Seven Pathways to a New Teacher Professionalism

Yes, it has been a long, long time between posts here. A new job, and the switch back from university based life to the reality of working with real schools and real children - real life, caused re-set. A reevaluation of how to use my time, and of how and perhaps why to write.

But I am back with a new mission - to begin a discussion of the known possible.  A discussion of the project we are attempting in real public schools in Virginia.  Not wealthy schools.  Not easy schools. Real schools. Complicated schools.  Schools with vast and deep challenges, as well as schools with great resources...     
                                                                           - Ira Socol  - Charlottesville, Virginia 

How do we reimagine teacher professional learning.  Let's face it, it isn't going to happen in universities and other institutions of higher education and teacher training. Those are places, even the "best" of those in the United States, of social reproduction and status preservation, not places interested in change. So it will be something which progressive schools and school systems have to do on their own - on their own, but, preferably together. 

 Enabling Opportunities, Creating Access (Click Here to See Video)

The new kind of teaching professional we need to build is something quite different in concept from that being developed in schools of education. Those institutions develop people who deliver content and manage classrooms. We need educators who enable opportunity and create access, and that requires a different group of skillsets and a different belief system.  For the most part our teachers know this... that is, they know what they do not know. They know what they need. They told us that...

I work in the Albemarle County Public Schools in Central Virginia and we've been thinking about this a lot this year. After a 12 year process of building change we attempted another acceleration this year, another "inflection in the innovation S curve" through an internal grant program called "Design 2015."

Design 2015 asked all of our 26 schools to describe a fundamental change they wanted to make in student learning, and to describe a project which could begin to break away the barriers which stood in the way of those changes happening.

For some schools those barriers were quite literal, and we removed walls or created new doorways which opened up new opportunities.  In others lack of technologies was an issue and the solutions ranged from 1:1 laptop initiatives to "tool buckets" for classrooms filled with MacBooks and Galaxy Tabs, iPods and Cameo fabricators. In other places it was more flexible comfortable furniture, or library redesigns, or a re-envisioned cafeteria which doubles as a collaborative MakerSpace. Still others just sought extra time for teachers to plan or to spend a few summer weeks immersed in Spanish for their bilingual school.

We found ways to fund all of these in one way or another. Not because we're wealthy, but because we dug deep and reallocated to fund innovation. But before we could begin building, or buying, we needed to help teachers find ways to find paths to new ways of thinking.

We knew this because we saw the questions embedded in their grant requests. And as we, a team ranging across many levels of our small “central office” - 

let me pause here and give some credit, for because of brave leaders - those who are both risk-takers and risk-accepters - that great things are allowed to happen - Dr. Billy Haun, our Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction; Debbie Collins, our Director of Instruction; Vince Scheivert, our Chief Information Officer; Becky Fisher, @beckyfisher73 our Director of EdTech and Professional Development; Chad Ratliff; our Assistant Director of Instruction; Rosalyn Schmidt, or School Architect; and our brilliant EdTech integrators and trainers Jamie Foreman and Nita Collier; along with myself, whatever it is that I do...

 - walked our schools, we listened. We walked our schools with "Attention-Deficit Disorder Vision" - seeing and hearing, even feeling, whatever we could. Observing children, grasping, however we were able, the User Experience and comparing that to the User Experience we hope for and that our educators hope for. For it is only by beginning with thinking about the User Experience we want that we can backward map to the User Interface - the school and pedagogical design we need.

Which pathways do you see here? A 9th Grade English Class in the MakerSpace in
the Monticello High School Library. Maker-Infused Curriculum? Project/Problem/Passion-Based Learning? Choice and Comfort? Instructional Tolerance? How about Universal Design?

We saw that no matter what our schools were asking “for,” what they really wanted their children to do fell into one or both of two broad categories: They wanted children to use contemporary technologies to interact broadly and consistently with the world in meaningful and deep ways, or/and. they wanted children to be makers most of the day, not just consumers. But in both cases the teachers were not entirely sure of how to jettison the constraints of delivering filtered, packaged content, and replace that with a trust-based, child-centric, open approach consistent with our Life Long Learning Competencies - competencies aimed at helping children become successful adults in every phase of their lives in their times. So those categories - Interactive Technologies and Maker-Infused Curriculum - became our first two professional learning pathways.

We found much more, of course, discovering five other essential questions:

Project/Problem/Passion-Based-Learning - Our teachers know that they waste their and their students’ energy fighting for attention when projects and passions bring attention naturally, they want the skills to bring knowledge through interest.

Choice and Comfort - Our teachers want to learn how to “let go” of rules which burn student cognitive energy on things unrelated to learning, and unrelated to workplace or social success in this century.

Connectivity - Our teachers have asked to learn the tools which connect students globally, synchronously and asynchronously, to create authentic audiences, break isolation, and support complex learning opportunities from kindergarten on up.

Universal Design for Learning - Our teachers have expressed real interest in looking “beyond differentiation” and even “beyond CAST,” toward a true Universal Design, with student preference replacing diagnosis and prescription everywhere it is possible.

Instructional Tolerance - Our teachers and administrators have begun a lively conversation about moving away from traditional school and classroom management toward the concept of “Instructional Tolerance.” What happens when “teacher preference” no longer drives classroom rules and atmosphere? What must students tolerate from adults? from other students?

Armed with these questions from our teachers, these professional learning needs, these “pathways” to a new kind of professionalism - we found teacher-leaders, “pedagogical entrepreneurs” in our emerging vocabulary, who could bring their vision of these educational futures to our entire faculty cohort. Not by labelling our previous work “a failure,” but by discussing the evolving marketplaces of education, brain research, and contemporary technological affordances. 

Tying these professional learning opportunities directly to school grants supporting new learning spaces and new technologies created both urgency and immediate learner test bed, crucial project-based learner tools. Offering learning opportunities at differing times, in differing formats, face-to-face and online, short and long sessions, in rooms often with multiple screens and multiple types of devices provided real demonstrations of the kinds of work we were showing. We never offered that ed school special, the lecture on differentiation.

 Transformational Maker Summer

We created "lab schools" too. Working with Maker Education's MakerCorps Initiative, and inventing some of our own stuff spun from ideas like Mozilla's Maker Summer we transformed Summer School in many places from the old remedial nightmare into something else - a radical pathways learning experience for children and teachers. Whether it was elementary summer school at impoverished sites, middle school connected maker summer school, or a ninth grade welcome week at a high school driven by maker activities and connectivity, our teachers watched as these new professional strategies transformed the often "hardest kids" into winners and their own careers into something with new meaning. These summer schools transformed principal expectations as well, bringing new paradigms to those August staff meetings.

Our Pathways are captured throughout our professional expectations
and performance assessments

As our school system has for years, we've reimagined what professional learning looks like in many ways. Recertification credits come many ways, including documenting active participation in social media professional learning. Just two weeks ago Chad Ratliff and I led a small group of our educators on a mission to New York, where - as we are increasingly learning to do - we avoided schools and eduction conferences and watched learning unfold at museums, at the World Maker Faire, on the High Line, in Central Park, on the subway system. What does learning look like? What do learning spaces look like? What questions do humans ask in learning spaces?

We're working on it, and we're looking for anyone willing to join with us, in collaboration, in sharing resources, in sharing the spirit. Honestly, as we asked the Virginia Educational Research Association a few weeks ago, we'll take the support of any university interested in supporting our mission as well...

We ended that call to "VERA" with this:

'"Fifty-one years ago at Rice University President John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win..."

'"Today we ask you to join those of us in Public Education to do the research [and teacher professional learning work] which our children need, not because it is easy, not because it is easily funded, not because there are existing textbooks and courses explaining how to do it, but because this is the hard work we must do, it is the grand challenge we are unwilling to postpone, the grand challenge we will step up to accept, and the task we will accomplish in order to build the society our children deserve."'

This the grand challenge. Teachers who understand themselves within a new professional paradigm. Teachers who see themselves as enablers of learning, as people who close the opportunity gaps, as educators who are both mentors and partners with their students on these learning journeys.

Wish us good luck, then jump in alongside us.

- Ira Socol

Affirmative Action in Education: Game Changers

A few years ago at a Disability Studies in Education Conference at Michigan State University we got into a fascinating discussion over dinner: Should schools/colleges of education use "Affirmative Action" ("Reverse Discrimination") to ensure that at every level - Bachelors/Undergraduate teacher training, Masters, PhD - there was far better representation of students with disabilities?

The argument for? Since most students do not actually do well in school, since most students with disabilities do not do well in school, we need more teachers, administrators, and teacher educators who understand - on a fundamental level - that education must change.

There was little argument against, this was not a group which would think that an effort like this would really be doing anything more than reversing all the existing discrimination against those who have struggled in school, but people were concerned that few, if any, schools/colleges of education - at least in North America - would do anything but terrible things to those incoming "disabled" students.

But despite all the obstacles, I have begun to detect something - a small but significant cohort of young, mostly male, teachers who are changing practice in schools in important ways. They typically had bad experiences as students themselves, often right through university. They struggled with attention issues, reading issues, math issues, writing issues. They were typically born from the late 1970s through the late 1980s and benefited as the first students with disabilities to have real human rights protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (as amended). And they went through the bulk of their education before the No Child Left Behind legislation began to destroy opportunity in American public education.

Today they range from, say, 35 down to their early twenties, and I have been watching them.

Middle School Jazz Camp, Albemarle County, Virginia

Watching them as they change - in dramatic ways - classrooms, schools, and the culture of education. Now, I'm not saying - obviously - that these are the only teachers doing these things. Often, these "boys" are adapting what they saw from the best of their teachers who "came of age" long before NCLB or even the "Reagan-Bush-1 Conservatism," but they are forming a powerful new cohort often in opposition to the "mainstream" teaching staff trained for an era of testing and classroom management.

I see these guys in elementary schools, in middle schools, in high schools, in every content area - a new band of teachers who demonstrate...

1. Instructional Tolerance and a belief that childhood and adolescence are good things.
These guys don't "sweat the small stuff." They know, from years of struggling in school, that no one in any classroom was always paying attention, or was always on task, or was always behaving. So stuff like taking breaks by staring at the window, or looking at Facebook, or walking around, or just spacing out, are fine. So is the use of different tools by different students. So are different time frames for different students. So are flexible deadlines and flexible assignments. Learning matters, the rest really does not.
2. A very different kind of classroom observation skill, perhaps the result of watching from back corners, these teachers are unusually good at spotting who is getting uncomfortable, and who is struggling.
This group of teachers understands how to watch for students becoming uncomfortable. They know it well because - that was them. Uncomfortable students stop learning, surely can't process at higher levels, so solving that is essential. These teachers also seem "much better than average" at recognizing when things aren't working for a student, and are most willing to try different paths.
3. A multi-level practice of teaching with large group, small group, and individual interactions occurring almost simultaneously.
Multitasking is basic to these men. They tend, most of them, toward the ADHD spectrum, and they see all the things in a room, thus they are able to observe and intervene, watch interactions at many different levels, and understand the borderline between the chaos of a great learning space and the chaos of dysfunction. As "Borderliners" themselves, this boundary line is far clearer than it is to those who sat near the front and attended to the teachers' directions.
4. A focus on student comfort and psychological safety is perhaps the most important thing in how this cohort teaches.
Once you've been uncomfortable, this become crucial. So these teachers have the classrooms where kids are "safe," where they go when they need to escape. You'll find kids there even when they don't have class. You'll find kids sitting on the floor, on windowsills, gathered together or being alone. Wearing hats, wearing hoods, playing games, doing nothing. There is an understanding - a native, pure understanding - that no one can do higher level learning - being intellectually uncomfortable - without being physically and psychologically comfortable. The concept is from Maslow, but these guys know it from their own experience.

Choices, opportunities, passions which engage instead of force conformity
are the hallmark of these teachers' spaces.

5. An understanding of the need for the passion which connects students to school is basic to these guys.
Why would a student come to school each day? Don't say, "we made it a law." Why would each student come to school each day? If football, or the play, or music, or the chance to talk about poetry with a certain teacher, or the social scene at lunch or recess is the top emotional reason which gets a child out of bed in the morning and two your door, you cannot let that ever become secondary to anything else, because if that disappears, the reason to attend - or at least in our compulsory system, engage - vanishes. These new teachers know that. You will see them bringing games, music production, new sports, new clubs, and new conversations to the schools as they seek to meet kids at their passions.

I have worked with many great teachers, from all kinds of backgrounds, and I have worked with many great new teachers, from many backgrounds - and yet, what I see in schools suggests that there is incredible value in recruiting - at every level of education - a group of people with diverse school experiences.

As long as schools are primarily taught and run by, and future teachers are prepared by, those for whom school has been "easy," or who have succeeded in school-as-we-know-it, schools will be, primarily, for that one-third of the population. To allow all to succeed, our faculties - all of our faculties - must begin to feel a lot more like our students.

- Ira Socol

The Demons of the Duncan Contradiction and Teacher Education

In a New York Times “Room for Debate” feature on teacher certification, an Alexandria, Virginia English teacher named Patrick Welsh unwittingly presents, in one clear paragraph, the problem with the Obama Administration’s educational policies.

“The credentialing game in public education may have once been a well-meaning effort to create some measurable criteria to maintain standards, but it has turned into an absurd process that forces both teachers and administrators to waste time jumping through hoops that have little or no relation to their job performance.”

Welsh, a Washington Post Blogger often deeply frustrated with educational change (he openly worries about schools with “too much technology”) is writing to oppose teacher certification requirements and – by extension – teacher training in and of itself. He spells out his hoped for situation: “A good start to ensure that schools get the best people in the classrooms would be to stop filtering candidates through personnel offices obsessed with education courses and “certification,” and allow individual schools to advertise for the positions they need, and then allow principals along with panels of teachers to hire enthusiastic candidates who exhibit knowledge and love of their subject and a passion for communicating that knowledge and love to students.”

The fact that Welsh can quote only a couple of locally observed anecdotes in defense of his position while others in the debate – taking the other side – can back their positions up with data is not the problem for the Obama administration. The problem is simply that Arne Duncan is taking opposite sides in the same debate: On hand he is arguing that teacher credentialing is unimportant, that traditional paths to teaching are no longer valid, that testing of new teachers for certification no longer has a place. Yet, his other hand is insisting on the most traditional measures of student achievement and teacher evaluation. Anyone with “enthusiasm” and “knowledge” can become a teacher in Duncan’s view, but every student must jump through annual hoops and certify themselves on achievement tests or both the student and his or her teacher fail. A funhouse mirror of education policies.

Which is it Mr. Obama? Are standardized tests and standardized curricula valid? Is it essential that all students attend a certain amount of school before they can claim some sort of certification? Or should a student be able to simply prove that they are “enthusiastic” and “exhibit knowledge”? Do I need to attend Mr. Welsh's classes at T.C. Williams High School or may I just read and write on my own until I satisfy my own preparatory needs for university?

Put another way, how do you tell a student that they must complete a specific set of courses, send a specific number of hours, days, years in school, pass a certain test – if that student’s teachers have had to do none of that in order to hold their present position?

Or in its most simple form – the argument for alternative certification for teachers, and the argument for “outsider run schools” (Charters), are clearly arguments for less standardization in school curricula and school assessment. The argument is that “school” – as we now understand it – is not the appropriate place to learn for many of our students – whether those are K-12 students or future educators. That standardized curricula, evaluations, and assessments are bad preparation for life and bad measures of capability - again, for K-12 students or future educators.

As for me – I believe in alternative teacher certification just as I believe in alternative educational opportunities for all students. And I believe in high expectations – for K-12 students and for new teachers – but I put little faith in industrial standards, whether those be the standards for a high school diploma (Did you come to class often enough? Did you do enough homework to make your algebra teacher happy?), a college degree (Did you click enough times in your Intro to Sociology lecture?), a PhD (Have you mastered APA Style, or is MLA?), or a teacher certification (Are you very good at sitting for very long tests?).

But I also know that teaching is the most important profession a society has. And I know that after a very selective, very extensive, and very expansive five-year program of teacher education, our Michigan State University College of Education grads are still often missing a great deal of information we wish we could find time to get in. Learning to be a great teacher is just a difficult thing. Why anyone would imagine you could become a great teacher in fewer years than you would need to become a great doctor is beyond my understanding.

So I want better teacher education programs. I want more flexible teacher education programs. I want teacher education programs more adapted to the diverse needs of the diverse people we want to attract into teaching. And I want teacher education programs with much more time spent in actual K-12 classrooms.

Just as I want better public schools. More flexible public schools. Public schools not tied to standardized tests and public schools with diverse choices meeting the needs of diverse learners. And I want public schools more firmly connected to the world our students live and learn in.

But my goal is not to eliminate either teacher training or public schools. Eliminating those institutions will not make either better – and eliminating either or both will not improve education at all.

- Ira Socol

What Teacher Education needs to be?

More "laboratory" work, more doubt, more diverse, more complex, and more flexible.

Chad Ratliff, a twitter colleague from Virginia, routinely challenges my thinking (a direct refutation of Larry Sanger's claims about web 2.0). Chad believes in Charter Schools (a rare thing in the Old Dominion), and Chad believes in alternative teacher certification, and I think Chad believes that at least some market forces can improve education. As an ex-teacher from a very high-needs impoverished community, and as a guy who studies education closely, I don't take his stances lightly.

First, let me say that I am not against Charter Schools. I believe charters and university lab schools are critical to educational invention in the public sector. My kid attended a great charter school. What I oppose are for profit chain-charters which steal money from children and do nothing to re-invent anything except, too often, racial and disability segregation.

Nor am I against alternative teacher certification. I am desperate to find effective ways to take experienced adults and convert them into great teachers, and equally desperate to develop strategies which turn committed adults from high-needs communities into lifelong teachers and community role models. What I'm against is Teach for America - a program that gives poor kids untrained, non-experienced teachers, while giving rich kids a resume boost.

Yes, I am pretty much against market solutions for public service. In my view market-based strategies have, for example, made American health care the most expensive in the world while also making it clearly less effective than the systems of other nations. And market-based strategies in the US military have given us Halliburton profits and Blackwater murders. I hope for better for our kids.

But let's go back to Teach for America. What's the problem? Well, it starts with a bit of cognitive dissonance. Teach for America claims that going to school to learn something is not just completely unimportant, it might be a negative. This is the heart of their argument (and the arguments of TFA fans like Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and The New York Times), that there is not just no difference between teachers who have attended education schools and those who have not, but that those who have not might even be better. This seems a story I wouldn't want presented to any child who I hoped to keep in school. "My teacher says school is worthless," is what I'd say if I had a TFA teacher.

But the bigger problem, even skipping my opinion of TFA as a classic colonial project designed to oppress, is that I see no reason why if rich kids get only "trained, certified" teachers, poor kids deserve something less. That's not, in my opinion, a gap-closing path.

If there is a teacher shortage in certain places, then maybe we do need a small "market solution." Would those districts attract top teachers if the pay was $150,000 or $200,000 a year? If the schools were properly equipped and maintained? If the necessary supports for student achievement were in place? I think the TFA Foundation should be raising cash to try that set of solutions out.

But yes, we all know that Teacher Education across America is not what it should be, and Chad wants to know where and how to start. And its a great question. And in trying to answer, I start outside the field.

Back when I was an NYPD cop, we used to describe certain rookies as suffering from "Starsky and Hutch Syndrome" (I believe the term now might be "Jack Bauer Syndrome"). "Starsky and Hutch Syndrome" cops inevitably came from the distant exurbs of New York, Suffolk County, Rockland County, Putnam County, and beyond. They had led these white bread kind of lives, and all they knew about the City of New York and its diverse population were the "horror" stories told by older cop relatives who had moved their families as far east or north as permissable to escape the "nightmare" of the city, which in their minds looked a lot like the film, Escape from New York. These cops arrived as crusaders who would "clean up" the city. They were totally earnest and sincere, determined to recreate the mythic New York City of their parents' childhoods'. They were also unbelievably dangerous. They could not understand street dynamics, our community standards. They could not comprehend that different people might behave differently on a hot summer Saturday night. They got into endless fights, they made stupid, worthless arrests, they damaged police community relationships, and they hurt members of the public and other cops through turning small problems into huge crises.

Here's an example of typical "Starsky and Hutch" behavior - from a much more recent time - thankfully captured on video:

The moral is, beware saviors, beware crusaders, and go for training.

The reason I start here is that for 6 months, that is, 26 weeks, the NYPD worked diligently in Police Academy courses to eliminate this syndrome. Through sociology and psychology courses, through Constitutional Law courses, through simulations and role play, through awareness training. New York cops learned all sorts of things during those 26 weeks, but the hardest thing to get across, almost every instructor said, was the notion that nothing in the past lives of these suburban 'pre-cops' or their educations (which were often quite impressive), was of any real value in terms of helping those in New York's struggling neighborhoods.

And so, after 26 weeks of 45 hours per wek training, New York's rookie cops are typically supervised heavily on the street for another six months - that's all considered part of their training. And still, more than a few Starsky and Hutches slipped through.

We compare that to the guy on the left, who now runs Teach for America in the San Francisco Bay area. He went through TFA's five week training program, and then taught for two years. I'm just saying...

So, issue one is that it takes a lot of training, and a lot of actual time, to make people effective public servants when dealing with people unlike themselves.

You know I tend to make fun of, and even to bash, my school, Michigan State University, but honestly we do do somethings quite well, and here's one: Our future teachers have typically spent time with as many high-needs diverse students before they begin their internship year than TFA corps members will in their entire "career." And we use that. From the first 100-level ed course on our students work in high needs classrooms. They do this in almost every course. And they come back and we - the instructors - get to work with their reactions. We do that for most of four years, and that makes a difference, because this is very difficult stuff to learn. We don't want missionaries, we don't want crusaders, we don't want saviors - we want teachers who, before they begin "student teaching" are starting to understand that their experience is not their students' experience, and that they are not superior humans for having had better luck in the birth lottery.

Now, Michigan State is no Ivy League institution. It is a Land Grant University (the very first Land Grant University) in a desperately struggling state. Yet our students are the elite, they have made it to one of our top universities in a place where attending any post-secondary school is a minority position. Their knowledge of the struggles of underclass children or children who struggle in school is typically highly limited. And if we, in the College of Education, did not push them out into the City of Lansing's schools or poor rural districts, well, the only times they'd actually get into Lansing itself is going to World Market in the Frandor Shopping Center for beer (sorry Spartans, MAC's Bar doesn't count, it is technically in Lansing Township). In other words, if they were not education majors, they would likely know little of this - even on a campus far more diverse in economic origin than those East Coast elite campuses.

We do something else pretty well at MSU, which is deal with issue two, creating and understanding doubt, which is essential to developing teachers who can differentiate instruction. We do not teach students "one way" to do anything. Our faculty could hardly agree on a group of five or six ways. I say to those in my team-taught course, that even in that single course they will hear three views, often at odds. If you take any sequence of MSU College of Ed courses you will hear lots of ideas, lots of possibilities, lots of suggestions - and as you go out into the a real classroom, and meet any collection of students - you will need every one of them.

Obviously, this also takes time. You cannot dump 50 strategies on a bunch of pre-service teachers in a semester. You can only offer that variety if you give everyone the time to process and compare, to test in actual teaching moments, then process and compare again.

We also have a highly diverse group of instructors at MSU, which is issue three, getting fully comfortable with diverse perspectives on the notion of education itself. I don't mean diverse in skin color, though we do have lots of people from lots of continents. I mean diverse by economic origin, by family origin, by systems of primary and secondary education. The "Brit" group comes with a set of views, as does our "East Asian" group, our "South Asian," and "African" groups have a "Brit plus" view set. Then we have our Americans. There are instructors wth every "disability," and instructors with every kind of language issue, and instructors with every type of political stance. This really does make a difference as new teachers learn to navigate communities which do not share their values or histories.

Issue four is all about complexity. In any class of students, but especially among "high needs" students, there will be real issues you must deal with. In Linda Darling-Hammond's study of TFA this is the place where the untrained teachers really fell apart, they had no exposure to any of this, and it showed. What, I recently asked a man on Twitter who seemed to be suggesting that anyone with good content knowledge would be a good teacher, does (his example) film maker and history buff Ken Burns know about dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ELL, AAC, CAPD, ADHD, EI, Autism, Aspergers - to name a few issues likely to confront every teacher. These are complex issues with no set formulas for answer. These take time too. You must move past the labels, past your "declarative knowledge," to true "operational knowledge," or you will not only not help these students, you will injure them.

My fifth issue though is about flexibility. Because I am a fan of alternative certification. When someone like @spedteacher chooses, after a lifetime of diverse experiences with people, to become a teacher, that is a fabulous thing. And so I want to be able to entice great people, in their 30s, 40s, 50s into education, and I want to leverage the human skills they already have. I want them to be able to study to be teachers while being paid. I want them to have shorter, year round courses, that fit their lifestyle needs. I want them to be merging their past experiences with the curriculum, and I want them in classrooms in a secondary role almost immediately. I especially want these people if they come from the kinds of communities which suffer teacher shortages, because I want to develop a community-based faculty which is lifespan dedicated to that community and its children.

In my battle over teacher training I surprise myself. I have a ton of problems with how we train teachers, just as I have a ton of problems with how we train doctors. So, I might think I'd be on the TFA "No Training" side. But I'm not. I consider these both to be critical, life and death professions. Who kills more in a year? I'd guess bad teachers over bad doctors, really. A disastrous education too often leads to a disastrous - and short - life.

So my solution to bad teachers and bad doctors is not to minimize training, it's to reconstruct it. To make it really work the way it should. That's my start - let the conversation begin...

- Ira Socol