At a recent trip to my primary care physician I am struck by how much his world and my care has changed in 10 years. Only a decade ago my Dr. had a manageable number of patients and spent about 30 to 45 minutes with me every time I came to her office. She retired. My new Dr. has 5 times as many patients and can barely let his feet settle on the floor of the exam room before he is off to the next patient. My care has become less personal and less effective. In classrooms all across America the number of students a teacher must teach is expanding. I began my career with a 5 period day and under 20 students in each section. My last year of face to face teaching was an 8 period day with 25 + students per class. My largest load was 195 students each day. That is strikingly similar to my current doctor’s plight. My diagnosis of educational needs was less sharp. My daily interactions were more group oriented and my time with each student was reduced. I still did a good job. However, it took a huge emotional toll.
As in current medicine, we need better diagnostics and that takes more time. We need more focused feedback and more time to meet the exceptionally individual needs of our students if we are to increase achievement and develop well educated citizens capable of developing their abilities to the fullest. We cannot do that with more students. We can get creative, as my physician has, and use para-professionals, digital record organizers and time management systems. However, those interventions only help with the short term stress on the system. Kids need teachers. They need the gift of our rapt attention to their educational needs.
My Doctor says that he could increase the quality of his health care 100% with another Dr. in the practice and cut his patient load in half. We can do the same in education. Are we as a profession strong enough to call for a doubling of the teaching force by 2030? The system says we cannot educate enough doctors to meet demand. Are we capable of educating enough teachers? I think we are. The fly in the ointment is the cost of employing all of the new teachers.
NCLB had a fragment of a good idea in that it mandated that all students have access to highly qualified teachers. There was some craziness in how they defined that. It is time to refine our priorities and give every child access to educators with enough time to teach well. I recently was at a school board meeting where they were deciding not to fill a teaching position when a teacher retired. The class size projections only went up by 5 students per class. I argued vehemently against the move and lost the argument. In the next half hour the board added 2 new assistant football coaches to make sure the team was competitive in the conference. Let’s focus on being competitive on a global scale.
Shannon
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Shannon,
What a sad but accurate comparison of our two professions!I too have seen the change in my doctor’s practice in the past several years from one of spending time (both qualitative and quantitative) and recently feeling rushed and pressured to have all my concerns addressed. My colleagues and I are seeing changes too, and I worry about them. My teammates are all teaching two subjects every day, (each out of their certification area), and they are highly stressed feeling they aren’t meeting their students’ needs the way they’d like to. Our classes are full and if it weren’t so sad we’d laugh, but there are days when they have to ask the kids which subject they are there for, because they can’t always keep the schedule straight. Imagine going to a primary care physician who also had to be a pulmonary specialist because there wasn’t enough money to pay for both doctors’ salaries?
Excellent comment and post. What if we were able take that metaphor farther and become our own research hospitals. We could push practice forward as well as bring up new “residents”. If we had a “crowd” mentality about how to educate kids we might be able meet their needs.
There’s a lot of comparing that can be done between medicine and teaching. Recently New York’s new Commissioner discussed with our union the need to change teacher preparation into a more clinical model by perhaps having residencies. I also heard a speaker say recently that education today is where medicine was in the 1920’s . At least we now have standards for the profession. How else we we move forward? Thank you NBPTS.
I believe we can learn a great deal from the medical field. In one of the best hospitals on one of the best floors, where I lived for about 5 weeks while my son was going through a bone marrow transplant, there was one nurse for every three children. There was a daily visit from the attending doctor, resident, nurse manager, and primary nurse who traveled from room to room during rounds with a computer on a cart. The rounds took 5 hours for 11 children. They worked seamlessly as a team with specialists and 2 other hospitals to provide the world’s best care.
So if we are to get to where the medical profession is, we need teacher leaders working with teachers and specialists and other institutions to provide the best education possible. Teachers will develop various areas of expertise and specialization as a chemo certified nurse is permitted to administer chemo. So will a teacher be certified to be an instructional coach, service learning coordinator, or mentor coordinator. What I found out was that doctors are important but nurses really are the key to your care. Just as teachers are the key to your education.
P.S. My son is doing great. Thanks to a wonderful unrelated donor who is still anonymous.