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Source:ASCD Examining the Teaching LifeBy Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Educational Leadership Online Magazine, March, 2006 Teachers Rights of Free Speech are Limited We need to assess teaching practices and professional development activities in light of sound principles about how learning works. A school is in business to cause and promote learning. It should therefore model for all institutions what it means to be a learning organization. A school is not merely a place that expects students to learn; it must encourage and support everyone's learning. For a school to be a model learning organization, all faculty members should be professional learners: They should engage in deep, broad study of the learning they are charged to cause. What works? What doesn't? Where is student learning most successful, and why? How can we learn from that success? Where are students struggling to learn, and why? What can we do about it? Effectively tackling these questions is what the “professional” in “professional practice” means. How Learning WorksWe are advocating for something more than the professional learning communities that DuFour and others have so eloquently described. School leaders need to create job requirements that make learning about learning mandatory. Moreover, we need the equivalent in schools of a Learning Bill of Rights—standards and structures that help us research and decide, as a staff, whether a given teaching practice is truly professional and consistent with our mission and state standards. These learning principles, like the Bill of Rights, should serve as criteria for safeguarding a learning-centered mission in which teachers regularly engage in peer review and self-assessment as part of their jobs. In a true learning organization, staff members should work together to arrive at their own common principles. In departmental, team, or school meetings, faculty could first review the list of principles that follows or consult various authoritative resources to develop one of their own (see “Resources for Developing a Set of Learning Principles,” p. 28). A committee composed of supervisors and teacher leaders could then hone the list into a draft for approval by the entire staff. Because teachers will hold themselves accountable for the learning principles, they must own them at a deep level for significant reform to occur and for schools to truly become learning organizations. To help you get started, we offer the following nine principles that we have developed to reflect an understanding about how learning works:
Like the Bill of Rights, these principles, although clear, are necessarily pregnant with possibilities and implications that we can tease out only through continual analysis of the cases that come before us. Staff, team, departmental, and grade-level meetings should focus in large part on considering such professional matters as pedagogical questions, selection of instructional materials, and persistent achievement problems through the lens of learning principles. The cases considered would be impersonal, a summary of individual classroom issues that raise an important question for staff to consider. For example, a team leader might invite members to bring samples of their strongest and weakest tests for a general discussion of the validity of local assessments related to standards. Or a department head might ensure that one meeting each semester is devoted to analyzing student feedback from a staff-developed survey about student engagement in various assignments and practices. The Unexamined Teaching LifeFour characteristics distinguish professionals in any field. Professionals (1) act on the most current knowledge that defines their field; (2) are client-centered and adapt to meet the needs of the individuals whom they serve; (3) are results-oriented; and (4) uphold the standards of the profession in their own practice and through peer review. A great weakness of our craft is that we typically do not require faculty members to justify their teaching methods, course designs, and assessments against a set of learning principles. Indeed, in some academic settings, even raising this point is viewed as an assault on academic freedom. As a result, many well-intentioned teachers end up in the grip of unexamined habits of teaching. The inherent and perpetual isolation of staff in schools only makes matters worse. Without regular opportunities to consider, observe, and analyze best practice and receive helpful, nonevaluative feedback, how likely are teachers to engage in continual professional improvement? Indeed, teachers can be remarkably thin-skinned when someone questions their methods or decisions, and many of us resist seeking or receiving feedback from students, parents, colleagues, and supervisors. When students fail to learn, some teachers end up blaming the students, without an honest investigation of where student fault ends and teacher responsibility begins. Nothing Personal, But . . .The nine learning principles can serve as a vital touchstone and as a counterweight to bad habits that impede a school's mission. They can help define best practice and depersonalize the feedback necessary to improve teaching. In a pedagogical disagreement, teachers and supervisors too often revert to defensive postures. “He just doesn't like my teaching style” and “I've been teaching for a long time, and I know that. . . .” are frequent laments in supervisory or collegial talk. These discussions can never come to a meaningful professional conclusion unless we refer to valid standards for learning. Depersonalized feedback is productive because it is disinterested: “Nothing personal, but lecturing 80 percent of the time is inconsistent with the school goal of engaging learners in making meaning for themselves.” Or, “Nothing personal, but widespread use of multiple-choice departmental exams is out of sync with our mission to teach and assess for understanding and transfer.” Or, “Nothing personal, but only one-quarter of your students, when surveyed, report that they find their classwork meaningful.” Without explicit learning principles—and clear course goals linked to standards—there will be no end to tiresome debates and disingenuous posturing about practice. In other words, no matter how common specific teaching practices have been historically, they are only “professional” when they are defensible in terms of the school's mission and its adopted learning principles. The need to vigorously and continually question what happens in the name of learning would be obvious to all educators if we weren't so comfortable with our habits, and hence so blind to their shortcomings. Some teachers think nothing of failing a student for a given project or even an entire semester because of one zero “averaged in” to the student's grade, even though such a practice has no counterpart in the wider world and strikes the very notion of fairness (not to mention the notions of validity and reliability). Some administrators don't bat an eye when faculty members fail to consider students' learning styles in scheduling classes or designing lessons. We defend many comfortable school customs by saying, “Hey, it worked for me and my kids!” or “We've always done it this way!” In a model learning organization, such responses are the opposite of what we would expect and demand. Rather, we educators would continually ask the following questions: For whom is school currently not working as a place for learning? Why? How can we improve learning for all? Examining Staff LearningIf our learning principles are valid, they should apply not only to student learning but also to professional development of staff members. Consider just two of these principles:
Many inservice programs for teachers neither personalize learning nor focus on the teachers' need to eventually transfer the learning to their classrooms. Much of what passes for inservice professional development is neither professional nor adequate for developing new learning by staff. In the worst cases, it is merely a day-filling smorgasbord, a tasting of interesting tidbits that teachers are free to try out or ignore. Time again for our mantra: “Nothing personal, but many inservice experiences seem to be contrary to the learning principles. Staff members' criticisms have reflected this for years. How can we make changes, on the basis of our learning principles and staff feedback?” Indeed, if we were to agree to evaluate all professional development against the learning principles, we could quickly eradicate the most pointless aspects of so-called professional development activities—such as a mandatory one-size-fits-all “sit ‘n’ git” inservice day whose agenda teachers have little say in—with less hurt to and resistance from program planners than leaders might fear. Unsound and unprofessional practices are also abetted by the failure of school leaders to provide staff with ongoing, organized opportunities to learn about learning and the effects of their teaching as part of the job. Practically speaking, that means providing the time and support necessary to ensure ongoing, collaborative staff research and development. True professional practice requires a continual, in-depth investigation into what is and isn't working locally, with ongoing adjustments to instruction on the basis of analysis and best practice. For example, each department or grade-level team would be expected to routinely analyze the assessments it uses each semester to ensure that they assess according to state standards. Faculty members would analyze assessment results and devise an action plan that targets key weaknesses in student performance. Leadership in a learning organization means leading by being a model learner and by demanding learning. The leadership team in a school or district must be seen as a group of professional learners, whether the purview is budgets, buses, or books. Not just because continual learning is desirable, but because it is essential: Each new school year brings extraordinary change to the institution as another large group of new students (and perhaps teachers) arrives. The job of education leaders in the 21st century is to continually demand significant new learning, clarifying which timeworn aspects of schooling advance learning and which unwittingly impede it. Owning the PrinciplesIf our message is to continually learn about learning, it would hardly do for us to recommend that you unthinkingly adopt our learning principles. So, do not accept our principles as gospel; do not demand that staff or colleagues bow down before them. Rather, think of these principles as a rough draft for developing a set of understandings about learning that faculty willingly sign off on as representing their views about how people best learn. Consider the principles as a jump start for the challenging yet invigorating task at the heart of learning about learning. Resources for Developing a Set of Learning Principles Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. Robert J. Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. (2001). Alexandria, VA: ASCD. By Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, May 14, 2007 When one of Deborah Mayer's elementary school students asked her on the eve of the Iraq war whether she would ever take part in a peace march, the veteran teacher recalls answering, "I honk for peace." Soon afterward, Mayer lost her job and her home in Indiana. She was out of work for nearly three years. And when she complained to federal courts that her free-speech rights had been violated, the courts replied, essentially, that as a public school teacher she didn't have any. As a federal appeals court in Chicago put it in January, a teacher's speech is "the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary." The Bloomington, Ind., school district had just as much right to fire Mayer, the court said, as it would have if she were a creationist who refused to teach evolution. The ruling was legally significant. Eight months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in a case involving the Los Angeles district attorney's office that government employees were not protected by the First Amendment when they faced discipline for speaking at work about controversies related to their jobs. The Chicago appeals court was the first to apply the same rationale to the classroom, an issue that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved. But legal analysts said the Mayer ruling was probably less important as a precedent than as a stark reminder that the law provides little protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs. As far as the courts are concerned, "public education is inherently a situation where the government is the speaker, and ... its employees are the mouthpieces of the government," said Vikram Amar, a professor at UC's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Whatever academic freedom exists for college teachers is "much, much less" in public schools, he said. A recent case from a Los Angeles charter school offers more evidence of the limits teachers face in choosing curricula or seeking redress of grievances. The school's administrators forbade seventh-graders from reading aloud at a February assembly the award-winning poem "A Wreath for Emmett Till," about a black teenager beaten to death by white men in 1955. In an online guide to teaching the poem in grades seven and up, publisher Houghton Mifflin recommends telling students that it will be disturbing; administrators said they feared it would be too much for the kindergartners in the audience and then explained that Till's alleged whistle at a white woman was inappropriate. When social studies teacher Marisol Alba and a colleague signed letters of protest written by students at the largely African American school, both teachers were fired. The Mayer ruling was disappointing but not surprising, said Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. For the last decade, he said, federal courts "have not been receptive to arguments that teachers, both K-12 and higher education, have free-speech rights in the classroom."
That's unacceptable, said Mayer, 57, who now teaches seventh-graders in Haines City, Fla. She said she's scraped up enough money, by selling her car, to appeal her case to the Supreme Court, though she doubts the justices will review it. "If a teacher can be fired for saying those four little words -- 'I honk for peace' -- who's going to want to teach?" she asked. "They're taking away free speech at school. ... You might just as well get a big television and set it in front of the children and have them watch, (using) the curriculum the school board has." On the other hand, said Francisco Negrón, lawyer for the National School Boards Association, if teachers were free to express their viewpoints in class, school boards would be less able to do their job of determining the curriculum and complying with government demands for accountability. "Teachers bring their creativity, their energy, their skill in teaching the curriculum, but ... a teacher in K-12 is really not at liberty to design a curriculum," said Negrón, who filed arguments with the court in Mayer's case supporting the Bloomington school district. "That's the function of the school board." The incident occurred in January 2003, when Mayer was teaching a class of fourth- through sixth-graders at Clear Creek Elementary School. As Mayer recalled it later, the question about peace marches arose during a discussion of an article in the children's edition of Time magazine, part of the school-approved curriculum, about protests against U.S. preparations for war in Iraq. When the student asked the question about taking part in demonstrations, Mayer said, she replied that there were peace marches in Bloomington, that she blew her horn whenever she saw a "Honk for Peace" sign, and that people should seek peaceful solutions before going to war. A student complained to her father, who complained to the principal, who canceled the school's annual "Peace Month" observance and told Mayer never to discuss the war or her political views in class. Mayer, who had been hired after the semester started and had received a good job evaluation before the incident, was dismissed at the end of the school year. The school said it was for poor performance, but the appeals court assumed that she had been fired for her comments and said the school had acted legally. "Teachers hire out their own speech and must provide the service for which employers are willing to pay," a three-judge panel of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Jan. 24. "The Constitution does not entitle teachers to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials." Mayer, the court said, was told by her bosses that she could teach about the war "as long as she kept her opinions to herself." Like the Los Angeles district attorney's employee whose demotion led to the Supreme Court's 2006 ruling, the appellate panel said, Mayer had no constitutional right to say anything on the job that conflicted with her employer's policy. Mayer's lawyer asked for a rehearing, saying the evidence was clear that the school had no such policy when Mayer answered the student's question. The court denied reconsideration in March without comment. Mayer, who had taught for more than 20 years, couldn't afford to keep her Indiana home after being fired and left the state. She got another teaching job in Florida, but lost it after disclosing her previous dismissal, and didn't get another position until last fall. As all parties to Mayer's case recognize, her statements would have been constitutionally protected and beyond the government's power to suppress if she had been speaking on a street corner or at a public hearing. But in the classroom, as in the workplace, courts have upheld limits on speech. In both settings, past rulings have taken into account the institution's need to function efficiently and keep order, and the rights of co-workers and students not to be subjected to unwanted diatribes. In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld a high school student's right to wear a black armband as a silent protest against the Vietnam War and barred schools from stifling student expression unless it was disruptive or interfered with education. The court retreated from that standard somewhat in a 1988 ruling upholding censorship of student newspapers, and will revisit the issue in a pending case involving an Alaskan student who was suspended for unfurling a banner outside the school grounds that read, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." The Supreme Court has never ruled on teachers' free speech. In lower courts, teachers have won cases by showing they were punished for violating policies that school officials never explained to them beforehand or invented after the fact. A federal appeals court in 2001 ruled in favor of a fifth-grade teacher in Kentucky who was fired for bringing actor Woody Harrelson to her class to discuss the benefits of industrial hemp, an appearance that school officials had approved. But teachers who were on notice of school policies they transgressed have usually lost their cases. In one Bay Area case, in August 2005, a federal judge in San Jose rejected arguments by Cupertino elementary school teacher Stephen Williams that his principal had violated his freedom of speech by prohibiting him from using outside religious materials in history lessons. Unless the Supreme Court takes up Mayer's case, its legal effect is limited to federal courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, the three states in the Seventh Circuit. But Amar, the Hastings law professor, and others said the ruling could be influential elsewhere because there are few appellate decisions on the issue, and because the author, Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, is a prominent conservative jurist. "Very few schools are going to be that harsh in muzzling or silencing their teachers," but the ruling indicates they would be free to do so, Amar said. Simpson, the National Education Association's lawyer, said the ruling, though within the legal mainstream, was bad for education because teachers are not "hired to read a script." The case might interest the Supreme Court, and the NEA will probably file a brief in support of Mayer's appeal should the justices take the case, he said.
Beverly Tucker, chief counsel of the NEA-affiliated California Teachers Association, said she doubts that federal courts in California would take as conservative a position as the court in Mayer's case. But she expects school districts to cite the ruling in the next case that arises. "If I were a public school teacher, I would live in fear that some innocuous remark made in the classroom in response to a question from a pupil would lead to me being terminated" under such a ruling, Tucker said. As for Mayer, she isn't sure what rankles her most -- the impact on her life, the stigma of being branded a rogue teacher, or the court's assertion that a teacher's speech is a commodity purchased by the government. "My free speech," she said, "is not for sale at any price."
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