Eduwonkette's Question about Professionalization of Teachers

About two weeks ago, eduwonkette had this post on a topic that I have written about a fair bit over the past week or so, the professionalization of teachers. Eduwonkette asked these questions:

* How do the processes of diagnosis, inference, and treatment in education differ from those in medicine and law, and what are the implications of these differences for "professional accountability?"

* How does the state of our knowledge about educational diagnosis and treatment differ from that in other professions?

I cannot answer as to how doctors work on individual cases, other than in a general sense, but I can speak to the legal side of things.

A client comes in the office door with a particular problem. The problem is disrete to them, although they may not, indeed probably are not, the first to experience a similar problem. But each case has a series of facts and events the provide the foundation of the legal problem. The lawyer collects these facts, deduces what other facts may be helpful and then goes to work. Lawyers look at the law, statutes, ordinances and regulations to see if one of those are helpful in discerning how to solve the legal problem. Lawyers may also look to case law, both in the local jurisdiction and even nationally for analogous case that would indicate how that particularly type of legal problem was solved. Lawyers may even to look to cases that involve different subject matters but have a fact pattern that can be made analogous to the current issue. The goal is to look for a pattern of who similar fact patterns were decided and then pursue a similar course of action, with similar arguements.

But the professional judgment of a lawyer also means that they take each case, and treat each client, separately. There may be one or two facts, quirks or twists that are unique and it is the uniqueness of those facts that can be determinative of the outcome of a case.

Doctors do something similar. An illness or injury presents itself in similar fashion in many patients. For example, the flu or a broken arm. These type of cases lend themselves to a common treatment that has proven effective. Like a lawyer looking for common cases and a common solution, doctors look at common cases implement common treatments. However, like each law case, each patient is different, and it is those differences that a doctor has to discover and account. Perhaps you flu patients has an auto-immune deficiency, or is allergic to certain kinds of medicine. Perhaps the boy with the broken arm has brittle bones for a genetic reason. These quirks lead to different treatment plans.

Which brings us to teachers. In essence, a professional teacher would be required to operate much like a doctor or lawyer, when presented with a group of individuals students. Like medical patients whose normal status is healthy, most students would be able to learn in a common manner. However, like lawyers expereince and doctors to a lesser extent, each case must be examined on its own merits and judged accordingly. In a professional context, with teachers as a legally recognized profession, we would have to trust that teachers have sufficient knowledge, skill and professional judgment to examine each child individually, to diagnose the "treatment" necessary and apply that treatment properly. This would mean more than just simple subject matter knowledge, but knowledge of different teaching methods, pedagogies, interventions, remediation and assessment, as well as knowledge of child development, etc. The teacher would have to know and be able to diagnose which little quirk, twist or fact in each child might require a different intervention or treatment. Thus the teacher would need a level of training and minimum competency to demonstrate those skills and knowledge.

Which leads us to Eduwonkette's second question. I am not sure that we are quite there as a society where we have enough data to begin to diagnose problems and prescribe "treatments" or interventions. There are in my mind two reasons for this inability.

First, we don't necessarily have the data systems in place to be able to a) test for potential causes of problems--i.e. like a test that can determine possible reasons for a student's lack of success or b) track the development of a student over time, either a short period or time or a long period of time. I think we have the capability to have such systems--although reliable tests may be a bit further off. But I think we lack the tools to give to a professional teacher to enable her to diagnose a problem, let alone prescribe a solution.

Second, many of our treatments lack the assurance of working even in "ordinary circumstances." By this I mean, there is not even reliable data on the effectivness of many of our common teaching methods, let alone any methods that could or would be described as extraordinary. As such, we can't be sure which treatment to use or whether that treatment would work.

Of course, in law and in medicine, not every prescribed course of action is relevant or effective. But through long periods of work and in the case of medicine decades of scientific struggle, practicioners have learned what works and in what circumstances it works. Yes, some trial and error was part of it, but there is a body of knowledge out there that can be tapped to find information on the outlier, the extraordinary case. Right now I don't see that for education.

In many respects, education as a legally recognized profession is going to have much mroe in common with the law than with medicine. However, there are aspects of both that are present. But simply at this time, I don't see that we have the necessary tools for teachers to exercise professional judgment and certainly lack the resources to give to teachers to act on their judgment.

In the end, I think only teachers will be able to do this.

The Teacher Led School--The Law Firm Model

I find myself caught up in this subject and to a certain extent riffing off the writing of Marc Dean Millot.

My last post on this subject toward the end discussed a comment on one of Millot's posts dealing with how a teacher led school would look and to a certain extent operate. The commenter thought that a teacher led school, managed by "professional teachers" educated, trained, licensed and regulated like a legally recognized profession such as law or medicine, would look either like an in-house legal department at a corporation or like a private law firm.

The comment immediately got me thinking about a trend in law firm management of hiring a non-lawyer manager answering to a committee of partners rather than the traditional model of a "managing partner." The reasons for the trend include ideas that managing a large entity takes specialized skills, skills that a law firm partner may not have. But running a law firm is a business that does not necessarily require a law degree or actually practicing law, thus a move toward professional managers.

But the idea of a school managed by a committee of teachers with a "director of operations" in intriguing. Having spent some time examining this idea in the context of a law firm, here is what such a school would look like and operate--and it can be done without a full-blown move to a full professional standing for teachers--but it could help the move in that direction.

For those unfamiliar with law firm structures, in general, over a certain size, most firms look and operate pretty much alike. The culture may be different but it works pretty much the same. At the top are the senior partners. These individuals have years, even decades of experience both as practitioners and as "draws" for clients. Next step down are junior partners/senior associates. The different between the two is largely based upon their compensation, partners get a share of the firms profits, senior associates get a salary. But functionally, they operate as the front line, day to day lawyers in the firm, generating a lot of billing, business and work product for the firm. At the bottom are junior associates, usually within 3-4 years of graduating law school. Their job, in addition to doing a lot of the grunt work of lawyering, the research, drafting, calendaring and general scut work that has to be done by lawyers, is to learn the legal trade, usually under the guidance of everyone above them. Finally a law firm has non-lawyer staff, paralegals, secretaries, IT staff, accounting, HR, etc. These non-lawyer professionals run the day to day affairs of a firm in order to allow the lawyers to lawyer.

A teacher run school, in this model would have a similar breakdown.

The method by which this could be accomplished is by using a state's charter law. A group of teachers could apply for a charter with a school along a law firm model. In the model, there would be senior teachers on a managing committee, say 8-12 in total. Each of these senior teachers would have three roles, not unlike senior partners. First would be management of the school. Whether this is delegated to a staff person or handled by committee, they would be ultimately responsible for the schools bottom line--fiscally and educationally. While there may be other senior teachers at the school, this small committee is responsible, just like the management committee of a law firm, for the overall success of the school.

Second each managing teacher would probably be a "department head" responsible for a discreet area of the school's mission. Be that math, science, history, English, Literature, what have you. Most law firms have lawyers who head a "practice group" a groups of lawyers practicing in the same general field. There is often overlap in the membership of these groups, just like having a teacher who teaches both Physics and calculus. Ultimately, these practice group heads are responsible for the success of the practice groups, accountable to the management committee.

Third, each senior teacher is a classroom teacher. Most senior partners at a law firm are among the most successful lawyers in the firm in terms legal experience and at bringing in business. To attract students, these senior teachers need to be the "rainmakers," enticing parents and students with their skill in the classroom and their ability to deliver. They would have the autonomy, judgment and ability to get students to perform to teh best of their ability and to develop other teachers to do the same.

Skilled senior lawyers also know that their success depends on the quality of junior lawyers (the associates) in their firm. Senior teacher will also have to collectively ensure that their junior teachers receive the additional training, practice, supervision and development to continue to build on the school's success. As such, a senior teacher may not spend their entire day as the front line classroom teacher, this would be left to the mid level teachers who would carry the brunt of the teaching duties, so that senior teachers are working to develop the junior teachers as professionals.

At an operations level, I would envision say 20 or so well-known, well-respected teachers in an area banding together to build such a school. They would have some "name draw" and also understand the mechanics of developing curricula, programs and other needs of the school. They would identify/recruit mid-level teachers for day to day teaching and start recruiting junior teachers to flesh out the school's teaching staff. As a charter school, they have a stake in the schools's success, which while not financial, is predicated upon the school's ability to teach successfully.

Finally, as in a lawyerly model, the teachers at this school would develop a code of professional conduct by which to evaluate the reasonableness of their own and their colleagues work. More on that in a different post.