The school year begins for me today. This will be my 26th year in the classroom—all in the same school and almost all in the same classroom. It’s a school where I met my wife, many of my friends, and many students who remain in my life long after their time in my classroom has come to an end.
How lucky I have been.
But it’s also a challenging time to be a teacher.
Emerging from the pandemic, children have enormous social, emotional, and academic needs. Many are struggling with trauma, the effects of prolonged isolation, and grief.
It’s all been incredibly, debilitatingly difficult.
It’s also been remarkably, joyfully, endlessly rewarding. Knowing that you make a difference in a child’s life—especially during these challenging times—has been a gift to most teachers.
In the face of these unprecedented challenges and sweeping changes, I would like to offer this advice on behalf of my fellow educators:
If you are an administrator — principal, superintendent, or anyone else occupying some place other than the classroom — and have not been a teacher for three or four years, please stop talking about what you think constitutes effective teaching and start listening to teachers. The pandemic has changed education — at least for a time — in profound ways. If you’re not in a classroom — especially not working in a school — your previous teaching experience is far less relevant than it once was.
If you are an administrator who hasn’t been in the classroom for a decade or more—especially if you’re not working in a school—please, by all means, shut the hell up and start listening to teachers. Your awareness of students’ needs and the challenges of a school day has all but evaporated with time.
If it’s been over a decade since you’ve stood before students daily, you honestly have little to say. You probably taught in an age before children carried cell phones. Maybe in an age before the internet became as ubiquitous as today. You’ve probably never had a class of students with laptops on their desks at all times. You probably didn’t teach during the extreme partisanship that has divided our nation. You may have been teaching before Sandy Hook or Parkland or Uvalde.
If it’s been longer than a decade since you last taught in a classroom daily, your job is to support teachers by constantly and carefully listening to them and working like hell to meet their needs. Your opinions on teaching are almost irrelevant unless they come from the people doing the job daily.
Here’s the thing about teachers:
None of us went into this profession to get rich.
None of us saw teaching as an easy job.
None of us want to fail.
For many teachers, the week before school begins is filled with sleepless nights, constant worry, and furious planning because they want to be the very best for their students and relentlessly worry that they might fail.
I once worked with a veteran teacher of more than two decades who would throw up the night before the start of every school year.
Teachers want to succeed on behalf of their students.
So if a teacher asks you for a tool, it’s because we know—better than you could—that we need it.
When we tell you that the curriculum is atrocious, it’s because we know — far better than you ever could — that the curriculum is atrocious.
If we tell you that an assessment is useless, it’s because we know—better than you ever will—that it is useless.
When we tell you a policy is not working, it’s not because we are trying to make our lives easier. It’s because your policy sucks.
Plato Karafelis, my first principal—who served for 25 years in the school where I am beginning my 26th year today—often pointed out in faculty meetings that he hadn’t taught in a classroom for 12 or 15 or 20 years. “How could I pretend to know what your job is like anymore?” he would say. “I need you to tell me what I need to know. Tell me what you need so I can do my best to support you.”
This impressed the hell out of me.
But that type of leadership is hard to find these days. Many administrators who once taught in bygone days—pre-pandemic, pre-digital, pre-computers in your pocket, pre-murder in the classroom, pre-social media—think they understand the job. They think their opinions on pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment are relevant in today’s teaching environment. They spout theories, opinions, and policies from ivory towers when they know nothing about the realities of a classroom today.
I was named West Hartford’s Teacher of the Year in 2006. If that same 2006 version of me appeared in my classroom today, I would be a tragically ineffective teacher for my students. It would take me at least a year and a lot of work to become highly effective again. The world has fundamentally shifted since my first few years of teaching. If you’ve been teaching in the classroom during that time, you, too, have shifted along with it.
But if you’ve spent your time outside the classroom, in some office or ivory tower, you know little about classroom instruction. You know lots of other things, I’m sure — essential and valuable, for sure — but if you don’t work with kids, you don’t understand the realities of the classroom in today’s world, and that, more than anything, is what teaching is about.
So, in these challenging times, I implore administrators—especially those not working inside schools—to stop thinking that they know anything about what is going on in the classroom and start relentlessly and religiously asking teachers what they need to be successful.
Ask them all—the compliant ones, the nonconformists, the rookies, the veterans, the rabble-rousers, and everyone in between.
Every teacher has a list of what they need to help students learn better. Ask them for their list, and don’t waste their time explaining why the items on their lists are unimportant, too expensive, unrealistic, or not needed.
Stop assuming you know anything and ask them. Listen to them. Act upon their requests whenever possible. When it’s not possible, find a way to make it possible. That is why your job exists.
If you can’t bring yourself to do these things, then be quiet. Don’t become an obstruction to good teaching. Stay the hell out of our way.
And please don’t make the mistake of thinking this is one person’s opinion or that I’m speaking about my school district. As a public figure, I hear from teachers all over the country. This is not a problem in a single school district or a small handful of school districts.
I hear from struggling teachers all the time. I listen to their stories of struggle, heartache, and the desire to do well in the face of administrators who fail to meet their needs daily. I hear about administrators who think they know something but know almost nothing.
There isn’t a teacher I know who doesn’t feel similarly. Teachers tend not to be boat rockers. Many are rule followers. Even more are people-pleasers. Most are simply too invested in their students to fight against blind, incompetent administrative buffoonery.
But they all are feeling these pressures. They all want more for their students. They all need more support. They all wish people who have not occupied a classroom for 5 or 10 or 20 years would do much less talking, a lot less demanding, and a lot more listening.
