Professors are People too
I’ve spent a lot of the last two years thinking about the conditions and strategies that will make more teachers more likely to change how they teach reading.
I’ve written about how hard it is for people to change their mind about anything, let alone a deeply-entrenched practice that they believe to be effective. I’ve urged advocates to consider their objectives before they fire off anti-teacher tweets. I’ve outlined my do’s and don’ts of literacy changes. I’ve considered what we might learn from the balanced literacy and whole language movements. I’ve even written about relational organizing and how it might apply to the science of reading movement.
The ideas in these pieces can largely be condensed into the following points:
Show concrete examples of beautiful, joyous, and engaging structured literacy instruction (I may have started an entire fellowship program dedicated to this undertaking).
Ask and empower teachers to tell their stories.
Do not shame and blame teachers. Avoid it at all costs.
Be patient. You’re not going to transform a complicated system overnight.
Mostly stop talking about data and stats.
Quit arguing with the trolls (you know who I’m talking about).
I stand by what I’ve written about cultivating conditions for literacy change. But I want to make a vital addendum.
All of this advice applies to college professors as well. We have to remember that professors are people too.
So what does this mean in practice?
It means that we have got to stop shaming and blaming professors for what they do not know and were never taught. Many of these professors started out as classroom teachers. They took the same reading methods courses that the teachers did. They completed the same projects. They learned from the same professors. They are just as much victims of a broken educator prep-system as classroom teachers are.
“But they’re college professors. It’s their job to know the research. We have to hold them to a higher standard.”
Sure. I agree. We should absolutely ask questions and share research and challenge their ideas. (We should also seek to build relationships with them and show them examples of exemplary teaching and encourage former students of theirs to reach out about their teaching experience). But when higher standards mostly mean blame and shame, which they often do, I’m not on board. We want education professors to learn and embrace reading science so that they better prepare pre-service teachers. Shame and blame don’t help them change their minds.
So how do we engage education professors?
Honestly, I think it looks a lot like the same ways advocates are already engaging teachers. Here’s what I would suggest:
We tell positive, affirming stories about specific education programs and individual professors.
We share model syllabi, assignments, and course sequences. We share actual teaching clips from these model courses.
When we meet professors who have changed their minds and their instruction, we try to learn from them. We ask and encourage them to share their story. We seek to understand and replicate the conditions that led them to change their minds.
We build welcoming and informal spaces where curious professors can dip their toes in the water and begin to learn about reading science.
We build welcoming and formal spaces where curious professors can dig in and learn what they don’t know about reading science.
We are patient, and we are firm about the importance of making these instructional shifts.
These are not novel ideas. In fact, I’m sure many of these things are happening already, just not in a public and coordinated way. So let’s make these efforts public so we can coordinate and learn from one another! So curious professors can learn from us! So we can forge stronger connections between teachers and professors, who both need to learn the same things!
Here’s my bottom-line:
We cannot change and improve reading instruction without changing teachers’ minds.
We cannot change and improve educator prep without changing professors’ minds.
The most effective advocacy will center both of those ideas.
