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Learnings of a first-year teacher
In my year-end survey, TFA asked me what I’ve learned about education. Here are a few things I put down:
Socioeconomic status does not prevent students from learning. (I work at a charter with high achievement and growth rates, and a very high free/reduced lunch population).
There’s no silver bullet in education - even policies that I support (charters, alternative certification programs like TFA, extended school day/year) - are only a small part of the solution, and will only work when implemented by competent and passionate administrators/teachers.
We still really don’t know what students know. I’m a believer in the power of data, but I feel like the assessments available to me (as a middle school science teacher) are rather awful - from the CSAP to the SAT 10 to my self-created end of year assessment. So many strategies (incentive pay, student accountability, growth tracking, targeted interventions) depend on high-quality assessments, aligned to standards, and the quality of these assessments needs to improve dramatically.
Probably all obvious truisms to those who study education (and are in the same nebulous pro-reform camp that my school/myself fall into), but I don’t think I really believed any of these things prior to teaching.
I also have a growing belief that the way we hire, train, promote educators in the US is entirely fucked… but more on that later.
