Past President’s Message Face the Music . . . and a Successful School Year Brent Rose T WMEA Past President
he start of a new school year is hard whether you’ve got no years of experience or ten. You can bring instructional expertise, energetic passion, and tons of knowledge. But when you have new students, there’s a big thing you lack: credibility.
Whether a new school year means new administrators, new staff, or new students, there are questions that need answers.
Is this person a good teacher? That’s the question everyone’s asking, whether consciously or not. We’re natural judgers. In some cases, it’s fine for you to be a person of principle who doesn’t care what people think about you. Actually, that’s probably really healthy, but in teaching, you do need people to think you’re a good teacher. Believe it or not, teacher credibility is a key contributor to student success.
According to the largest meta-analysis in education research history — and, according to some claims, the largest review of literature ever conducted — teacher credibility is a powerful force. This extensive analysis, headed by John Hattie, is based on data from over 50,000 individual studies and 250 million students. Teacher credibility, in Hattie’s list of
practices that affect student achievement, is “on the top of the list” of practices that can be applied by any teacher in the world. As Fisher, Frey, and Hattie explain, “The dynamic of teacher credibility is always at play.” (Hattie 2012).
So they’re trying to figure out if you’re credible. That’s why people treat you weirdly when you’re starting out at a new place. And the bad news is that it’s not very effective to try and explicitly convince them of your credibility. You don’t want to go around attempting to impress everyone or bragging about your classroom.
The good news is that credibility can actually be boiled down pretty succinctly. According to educational philosopher Dave Stuart Jr., students (and co-workers and bosses) determine a teacher’s credibility based on CCP: care, competence, and passion (Stuart 2014).
CARE: Do you care about students
personally? Do you care about them as learners? Don’t miss either one of those. As a teacher, I put a great deal of weight into personal relationships. However, be sure to connect your caring as much to their classroom work as you do to their well-being. I’m sure my students found me to be a nice person, even a good person — but I’m also sure that some of them did not find me a particularly good teacher at times. In a student’s eyes, we have to be both good teachers and good people if we want them to learn as much as possible.
COMPETENCE: Do you know your stuff? Your content? Your craft? How to manage a class? How to stay organized? (I am always working on that one.) There aren’t many shortcuts to competence, but here’s one: every day, go in to work determined to learn something new. I always tell my boss, “If you walk by my classroom and we are not making music… please come in and check on us… something is either very wrong or very
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Wyoming Windsong
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