Teacher Interview Synopsis This Project

Teacher Interview Synopsis

This project consisted of a telephone interview with a professional educator who has taught for seven years: four years in two medium-sized middle school and three years in a small high school in the same large city. She responded to questions about her teaching experiences to date, including her highlights and frustrations. She also provided an explanation for issues that she believes are important in the profession and the difference between what she expected from the profession as a graduate student and what she has experienced in her work.

Teaching Methods

The subject expressed frustration and suggested that, in many ways, teaching in the 21st century is not substantially different from teaching in the 19th century. Notwithstanding obvious differences in the quality and types of learning materials available to the modern educator, academic instruction still relies largely on passive learning through the traditional lecture and textbook method of teaching. Generally, teachers dispense information in classroom lectures, and students take notes from which they will study so that they will be able to paraphrase their teachers' ideas on graded tests. The interview subject suggested that the few times she has had the opportunity to implement active learning and inquiry-based teaching methodologies, the results were extremely beneficial. In general, the interview subject believes that much more emphasis should be given to teaching students how to think instead of emphasizing their ability to remember information for the short-term.

Standardized Testing

This interview subject feels very strongly that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal policies of the Bush administration were more harmful than helpful to the American education system. She acknowledged that standardized testing also provides essential information when it is used properly, but she reports that, in her experience, the natural tendency of teachers and educational institutions working under NCLB policies is to "teach to test" instead of teaching to learn and testing to measure learning. According to her, standardized testing used in the manner required under NCLB often reduces the quality of education because teachers devote excessive time to drilling standardized test-taking, and at the expense of time that would be better used teaching substantive material.

While she says she never witnessed it personally, she reported that there have been numerous instances across the country where educators have actually misused pre-released state tests as practice tests; in other cases, teachers changed students' responses on test sheets after they were turned in. She says that even "ordinary" situations, as soon as mandatory state testing is emphasized, that testing process becomes less valuable because it often ends up measuring results that are more representative of test-taking preparation rather than they are representative of genuine learning and academic proficiency.

Tenure

The interview subject expressed intense frustration at the way that the tenure system in modern education undermines the system. She has encountered several different fellow teachers who were tenured but clearly no longer motivated or particularly interested in teaching except as a regular paycheck. Some of them simply do the minimum and never challenge their students. Other teachers have even been disciplined for serious conduct issues. However, those teachers are almost always retained and even when they are suspended or placed on modified administrative duty, they still receive their full salaries. According to the interview subject, the tenure system is much too protective of tenured teachers who perform poorly or engage in misconduct. She fully supports the principle of tenure in teaching and she defends other tenure benefits. However, she has encountered too many situations where the fact that certain educators were tenured protected them against rightful termination.

Teaching Culture

The interview subject said that she was most surprised by the way that social culture among professional educators dictates the entire educational environment in many schools. When she studied teaching methodologies and learning theories in graduate school, the interview subject had formed the impression that decisions about those kinds of things in educational institutions were made very scientifically. She says that, in retrospect, she came into the teaching profession very idealistically and naively because she had no idea how political educational administration often is.