Soulless Teaching

What it is and where it comes from

There’s more to learning than this

This is another post specific to US education, apologies again to my international readers.

The goal of school is to help students learn things. There have been a lot of changes to schools over the last ten to twenty years that, on the surface, purport to help students learn things. I'm going to argue that, despite those intentions, some common changes in schools have actually caused us to lose sight of learning, and lead to what I'll call "soulless teaching."

Soulless teaching happens when teachers are more concerned about jumping through hoops and checking boxes than they are with learning. It happens when teachers make sure they're on the right page in the curriculum, they've filled out all their MTSS paperwork, they've logged behaviors in the behavior system, the online gradebook is up to date, they facilitate a silent Do Now, and they have an immaculately organized Google Classroom. But students aren't learning.

There’s a bit of education history that I think is helpful to understand soulless teaching. Hold that thought for a minute.

Some Education History

For a long time in the US, education was what David Labaree calls "loosely coupled." In his words:

Think about how loosely coupled US school systems are. They exist across six levels, each nested in the other: Federal, state, district, school, classroom, and student. Each level is partially autonomous, buffered from the level above. Each unit is also buffered from others at the same level. Units at each level and across levels are physically separated, operating independently. In such a structure, it is very difficult to effect change down the hierarchy, and it’s also not easy to disseminate change across units at the same level.

For a long time, most education reform efforts focused on the district and school levels. Reform had very little to do with classrooms or, directly at least, with learning. The reforms up until around 1980 focused on questions like, Will schools be segregated? Which students will go to high school? Will they follow an academic or vocational track? How and where will students with disabilities be included? How will schools and districts be run? There was also a great deal of rhetoric about pedagogy and how teachers should teach. But very little of that rhetoric actually changed classroom teaching, because of the loose coupling of the system. The changes at the district and school levels did impact education, but didn't have much influence on what teachers were doing in classrooms.

That started to change in the 80s with the government report, “A Nation At Risk.” The focus shifted from the structure of school to whether students are learning. It took a few decades, but this led to No Child Left Behind and the accountability era of the 2000s. This was a big shift. Previously, while teachers might not have much control over the structure of the school around them, they had a great deal of autonomy to teach the students in front of them in the way they saw fit. The accountability era began with high-stakes standardized tests, but it has mushroomed. over the last decade. Teachers are pressured to improve test scores, but now there are also interim assessments that students must perform well on. There are systems to track which students are making progress and to intervene for students who are not. There are systems to track behavior. There is accountability for grades and an online gradebook visible to parents at every moment. There is a district-provided curriculum and pacing guide. There is PD on jigsaw discussions, or cold call, or whatever. All of these pieces are attempts to measure and manage learning from a distance, and to hold teachers accountable for that learning.

Back to Soulless Teaching

Stepping back, I think it's important to look at all of those systems first as a new and abrupt change to the working conditions of teachers. The era of loose coupling is over. The last 20 or so years in the US have been a long attempt to tightly couple the education system.

To me, there's one core obstacle with tight coupling in schools. Learning is complex. Every effort to tightly couple the classroom level to the higher levels of education inevitably involves taking the complexity of learning and oversimplifying it. We take a score on a standardized assessment and assume that captures everything we need to know about whether a student learned. We build an intervention system with three categories, and assume those three categories can help us meet the needs of students who are having a hard time. We log behaviors in a behavior system and assume that the tallies of referrals and detentions accurately summarize a student's behavior. I literally went to a PD last year where I was told that jigsaw activities are one of the most valuable things I can do to promote learning, as if that’s all there is to it. But learning is complex, and all of those fall short of capturing the complexity of learning.

To me, one of the most frustrating things about soulless teaching is the way it is completely opaque to parents and families. Parents approach the school with concerns that their child isn't learning, and they end up hearing some nonsense alphabet soup about all the hoops teachers are jumping through but nothing about how the school will help their kid learn.

"Well their BOY results were low growth/low achievement, but their MOY results were high growth/low achievement so we're going to keep them in Tier 1 for now. If you could make sure they get their i-Ready minutes every week, and when we get to module 4 of CKLA we'll work on some of those skills you’re worried about. You should look at F2 and P6 on Google Classroom with them. Also, they only had four HOWL points first semester and they have two referrals from Mr. Smith, so if they could work on their focus in class that would be really helpful."

That's only a slight exaggeration of the types of things parents hear. But the impenetrable jargon is only a symptom of the deeper problem: schools become obsessed with outcomes that aren’t the same as learning. It’s all about test scores and curriculum fidelity and the gradebook and the behavior system and whatever other hoops are on the menu that year. Teachers spend all their time making sure they’re following the rules and checking the boxes and they lose sight of learning.

The best teaching happens when skillful teachers have tools like high-quality curriculum, support from administrators with challenging behavior, and space in the schedule to intervene when students are falling behind. And then, teachers need the time and freedom to use all of those resources to meet their students' needs. A loosely coupled system can do that, and gives teachers the freedom to adapt tools to their strengths and adapt to their students’ needs. A tightly coupled system, where principals or district leaders insist that teachers follow a curriculum to the day, fill out an MTSS tracker after each assessment, put three grades in the gradebook every week, and more, leads to micromanagement and soulless teaching.

Goodhart’s Law says, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Tightly coupled schools create lots of ways to measure whether teachers are doing a good job. All those measures have some sort of loose connection to learning. But when we measure teachers in all these different ways, and give teachers a hard time about those measures, teachers focus on the measures rather than the learning.

Not all schools do this. Some do it a little, some do it a lot. It looks different in each school. Some schools are obsessed with the box-checking and hoop-jumping, others do a better job of focusing on learning. But the thesis of this post is that a tightly coupled education system is not likely to work at scale. Learning is too complex. Teachers are busy, and should spend their time thinking about learning. The more schools and districts and states try to tightly couple the system, the more teachers will focus on the wrong stuff and lose sight of learning.