When I built my company Mindsteps on the idea that any teacher can become a master teacher with the right kind of support and practice, I got a lot of push back. Immediately, people bristled at the idea. They pointed to teachers who threw chairs at students, or teachers who were mentally cruel to students, or teachers who were pedaphiles and then they ask “Are you really saying that those teachers can become master teachers?”

Uh, no.

But it’s really an unfair question to begin with. It equates bad teaching with being a bad person.  It’s funny, when a disaffected postal worker or tax accountant shoots his colleagues in a rage, we don’t call him a bad employee. Or when a doctor molests his patients, we don’t call that bad medicine. When an accountant steals her clients’ life savings, we don’t call that bad accounting.  When a chef throws a knife at a diner, we don’t call it bad cooking. It’s evil behavior to be sure, but we are able to attribute the behavior to the person, not the profession. Why is it that we are able to separate bad behavior from job performance in just about every other profession except teaching?

Wednesday on CNN, I saw some of the most disturbing video footage I have ever seen. In it, a teacher cornered and brutally beat a student while other students watched and laughed. The teacher’s behavior was evil, and disgusting, and a whole lot of other adjectives I could come up with, but it wasn’t bad teaching.

Bad teaching is not planning lessons that clearly move studnts toward mastery, or not using effective strategies to help students learn, or trying to cover too much in one class period, or giving students unclear feedback, or having a lesson so disorganized that students are all over the place. That’s bad teaching.

So when I express concern about the push to fire bad teachers, don’t mean the pedaphiles and the mental, emotional, and physical abusers, and others who present a danger to children. They aren’t bad teachers- they’re bad people and they have  no business being around children. 

But bad teachers — the ones who, by lack of will or skill, aren’t effective in the classroom — I still believe that with the right kind of support and practice, they can become great teachers and it’s worth the investment to help them.

More on that in my next post…

For those of you who haven’t heard, I am on a quest to improve the way that we deliver professional learning experiences for teachers. My goal is to build a new model that has a greater impact in the classroom. I started this journey with the pledge that if I cannot deliver PD that is more useful to teachers than if they had spent the same amount of time grading papers, I will not deliver it.

This week was the first time I had to put that pledge to the test. I worked hard to provide an interactive, hands-on, practical workshop but I also wanted to avoid a laundry list of strategies. I wanted teachers to understand the principles behind the strategies so that they could adapt them to meet the needs of their students in the context of their classrooms.

Because PD can often feel like jail, I decided to give each teacher a “Get out of jail free” card. They could use that card at any time to anonymously raise a question, voice a concern, or let me know that the workshop was not meeting their needs. I thought it would be a great way to let the teachers exercise some control over the agenda and hold me accountable for keeping my pledge.

The entire day, only one person used his card. Now that could mean that I was delivering utterly compelling and useful PD, but I think that the more likely reason is that using the cards is an imperfect solution to a much greater problem. For one, only people who care about their learning will even use such a card. Those who are just there putting in time won’t bother.  Two, although I immediately addressed the card, the writer’s concern — he wanted more help with motivating reluctant learners — I could not address his concern to the level and degree he needed within the confines of the time we had. The best I could do is promise to deal with his concern in more detail the next time I came and to bring additional resources with me. The others in the room liked that idea and we changed the agenda for next time, but I worry that the teacher who raised that concern didn’t get his needs met immediately.

So, do “Get out of jail free” cards work?  Not sure. I’ll need to try them a few more times to see if they really make a difference.  But I do know this. These cards are minor tweaks.  They are never going to accomplish the goals I have set for how we deliver professional learning. 

So, the quest continues…