CEA Member Ryan Abbott Email to School Board October 14, 2014 My name is Ryan Abbott, and I am the two-time Social Studies Teacher of the Year at Cosby high School, as well as a recipient of the REB Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2013. As a 16-year veteran of Chesterfield schools, I have never seen teachers and students as overwhelmed by new policies coming from the administrative leadership of Chesterfield County schools as they are this year; this flood of policies, taken collectively, is moving education in the county in the wrong direction. The inability of county policy-makers to prioritize policies has overburdened teachers and undermined the education of our students. Because county leaders have failed to eliminate old policies when creating new policies, there are now so many initiatives competing for the limited time of teachers and administrators that the policies ultimately provide no benefit while reducing student achievement in much the same way that large class sizes have: by limiting the amount of time teachers can spend planning, writing letters of recommendation, running help sessions, or providing necessary feedback to students and by negatively impacting teacher morale. Indeed, the policies are worse than large class sizes in that they are often needless, self-inflicted wounds. This year in particular, teachers have been overwhelmed with new county expectations – from Synergy, the student information system, iTech technology trainings, TalentEd for evaluations, new Smart Goal guidelines, Project Based Learning expectations, a new grading scale, new grading policies, Chromebook initiatives, and more. How in the world, in one month of school, are teachers and school administrators expected to balance all of these with educating students and executing the existing county policies, none of which has gone away? The resulting feelings of frustration and hopelessness have contributed to the lowest teacher morale that I have ever seen after just one month of school. Of the impact of morale on student achievement, the research is clear; one representative study done in Michigan “found that student achievement increased under teachers with high morale and decreased under teachers with low morale. High morale simply helped create a more conducive, inviting, and stable learning environment. In short, the morale of teachers has far-reaching implications for student learning…” To deal with these issues, county administrators should ask two questions that they have not been asking when framing policies – what policy will we eliminate to provide school administrators and teachers the time to execute the new policy? And how will we ensure teacher buy in to the new policy? Regrettably, these questions have clearly not been asked by county leaders in recent years. The Project Based Learning initiative is a good example of a policy that fails to meet the above guidelines. Developing projects takes time for teachers, as sources need to be located, rubrics need to be drawn up, and more. If county leaders truly valued this initiative, they would have cleared time during the school year for teachers to produce these projects by discontinuing some previous initiative. By not clearing time, administrators have clearly announced to teachers that the policy is so unimportant that it could not be prioritized above a single existing county initiative. In addition, PBL is incompatible with our current testing regime, a fact that limits teacher buy-in to the program and contributes to low teacher morale. PBL, an inquiry-based system, involves trial and error, while preparing students for a standardized test involves maximizing the time spent reinforcing SOL content. No teacher that I have talked to really believes that the county values PBL as much as SOL achievement, and the county has done nothing to reassure teachers that they will be protected while experimenting with new projects. As a result, however much officials value Project Based Learning as a concept, the PBL policy has been harmful. County administrators all the way up to the superintendent have been told of teacher concerns about the quantity and implementation of county policies, but administrators have casually waved away these concerns with the claim that all of these policies “help kids. Yet the failure of leaders to prioritize the most valued policies (and to eliminate less valuable policies) has more than neutralized even the most well-intended county policy – there just isn’t enough time to make them all work. In order for a policy to “work,” administrators need to carve out the time in the day to implement the policy, and to ensure better teacher morale by making an effort to obtain teacher support for the policy. There are so many things we have little control over – teacher salaries and benefits, class sizes, and school renovation schedules. But here is an area where improve our schools in so many ways, by removing self-imposed obstacles to education in Chesterfield. County leaders, please let teachers teach by eliminating unnecessary policies!
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 00:57:32 +0000