The career path for teachers has traditionally been narrowly circumscribed. They could remain in the classroom for life, as many do. For those who want a break from the classroom routine, there have historically been few options: become a principal or superintendent, or morph into a policymaker or researcher. More likely, teachers who wanted to get away from the classroom would leave education altogether.
That’s not the case anymore. A whole new economy has emerged for former teachers to stay plugged into education — entirely outside the classroom if they want. Some leave the classroom to become “teacher-preneurs,” sharing their lesson plans on sites like Teachers Pay Teachers or Pinterest. Some are rewriting curriculum from a teacher-friendly point-of-view. More recently, teachers are being recruited by software companies to work on educational apps. And a few truly forward-looking teachers are working to create a new vision of what schools should look like.
“I think that often when people think of teachers, they think of a very one-dimensional sort of person,” said Vera Triplett, an educator in New Orleans. “But teachers are really talented and multifaceted individuals with a lot of gifts that people rarely get to see. And because they are on the ground and in the room with kids on a daily basis, they know better than anyone what the needs are.”
Bright talked with five educators who have left the classroom, but found creative ways to stay in the field.
Dr. Vera Triplett, Noble Minds Institute for Whole Child Learning, New Orleans
Creating the restorative justice classroom
Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has undergone an education overhaul that one local paper describes as “a buffet of independently run charter schools.” Some schools in the economically divided city took a tough-love approach, heavy on discipline, and others an ambitious college prep model that might naturally target more privileged students. There was little middle ground.
Dr. Vera Triplett, a 43-year-old former English teacher and counselor, hopes that her own forthcoming charter, the Noble Minds Institute for Whole Child Learning, can offer something that few, if any, of the others can: a school that can reverse “the school-to-prison pipeline and actually be a supportive institution for kids.” In practice, that means a school that never suspends or expels students, but seeks to replace traditional punishment with a therapeutic approach.
Triplett began her career as a middle and high school English teacher in 1997, until she left to get a Masters in counseling. She started her own private counseling practice in 2002; worked with local New Orleans children’s organizations, including the New Orleans Child Advocacy Center, the Juvenile Justice Center, and the Youth Empowerment Project; and went on to teach counseling at the college level.
“Because of that work, I got to know a lot of kids who had very formative experiences — in a negative way — in school,” she said. “Almost all the kids I came across in the juvenile justice system had been suspended at least once. And in some cases, they had gotten in the trouble that landed them in the juvenile justice system while they were on suspension.”
When children, often coming from difficult or impoverished backgrounds, are suspended or expelled, Triplett said, they are labeled “bad kids” — leading many times to a chain of negative outcomes.
Noble Minds, which Triplett plans to launch in 2016, will employ teachers who have graduate-level training in counseling as well as education. The charter will be open to the general public, and will initially serve kindergarten through second-grade students (and eventually growing to encompass K-8). The teachers, Triplett envisions, will be able to seamlessly shift from leading a classroom to employing therapeutic models of conflict resolution and accountability.
“We see it as part of the restorative justice process,” said Triplett, referring to the “softer approach” to classroom management that trades zero-tolerance discipline for group mediation. To prepare for launching Noble Minds, she ran a few “pop-up schools” in New Orleans in the summer of 2014: twice-monthly, single-day classes that demonstrated Noble Minds’ approach, where children explored different learning centers rather than follow set lessons, and where teachers defused conflicts with counseling techniques. Misbehaving students in these schools were not punished, but brought into a “restorative justice circle” — effectively a real-time class meeting, where other students talk about how their peer’s misbehavior effected them and the rest of the class, and also what they value about the student who is acting out.
“It’s immediate accountability: not to punish you, but we want to understand why you’re making the decision you’re making, and here’s how we feel about that decision,” she explained.
All of the students operate in an environment of ongoing group counseling around impulse control, conflict resolution and communication skills, with additional individual counseling for those students who need it.
For children who come from families where communication is the norm, Triplett’s pop-up school seemed like a natural extension of discussions at home. For others, coming from what Triplett described as a “do as I say, be seen, not heard,” philosophy of child-rearing, the school’s rules are more of an adjustment.
“I think what many people don’t understand is that misbehavior in school is driven by frustration and anxiety,” said Triplett. “If kids are able to express themselves, or feel there are options, or just feel respected as part of the system, then misbehavior is reduced by quite a bit.”
Karim Ani, Mathalicious, Austin
Building an authentic math experience
When Karim Ani, 36, started teaching math in 2006 in Virginia, he already knew that he loved teaching. He’d spent time teaching Spanish in California and Massachusetts, before traveling to his family’s native Syria to study Arabic. But his middle school math class proved surprisingly stressful. He soon realized that it wasn’t just that he was still refining his pedagogical approach towards the subject.
“I was trying to engage students without knowing what that meant,” he said. He came up with fun math games for students to play — say, a scavenger hunt where students found clues by solving equations — but it seemed like an artificial overlay on skills practice. It wasn’t getting at the deeper question, lobbed at math teachers everywhere, of why students “have to learn this stuff.”
When Ani began working as a math coach for a DC-area school, he was able to step back from the crushing workload of teaching to address some of those questions, and came to believe that a core problem lay in the content that teachers regularly use. He began to write the first questions that would eventually become Mathalicious, a collection of lesson plans that sound less like equations than ethical quandaries: Should McDonalds post estimates of how long it takes to burn off a Big Mac? Is the advancement of video game technology leading to the creation of a real-world Matrix?
Mathalicious (named for the hip-hop duo Blackalicious, which contributed a song to the group’s fundraising campaign) aspires to answer the question of what Ani calls the “authenticity” of mathematics instruction: why it’s relevant to the largest questions of the world today.
Mathalicious’s first few lesson plans included dozens of steps, guiding students through the process of thinking through its philosophical challenges — questions like whether tipping by percentage is unfair to wait staff in cheaper restaurants, or what income distribution looks like in a fair country.
Ani eventually pared back the plans to be less prescriptive, calling upon students to individually think through the mathematical steps required to answer these questions. Today, a Mathalicious student may be asked whether people with larger feet should pay more for shoes. Rather than tell them what questions they need to answer, Mathalicious’ lessons leave much of that work up to students so that, in thinking through what sorts of questions they need to ask and answer — what’s the comparative weight of size 6 and size 11 shoes? What’s the price difference for the materials? — students must come up with a strategy for approaching and solving the problem themselves.
“Mathematical concepts become powerful when we can talk about them as a prism for discussing, say, income inequality in the United States. It puts teachers in a position to rethink what their job is,” said Ani. “I think we’re creating a resource where the answer to that can be: ‘My job is to have conversations with students that really challenge the way they view the world, and give students a way to discuss some of the most interesting topics through mathematics.”
Ani doesn’t have any regrets about leaving the classroom: he felt he was a good teacher to some already-engaged students, but that a great teacher is able to engage everyone. “The teachers I admire most are the ones that offer something to everyone, and who have patience to optimize for 100 different students,” said Ani. “Fortunately, I’ve found something that allows me to support teachers in becoming better, and something that I feel naturally more inclined towards.”
“The only way we’ll really change and improve education is fundamentally a question of training and supporting good teachers,” said Ani. “Tools might help with that, but education is fundamentally about human development.”
Eileen Murphy, ThinkCERCA, Chicago
Scaling up college and career readiness
Eileen Murphy, 44, spent the first 15 years of her career teaching English in Chicago public schools. In 2000, she helped open Walter Payton College Prep: a select school in an interesting corner of the city that drew students from both Chicago’s elite “Gold Coast” and the struggling Cabrini Green. Murphy and her young colleagues were passionate — on a mission to create a model school where students from all backgrounds had an equal shot at post-school success.
And it worked for the students in the school, who ranked second in the city on their first ACT testing.
But Murphy came to realize that what was most helpful for the kids at Walter Payton was the teachers’ enthusiasm about their subjects and their focused attention on close reading and discussion — a classroom dynamic that inculcated critical thinking and close reading skills.
“We had classrooms full of engaged kids making each other smarter every day,” said Murphy. But that teaching experience was hard to scale, dependent as it was on classroom environment and individual teachers’ expertise and energy.
“A lot of students don’t really ever get a chance to try to do rigorous work, simply because a lot of schools are terribly under-resourced in terms of actual materials but also the time for teachers to go to the well to replenish their own learning.”
Murphy wanted to pass on some of her pedagogical lessons, and in 2011 she published a book, 360 Degrees of Text, about teaching close reading. The timing was prescient — coming out at the same time as Common Core standards stressing critical thinking — but Murphy saw those skills as the one most important criteria for improving students’ chances of career and college readiness: systematically teaching them to read and write effectively.
Murphy brought her framework of critical thinking to her later position as the Director of Curriculum for some 115 schools in Chicago. But there she saw that students were “becoming less college-ready” across the board, thanks to a one-size-fits-all curriculum. Proficient kids weren’t improving; those above grade-level weren’t being challenged; and those below grade-level continued to struggle.
“Because of the ways we were trying to help them, we were making everyone not successful, and it wasn’t for lack of hard work on the part of teachers, but a lack of resources,” Murphy said. “They might have 10 different levels of readers in a classroom, and one paper textbook [to teach from].”
But Murphy was acutely aware that asking teachers to create ten individualized lesson plans, for perhaps 140 students in packed city schools, was a physical impossibility. New standards that asked teachers to be simultaneously “data-driven” and to create a blended learning environment — differentiating instruction according to student needs — were laughably unrealistic, given teachers’ existing workloads.
Technology was available that could help, providing customized lessons for learners, but most of the educational tech then on the market — like iPad apps for basic literacy or math skills — stressed rote practice for early learners, not critical thinking and close reading.
After receiving support from a Chicago business accelerator dedicated to social justice issues, Impact Engine, Murphy began a company, ThinkCERCA, that would provide teachers with differentiated lesson plans for English, Social Studies and Science classes, across grades 4–12, all geared at teaching students to make persuasive arguments. The name is an acronym for what Murphy said it requires students to do: to make Claims, support them with Evidence, explain their Reasoning, address Counterarguments, and use Audience-appropriate language.
Part of the company’s approach is an argument that whole schools need to buy in to a coherent plan of promoting blended, critical thinking, across various subjects; that customizing education and holding to a common set of standards can’t rest on teachers alone. Thirty schools signed up before the launch, in 2013, and today there are around 250 schools and districts, in 27 states, using ThinkCERCA’s materials.
“Cognitive science tells us there’s only one way people learn: by what they think and what they do,” said Murphy. “If you’ve never sat there, side-by-side with a kid, watching them think and seeing that thinking turn into a piece of writing, how could you possibly create a product that can help replicate some of that support the teacher has given? It’s just not possible to know that outside that environment and getting the experience that gives you the ability to build a product that can really help kids think.”
Christopher Flint, Infiniteach & AACTION Autism, Chicago
Sharing solutions for the global autism crisis
Christopher Flint, 38, was an undergraduate science major, studying microbiology, when he first encountered autism on a part-time job as a behavioral therapist working with a child on the spectrum. The experience was so rewarding that Flint ended up switching majors — instead focusing on communicative disorders, such as problems with speech, hearing and language — and graduated to a career teaching in special education classrooms.
For a decade, he taught in self-contained classrooms at a therapeutic day school where children were often sent from other school districts because of behavioral problems. The students could be challenging, but in time Flint and his colleagues came to understand and perfect a few autism best practices that seemed to work: ensuring the visual learning environment was clear and predictable and individualizing instruction based on students’ interests, attention spans, cognitive skills and learning styles.
“We wanted to understand the strategies that go into programming to make sure that each child has an education program that’s really based on them,” Flint said. The classroom was so successful that it ended up becoming the demonstration class for the state of Illinois, and Flint became a consultant for more than forty state school districts, training thousands of parents and teachers, as well as community members like librarians, businesspeople, and airport security officers.
But as autism diagnoses continued to grow, Flint felt that he could share what they had learned about effectively teaching to the spectrum with a larger audience than just the 8–10 students he taught each year, and the other educators who came and learned best practices from his classroom. In 2006, he started a nonprofit, AACTION Autism, to focus on training teachers in autism education in developing countries, where there was sometimes such a profound lack of awareness that there wasn’t yet a word to describe spectrum disorders. Children struggling with the condition were often punished, stigmatized, or hidden at home. The program trains volunteer teachers to spend their vacations sharing best practices with parents of children with autism in developing nations, and has brought a team of autism experts from India to the U.S. for an intensive training program they can then transmit to India’s educators.
“As all this work was going on,” Flint said, “it was time to move to the next step, of giving [educational] access to more individuals.” In 2013, Flint and his colleagues started a company focused on creating tablet technology for people with autism. Infiniteach, which launched its lesson-building app, Skill Champ, in 2014, is structured as a two-part program: one facing parents or teachers, who can input information about a student to customize the app, and one facing the learner, who can use it to practice academic lessons, communication, and social skills. The data is tracked and allows teachers and parents to easily assess how the student is progressing, and the visual strategies Flint employed in the classroom are built into the platform.
Since its 2014 launch, there have been around 60,000 downloads of Skill Champ, Flint said. For young learners, the stakes are high, taking into account the difficulties facing many current-day adults on the spectrum.
“We have a huge crisis now in adult autism services,” said Flint. “These individuals have very high unemployment statistics, and parents are quitting their jobs [to care for their adult children, who] have no opportunities to live on their own. If we can help build better skills when they’re children, they’ll be more employable and have more opportunities for independence as they grow into adults.”
Rusul Alrubail, The Writing Project, Toronto
The art of the essay
Not all exits from the classroom are expected, or desired. Rusul Alrubail, 29, was an English composition and literature teacher at Toronto’s Seneca College for five years when she and her contract faculty colleagues were abruptly informed last year that the school had decided to stop hiring unionized adjuncts. Professors would be faced with either too few hours to support themselves, or too many to teach effectively. Alrubail felt the options would result in compromising students’ education, and reluctantly decided not to return to Seneca.
It wasn’t an easy choice though. “I didn’t know what to do outside of teaching,” she said. “For us teachers, that’s our identity: being in the classroom. I felt lost without it, like I can’t call myself an educator without having those students.”
But classroom instruction wasn’t the only thing Alrubail had worked on. For close to ten years, she and her husband had worked on a digital essay-writing program called The Writing Project, hoping to address what Alrubail said was “a teaching gap between traditional teaching methods and critical thinking applications in students’ writing.” She saw her students at Seneca struggle with the basics of constructing a written argument. “Students would come to us with the critical thinking skills,” she said, “but they didn’t understand how to put their thoughts into a structure, or vice versa.”
Initially, The Writing Project was conceived of as a workbook, walking students through the steps of creating an essay — from topic identification through conclusion — that transcended the standard five-paragraph formula (intro, three body paragraphs, conclusion). Instead, Alrubail’s book asked simple questions that encouraged students to analyze and synthesize information, which could then be compiled into a thoughtful piece of writing. As time went on, students using the materials responded that the program would work well as an interactive computer platform, and Alrubail and her colleagues decided to transform their project into an app. It’s currently in beta, and has been successfully tested both with college-level students and high school students from around Ontario.
Alrubail’s move from the classroom to an educator-at-large is still new, and she said she still struggles at times with feeling like she’s lost a part of her self-identity. “But then I talked with a lot of colleagues and people close to me, and they reminded me that we’re always teachers at heart. If I’m not in the classroom, I’m still an educator, because I think like a teacher. You can still be an educator without having students all around you.”
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