Houston Blog
My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
On Thursday and Friday, I welcomed our new faculty and staff to Awty in a series of orientation meetings. We have 32 new teachers and support staff this year, a few being replacements for departing faculty, but the majority comprising additions to assist with the expansion of student numbers. The strong demand for student places at Awty this year has confirmed the justifiably great reputation that we have as an excellent place to form young people for their future. At the beginning of the last school year when I arrived at Awty, we had 1290 students. We will begin the new school year next week with about 1470 students and 172 faculty (plus 29 non-teaching faculty and 60 non-teaching staff).
These numbers now make Awty Houston’s largest independent school (we were third largest this time last year), and the largest international school campus in the US (the only bigger international school in the US is UNIS - the United Nations International School - in New York, which has a slightly larger total student population that is split over two campuses).
Our new teachers are an impressive and diverse group of highly committed, professional educators with an infectious collective sense of humor and a genuine enthusiasm for the task that lies ahead of them. This led me to reflect on what makes a great teacher in the current era of globalized society, online learning, decreasing attention spans and immediate gratification. Six characteristics came to mind, all starting with the letter “P” (and I don’t know whether that makes them easier or more difficult to remember):
1. Personable
Teachers must do much more than communicate course content, as books and the internet are capable of conveying mere facts very effectively these days. Teachers must build relationships and enter into the world of their students. Humor and approachability will be great helps in achieving this, whereas over-familiarity will not. I think that a measure of righteous anger and even strictness are helpful for teachers provided they are displayed in the context of conveying to the student that he or she is deeply valued, and boundaries help to nurture and define this value. Perhaps the first rule for any successful teacher is that he or must enjoy teaching. Quite simply, if teachers do not enjoy teaching, their students will not enjoy learning. Thus, the most effective teacher will not necessarily be the friendliest teacher or even the most popular teacher. The great teacher will be the one who inspires and disturbs until new levels of possibility are seen.
2. Partner
It has been said that today’s teachers can no longer be the ‘sage on the stage’, but they must be the ‘guide by the side’. The old view of teaching (as in last century, about 12 years ago) was that teachers treated students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. Recently there has been an emerging democratization of learning where students are seen as active partners with teachers in learning. Of course, this shift can be somewhat humbling for many teachers who are used to a more Confucian approach in which content is conveyed to unquestioning students. For traditional teachers, such partnerships can be challenging. It is probably easier to be an autocrat in a classroom where there is minimal dialogue, no distractions, and therefore no worries – at least on the surface. However, the realities of our future society require that teachers manage classrooms as collaborators in the search for more enlightened understandings.
3. Progressive
In today’s and tomorrow’s schools, modern technologies will be used everywhere with a presumption of their worth and convenience. The whole school will become a workspace. Benches in the playground will be littered with students using laptops, iPads, pocket PCs and mobile phones. Learning will be encouraged everywhere as something natural and continuous. Students will come out of classrooms and re-form into a dozen small groups to engage in tweets, blogs and Wikis. Print stations will be found in strategic locations. Stand-up work spaces with touch-screens will facilitate web-browsing for those ‘on the move’ and without a pocket device. Flat plasma screens will provide synchronized school news, swipe cards will provide entry and attendance verification. In classrooms, interactive white boards will magnify and facilitate learning. All key lessons will be digitally recorded for student recall. Student work will be beamed onto screens for comment and marked using a virtual pencil. Lessons will be augmented by video-conferences with specialist teachers off-campus and by model lessons in clouds. Hopefully our teachers will be leading the way with these inevitable and desirable changes.
4. Performer
In America, the tyranny of accountability and its various measures seem to be everywhere. Debates are underway in the wider community about performance-related pay and credentialing. Huge emphasis is placed on test scores and external examination results, as if those numbers actually constituted a sound and complete measure of the quality of all that happens in a school. Paradoxically, the country (Finland) that consistently shows the world’s highest achievement ratings on educational outcomes – even higher than Singapore, China and Japan – engages in no formal teacher appraisal, preferring instead to trust the professionalism of the teachers and to allow teachers to focus on educating children rather than teaching towards test scores.
5. Parent
Teachers should not have to perform the role of parents, but inevitably this is sometimes necessary. Most parents (especially at Awty) are wonderful and fulfill their role with such completeness that a teacher should only need (to slightly exaggerate the point) to teach the blessings of quadratic equations and the curses of the split infinitive. However, some parents are less wonderful (for a range of often understandable but nonetheless sad and very real reasons), and this sometimes requires teachers to do the caring, the mentoring and even the loving. At the very least, teachers need to be sensitive to the possibility of needing to fill this potential role at any unexpected juncture.
6. Physician
Teachers must be healers. By this, I don’t mean dispensers of medicines, but at a more subtle and often deeper level, good teachers find that they must be healers of bruised souls - ethical role models who can help counter the de-sensitizing to violence, the premature sexualizing, and the ambiguous morality that pervades the cyber world, and even the television viewing, within which most children live (or at the very least, dabble in occasionally). Despite being squeezed between rising expectations and tight resources, good teachers will be expected to fulfill parental dreams and to protect children’s rights. They will be expected to be the ultimate polymath – the master of many skills. They will be asked to be prophet, priest and parent.
Would YOU be a teacher in today’s schools?
Our new classroom and administration building (to be known as the Levant Foundation Building in recognition of the School’s historic and ongoing close partnership with the Levant Foundation) has now been completed and we have been spending the last couple of weeks moving in and setting up the facilities. In between welcoming back our teachers and attending to a mountain of accumulated paperwork, I managed to get my office (almost) set up, as the photos below show.
Although we were hoping that the new 440-space parking garage would be ready for the start of the new term, heavy rains in Houston during summer have pushed back our opening date by several weeks. The structure is almost complete, with the stairs and elevator towers being the main areas that require more work. We will be pouring the rest of the external concrete paving this week, and the photos below give some idea of the progress made up to last Friday. Like everyone else at Awty, I can’t wait for this wonderful new facility to be ready for use.
The Six Ps of Great Teachers
Sunday, 12 August 2012
On Thursday, just before we began our first orientation session, I managed to get this group photo in our new building with 30 of our new teachers and support staff - the other two were delayed by traffic congestion; this IS Houston after all!