People usually go into teaching because they had a great teacher who inspired them; they care about kids or believe that it’s a way to make a difference.

No one in their right mind will argue that teachers are underpaid.

Sadly, the politics, internal and external, the system, often working without even minimal resources or adequate textbooks combined with the grind of producing daily lesson plans that engage their students year after year takes a toll on their idealism and enthusiasm.

Teachers differ in their skills, strengths and creativity — as do people in every field.

What if creative, high-performing teachers had a way to share successful lesson plans with other teachers and make money at the same time?

Further, what if the cost was personally affordable, so that teachers didn’t have to find funds or get approval?

That’s the idea behind TeachersPayTeachers, a virtual marketplace where educators can buy and sell lesson plans just like an app store and similarly priced.

What kind of tunes do you think Iago, the villain in William Shakespeare’s “Othello,” would listen to if he had an iPhone?

That is the kind of question that Laura Randazzo, an exuberant English teacher, often dreams up to challenge her students at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Calif. (…) “For a buck, a teacher has a really good tool that she can use with any work of literature,” Ms. Randazzo said in a phone interview last week. “Kids love it because it’s fun. But it’s also rigorous because they have to support their characterizations with evidence.”

The site’s been around since 2006 and is highly successful.

To date, Teacher Synergy, the company behind the site, has paid about $175 million to its teacher-authors, says Adam Freed, the company’s chief executive. The site takes a 15 percent commission on most sales.

Read the article; then share it with every teacher, or their relatives, you know; tweet it and share it as widely as possible.

Whether they sell or buy they’ll win.

And if your effort saves just one teacher from burnout or makes their life a bit easier then, you’ll deserve a pat on the back — whether you know it or not.

Flickr image credit: Mike Sansone

Long before I had a career and ever since I have lived by the following rule.

Whatever information, knowledge or even wisdom you are looking to teach, share or impart, whether as official teacher, mentoring manager, friend or just interested party, is more likely to be absorbed if you follow this advice.

“People learn more when they are laughing.” –Confucius

Flickr image credit: kafka4prez

Einstein once said, “The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything.”

He also said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Sadly, those two statements sum up much of the efforts to change/reform/fix our schools.

Education is the future of our country and teachers are central to its success or stagnation.

I read two articles and I’m interested to know what you think of the ideas in them.

The first is a discussion of the pros and cons of grading teachers’ skill.

The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.

The second one looks at an experimental program that puts teachers in charge of the school while they continue teaching.

The Newark teachers are part of a growing experiment around the country to allow teachers to step up from the classroom and lead efforts to turn around struggling urban school systems.

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on these two out-of-the-box ideas.

Stock.xchng image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1195959

If you were the boss and 40% of your employees said they were more interested in non-monetary rewards and felt that evaluating them on a single factor for jobs that required multiple skills were unfair would you proceed anyway with merit pay based on a single factor and expect it to be a good motivator?

That is the basic question in the drive for merit performance for teachers.

A March survey of teachers provided an inside look at their thoughts.

Teachers don’t want to see their students judged on the results of one test and they also want their own performances graded on multiple measures.

Most value non-monetary rewards, such as time to collaborate with other teachers and a supportive school leadership, over higher salaries. Only 28 percent felt performance pay would have a strong impact and 30 percent felt performance pay would have no impact at all.

Of course, worker input won’t slow management’s moving forward (rarely has, rarely will)

The biggest problems with merit pay is defining and applying valid measurement of success.

For example, only 6 percent of teachers surveyed said graduating all students with a high school diploma was one of the most important goals of schools and teaching, while 71 percent said one of the most important goals was to prepare all students for careers in the 21st century.

Whereas standardized test are the holy grail of school administrators.

Merit pay has a checkered background whether you are looking for proof that it works or proof that it doesn’t.

The problem isn’t the money, it’s the structure put together to award it.

Keeping it fair means keeping it free from political pull and other forms of favoritism. It means acknowledging that teachers can’t control what is happening to the kids in their classes and finding a way to account for that.

“Your mother and father just got a divorce, your grandfather died, your boyfriend broke up with you: those kinds of life-altering events have an effect on how you do in class that day, through no fault of the teacher whatsoever.” –Debra Gunter, middle school math teacher in Cobb County, Ga.

One survey result was surprising because it actually creates more work for teachers, but it was held by the majority.

A majority of teachers surveyed said they would like to see tougher academic standards and have them be the same in every state, despite the extra work common academic standards could create for them.

This definitely makes sense, especially given the mobility of the US population, but it’s unlikely to ever pass muster with state and local school administrators. It would also be interesting to see how it flies helicopter parents, considering it’s their complaining that has fostered termination of “tough” teachers.

Money has always been the quick fix, used by managers and parents alike, to achieve their desired ends, even though there is no proof that it is effective or sustainable. And there is no reason to think that teachers are any different.

I think that if the structure and standards aren’t improved along with embracing merit pay then success is unlikely.

What do you think?

Image credit: JadeGordon on flickr

Today’s post will be relatively short, because I want you to take time to read a NY Times article called Building a Better Teacher.

Education is an industry and from any viewpoint, it’s obvious that American education is in trouble—poor quality, low productivity, enormous turnover and bad press.

There is a raging argument about who are responsible—politicos (who hold the purse strings), administrators or frontline workers, i.e., teachers.

There is a move to shutdown underperforming plants and fire those frontline workers en masse.

Out with the old ad in with the new; the assumption being that “new” always means “better.”

In education as in any industry there are innovators and traditionalists—think Steve Jobs and the executives of the music industry.

Innovators: Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Michigan State’s school of education assistant professor, part time math teacher and originator of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, and Doug Lemov, teacher, principal, charter-school founder and author of Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

Traditionalist: Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. [because]… no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?

Hmmm, there was no market research to show that a personal music player would sell before the iPod changed history.

Read the article, it points the way to changes that will affect you no matter your age or if you have kids.

Changes that will determine America’s future.

Image credit: St Boniface’s Catholic College on flickr

Great insights for you today—all as true now as when they were originally written.

You’ll have to forgive Galileo; he wasn’t a chauvinist, just a product of his times. Feel free to add ‘hu’ to ‘man’ if it bothers you too much.

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.” –Galileo (Early exploration of MAP.)

“I never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.” –Galileo (Often more than from the educated ones.)

“Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.” — Lois Wyse (Does that make out-of-control ego and excessive greed a strength?)

“The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants them to do, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” –Theodore Roosevelt (True for managers at any level. Does the shoe fit?)

“I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.” -–Linus (I’ve always felt this way, but lately I’m starting to wonder about mankind.)

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: sxc.hu