I was scrolling through the Twitters yesterday, and found this tweet by Tom Loud:
I love discussing climate and culture because they really can be either detrimental to a school, or on the flip side, make it the supportive, engaging place of learning and innovation that we all strive for. In reading Tom’s tweet, I believe he is saying that when administration allows teachers to be lax on their professionalism, it can cause a negative effect on the culture (and I’d argue the climate as well). If I’m right in my thinking, I totally agree. When professional decisions are determined by “what is easier for me” over “what is best for students and their learning”, it causes a rift between teachers who are working diligently to support students the best way they can and the ones seen as protecting their own personal-professional interests. Working for students looks much different than working for oneself.
The part I would tweak in the tweet is the use of the word lazy. I believe that word choice can send a powerful message, and in this case, I would change lazy to unmotivated. I feel like lazy implies a fixed quality that can’t be changed, while unmotivated implies that one COULD be motivated if the right motivator was found. When I look at the teachers who would fall into this category, I mostly (and there are exceptions to every rule) find teachers who are not inherently lazy, but instead people who are disengaged from their professions. They’ve forgotten why they became teachers to begin with, and focus more on compliance and the students who are misbehaving “on purpose” to just to annoy them. I feel like the question here isn’t how admin can force feed motivation into “lazy” teachers, but rather how can we re-engage teachers into their profession so they are the relationship-building, student empowering, collaborative colleagues that would remove the unmotivated label they’ve been given. What support do they need to become the teachers everyone wants to work with?
We preach student engagement and empowerment. We work toward students taking ownership of their learning, we attempt to teach to the whole child, and we want them to WANT to come to school. We say we’ve taken the creativity out of school, we are teaching to tests, and we focus on facts. We don’t give enough time for things like passion projects or allow students to not only find what they’re good at but what actually makes them happy. Ironically, we do this same thing to teachers, but then we expect teachers to teach the opposite way from what is modeled for them. How powerful it would be if we could relax on the compliance measures for teachers and give them the opportunity to grow as professionals in the way that they want to, give them learning opportunities where they take ownership of their teaching and learning, give them freedom to be creative in their classroom again, and eventually be happy and look forward to coming to work. For some teachers, they have already done this, sometimes in spite of compliance measures, working innovatively even with the constraints put on them. However, some teachers, just like some students, are going to need additional assistance in finding their voice and being re-engaged in their profession. They need to take ownership, they need to focus on true self reflection, but they also need support. I would prefer to think of them as having the ability to be motivated, and then work towards a goal like that. A school of professionally driven educators engaged in their profession could have a significantly positive impact on climate and culture.
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