Want Vibrant, Engaged Teachers?

Want Vibrant, Engaged Teachers? Give Them Professional Freedom

The pandemic unearthed a lot of opportunities along with all the hardships it brought. One benefit was that it has made social and emotional wellness a more mainstream topic across the board in education. As a result, teachers, principals, and other school leaders seem to be carrying a little less on their shoulders. With that weight lifted, they have been especially engaged and energetic this year, but as the world returns to something like normal, there is going to be tremendous pressure to go back to doing things the old ways, even when they weren’t the best ways. How do we recognize that and work to extend the longevity of the eagerness and energy that’s been returning to campus?

Ulster Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) is a service district, so all our programs are alternatives to traditional schooling. That gives us some leeway to experiment that regular districts don’t have. Our districts can, however, look to us and the approaches we use to see what works for all students, making change a little easier for them.

At Ulster, the key to fostering a positive environment for teaching and learning has remained the same before, during, and after the pandemic. We believe our teachers are committed and capable educators and we give them the freedom to prove it. Here’s what it looks like.

A few years ago, BOCES leaders and faculty had a meeting about New York state’s Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), which has become a bit of a touchstone for the ethos of our district. A lot of faculty expressed concern about using the freedom they’ve been given to teach because if they tried something and it didn’t work, they would be punished for it on their evaluations and maybe even found to be ineffective.

Our superintendent, Charles Khoury, told them, “We hire professionals who come to the table with professional learning, professional experience, and professional judgment. Every teacher in every classroom makes hundreds of decisions every single day. I want you to make those decisions based on what you think is right using your professional judgment and experience. Each one of you is the designer, manager, and leader of a learning space, and I need you to be innovative in that role. I want you to figure out what’s right for each student in your class and to do it, even if it’s new and it might not work out.”

He told them that when any teacher is found to be ineffective, they would be allowed to appeal and that he was the person who would hear and decide on their appeal. And then he told them that if they were using their professional judgment, he guaranteed that they would be deemed effective. Fear of being found ineffective was stopping teachers from trying ideas they believed in, so Khoury removed that barrier for them.

To be clear, though, this was not a blank check to let ineffective teachers skate past accountability. Our job is to figure out who is struggling, why, and then to help lead them past that barrier so they can begin innovating for students again. We see the APPR as a tool for assessing growth instead of a tool for identifying teachers who aren’t a good fit for our district. Blending those functions doesn’t make sense, especially when we have an arsenal of tools that can help us identify teachers for removal.

Empowered by Khoury, our teachers are building portfolios about their own growth as teachers and learners that demonstrate that they are real students of the institution. When teachers are students themselves, that trickles down into the classroom and gives it a vibrant energy.

Our district is unusual, even among BOCES. We tend to do things a little differently, and most of our teachers have never worked anywhere quite like Ulster. To help make the transition smoother, we recently revamped and extended our teacher on-boarding process to three days so that they can really understand who we are and what makes our district unique. We on-boarded about 35 new teachers this year and received great feedback about this change.

In our morning meetings, we are trying to minimize email and focus on building human connections. Our HR team and directors are pulling together clerical and support staff cross-divisionally so people can begin building relationships and connecting.

In other meetings that would previously have been only faculty, we are including staff to help build community and make it clear that they’re part of the team. Everyone who works in this district touches the lives of our students, and keeping them in the loop by inviting them to meetings is a simple way to make it clear that we honor that.

Like most principals or superintendents, we’re looking at all our spaces intentionally to make sure people are eager to come in and work in our model workspaces.

Building connections also extends beyond our campus. We have a detailed plan to make sure leadership is able to meet other education professionals from around the country. We want to make sure that our educators are not just thinking about solutions within the box of Ulster County. Other people in other places see different possibilities from what we might here, so we want our people to explore and learn from people teaching in different contexts. We are fortunate to partner with organizations like High Tech High, EL Education, World Savvy and the Stanford d.School to collaborate, share knowledge, and improve education.

An essential part of Ulster’s commitment to empowering teachers as the leaders of their own classrooms is our dedication to ongoing equity work. Our team discusses these issues confidently and with a willingness to learn and be wrong. Nor are we shy about admitting the challenges of white leadership doing belonging and equity work. If the traditional way isn’t working and we don’t have the answers, Khoury’s willing to invest in looking beyond our district for the best pathway forward.

I have felt the energy in our buildings this school year, and it feels great. Our educators continue to prove us right—that they are professionals and in the best position to decide what’s right for their students, and we work at every level to set them free to exercise that judgment.

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The opinions expressed in Peter DeWitt’s Finding Common Ground are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

Rebecca Thomas has worked passionately in education for the past 25 years in primary to intermediate settings and in a variety of leadership roles in New Zealand. Steve Saville is a passionate educator who has significant experience across a range of educational settings. For the last three years, he has been working as an educational consultant specializing in the area of sustainable school change and leadership in New Zealand.

Following a narrative means following a fairly well-worn path, waiting to be told what to do by someone in “authority,” and then implementing that prescribed plan—compliance rather than empowerment. Compliance isn’t wrong; in some circumstances, it is necessary and logical. But it does have consequences.

In our haste to transfer academic research and government policies into fruition, the professional development of teachers has been a casualty in this compliance narrative. Typically, the teacher/leader becomes the conduit, a channel for conveying knowledge from the source to the students. Within this transmissive system, we neglect to empower our teachers.

We know this transmissive teaching method is often ineffective in driving sustainable change, or learning, so why would we accept it for ourselves?

Just as we crave the desire to enable our students to be agentic, active learners, driven by the joy of learning, we should also hold our professional developers to account for creating teachers who persevere, are resilient to challenges, who aren’t afraid to question, innovate, create, and learn from their mistakes.

Narrative pedagogy is an approach to thinking about teaching and learning that evolves from the lived experiences of teachers and students, using a narrative landscape to find and explore meaning. The telling of stories opens the door for eliciting and analyzing issues, interpreting and contextualizing meaning, and reflecting and integrating personal and theoretical knowledge. The most important thing about narratives is that they have an emotional effect on people: They can both shock and encourage them.

We have always found meaning in our lives through stories. It is what makes us human. Our ability to use metaphor and story to create history, culture, and purpose are all unique to us as a species. Think of when you listened to a song, read a poem, or watched a movie that has touched you on a personal level. It was written in another place and another time by a stranger who does not know you and whose life may bear only a scant connection to your own, but it resonated, it made you think, laugh, cry, filled you with love, or energy, or sadness. This is the power of narrative. Stories define and validate us as individuals and as a society.

Before we set out down this path, we need to know the starting point. For educators, that means knowing ourselves and our context. We can’t be told this, and if we are told this, our context is likely to be defined by statistics and comparisons.

Over facts and figures, we need personality and life. We need to listen to our own stories. Pause, pay attention, hear, and understand the voices that make up our context, our professional identity that has shaped us, our personal narratives.

To do this requires courage. A courage of care is needed to respect and empower the voices of our own people to ensure we are not only meeting our community’s needs, we are also ensuring our schools are places of joy and magic. Listening is the first step toward empowerment and agency.

Working hard with a collective of schools that were trying to collaborate on raising the literacy achievement of their students, we found the above approach needed implementing. This was a mixed group of schools with varying contexts, from primary to intermediate to high school brought together because of their data, their statistics.

Initially, there was conflict in these sessions as the school staffs didn’t quite understand the purpose of discussing the progress of students who were at levels above and below their “usual” scope and away from their context. They were also struggling to see the point in yet another meeting to their busy week. Taking the time to listen to their concerns, giving them space to share their narrative, and hearing what they were finding challenging, we designed the following meeting with care.

As they trundled into the next meeting tired and resistant, the session opened with a rallying call, a “thank you” for their honesty with a reassurance that their words had been heard. Instead of talking about progress, the educators spent time discussing what teaching methods they currently used in their settings. If there were any strategies that were unfamiliar in the group, teachers volunteered to model what that looked like to the others. Each school was represented, each teacher was nervous.

On sharing their teaching strategies, the room erupted in joy. They had been empowered to share their stories, shared their expertise. Our job had been to merely listen, respond, and facilitate the conversation. After each modeled example, they excitedly referred what they had seen to the progression framework we had been building a rubric for, then they made connections with how the modeled example could be adapted for the level they taught at. The result was efficacy as they had room to create their own narrative instead of being compliant. The rabble had bonded.

There is a danger in using narrative pedagogy. To share our stories, to create our own narrative, to establish where we are and where we need to go means being emotionally vulnerable, it means sharing and collaborating. This is going to be, at times, uncomfortable and challenging. Sometimes, it is easier not to and just go with the flow.

The dramatist Bertolt Brecht realized this when he used Verfremdungseffekt, (the “estrangement effect” or the “alienation effect”) when he wanted his audience to respond to important themes (wars) that were confronting Germany between the two world wars. Brecht set his plays in “removed locations” to enable his audience to respond to the themes and issues before personalizing them to facilitate a more rational thought process and emotional connection.

This step is important if we want to use narrative pedagogy to not only resonate and validate but to develop a shared understanding and collaborative action.

At its core, the use of narrative pedagogy allows for voices to be shared to develop a collective story or history that defines and drives the group. It values the individual by giving them space to share and be heard, so we get to know ourselves better individually and collectively. The process of “storying” in this way is one reason why reflection journals are often so effective.

We invite our teachers to reflect on the way they teach, favoring relationships and student agency as researched ways to effect change in how our students learn. If this magic method works from teacher to students, it’s about time we realize that this method will also help our teachers learn, too.

This approach is not new. It is well researched and documented. For example, the work of Rasa Nedzinskaitė-Mačiūnienė [Vytautas Magnus University] and Agnė Juškevičienė [Vilnius University], Lithuania, Kerry Priest [Kansas State University] and Corey Seemiller [Wright State University], as well as Ivor Goodson [University of Tallinn] and Scherto Gill [University of Sussex], all detail the power of stories and narrative pedagogical approaches.

Goodson and Gill’s diagram reprinted below is a particularly effective visual representation of the process from narrative to action.

Sharing narrations with colleagues and thinking them over not only enables teachers to see their motives, but they are also able to identify common challenges and dilemmas. All said and done, the narration of a story can serve as a powerful mechanism for transforming learning; it evokes imagination and can create and enhance professional creativity. Nurture it, don’t surrender it.