I had an interesting conversation with Barnett Berry, the lead author of Teaching 2030, earlier this week. We covered the waterfront: how teaching has changed and is changing, whether schools of education were up to the challenges facing them, why so many teachers leave, and so on. You will have to wait for our PBS NewsHour piece -- it’s in a quiz format, by the way -- and the accompanying podcast to find out what the brilliant Mr. Berry believes, because right now I want to explore his final comment, over coffee after the cameras had been turned off.
“Teaching is a team sport,” he opined before rushing off to a meeting, leaving me wondering.
Is it? Who says so? And if it is, why are so many politicians and state governments rushing to support ways of measuring individual teachers?
And what’s a “team sport” anyway?
Well, baseball is a team sport. We watched the Cardinals perform the near-impossible, and we saw that nearly everyone in a Cardinal uniform contributed to the team’s climb from 10.5 games out in late August to win the wild card spot on the last day of the season, upset two heavily favored teams to win the National League pennant and then overcome impossible odds to win the World Series. No one who saw it will forget game six, when the Cards were twice within one strike of losing it all to the Texas Rangers. Twice they rallied to tie, later winning on David Freese’s 11th inning walk-off home run. Freese won the series MVP award, but his teammates put him in the position to succeed.
Case closed: Baseball is a team sport, but with individual statistics and individual honors.
Now, what about teaching? That’s a tougher argument for at least six reasons.
Baseball is clearly a team sport, as the Cardinals evidenced throughout the summer and fall. But is teaching?
The “egg crate” architecture of most schools does not support the notion that teaching is a team sport: Individual classrooms resemble cartons, isolated from each other.
The typical school schedule does not support the notion that teaching is a team sport. Most American public school teachers spend almost all of their school time in their classrooms, which means they have very little time to work as a team.
The language of education does not support the notion. Occasionally a couple of teachers will “team teach,” which implies that the rest of the staff is not team-teaching! That is, you are only on a team when you are actually working in the same classroom with another teacher.
Nor does the evaluation of teachers support the notion that teaching is a team sport. It’s all done on an individual basis, with the possible exception of a few rating points being given for “contribution to the school environment” or something like that. In my experience, when an administrator praises a teacher for being “a team player,” he means that the teacher doesn’t make waves.
The governance of most schools contradicts the notion that teaching is a team sport. Often it’s “labor versus management,” with teachers punching a time clock twice a day. That’s a far cry from the St. Louis Cardinals, where manager Tony LaRussa had such trust in Albert Pujols that he let him call a hit-and-run play on his own. LaRussa was in charge, but he occasionally deferred to his coaches and his players. He left a pitcher in the game, for instance, after consulting with the catcher, who told him the pitcher had another inning in him (turned out to be wrong, but that’s not the point).
Finally, the emerging pay structure for teachers flies in the face of the idea that teaching is a team sport. The hot issue is some form of “merit pay” based on the academic performance of the individual teacher, whether it’s “value-added” test scores or good old standardized test scores. The policy makers who are supporting these schemes are paying scant attention to the implications (test all students in all subjects!); the fact that with high student turnover, a kid might have three different teachers in one year; or to the evidence indicating that merit pay doesn’t work.
In some places, if teachers are on a team, it’s probably their local union team, but not the PS 112 team or the Mather Middle School team.
I’m afraid my friend Barnett is letting the wish be the father of the thought. He wants teaching to be widely recognized as a team sport, which it is in the best schools. In those schools, teachers have time to meet and discuss individual students, to plan curriculum, to develop both short and long-term goals. They have time to breathe. They work as a team and hold each other accountable. Yes, each school has the equivalent of Tony LaRussa, the manager, but he or she is not “management” and the teachers “labor.” They all have their eyes on the prize.
I believe that most teachers want to play a team sport. They prefer to work together and to have big hopes, dreams and goals for their school and all its students. One of my strong memories from my own high school teaching in the late 1960s was the joy of working with other English teachers, even to the point of swapping classes for a few weeks so each of us could teach a play or a poet we felt particularly well-qualified to teach.
So here’s my pitch: Teaching should be recognized as a team sport, and education as a team activity. The “team” is the school, and everyone in the school is on the team, including secretarial staff and custodians. Education’s “won-loss” record is more complicated than baseball’s and should include academic measures, teacher and student attendance, teacher and student turnover, community involvement, and more. (I wrote about this recently in “Trust but Verify” and invite you to revisit that blog post.)
And just as the Cardinal team divided the World Series loot into individual shares, so too could merit pay be divvied up when the team achieves its agreed-upon goals. Cardinal players, coaches, equipment managers, et cetera shared the rewards. In this system, teachers, administrators, counselors, secretaries and custodians would all share the rewards.
But, going back to the St. Louis Cardinals, here’s the critical point: Notice that in writing about them, I described what the team did over a two-month period, not on one day or in one hour. I showed you the movie, not a snapshot.
Snapshots don’t help much in baseball or in education. In Game 3, Albert Pujols hit three home runs, had five hits for 14 total bases and drove in five runs. A great snapshot that is actually very misleading, because he had a disappointing World Series overall.
Pujols also made a key fielding misplay in the series; suppose instead the snapshot had been taken in that game? It would have been just as misleading, but the movie reveals just how valuable he was to the Cardinals.
Because education now relies on snapshots -- one score on one test on that one big day -- and because so much of schooling tilts against the team sport concept, we have miles to go before anyone can confidently assert that teaching is a team sport.
I’m interested in your thoughts on this.
