To strengthen the teaching profession, we need to develop a common language of teaching practice.  

As we enter a new decade, the teaching profession stands at a crossroads. Almost 20 years ago, responding to the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk, I wrote of the daunting challenges facing the profession, including “the influx of underqualified teachers into classrooms, the potential dismantling of professional education for teachers, and the trend toward the regulation of teaching practice — regulations that may deprive teachers of the ability to make professional judgments and exercise their professional knowledge” (Grossman, 2003). 

Unfortunately, things have not improved over the past two decades. The number of children facing challenges associated with living in poverty has only increased, making the work of teaching only more complex. Yet, despite the now widespread recognition that teachers represent the most important school-level influence on student achievement, teachers have continued to lose earning power; currently, according to economist Eric Hanushek, teachers are underpaid by at least 20% (personal communication, December 3, 2019).  

The stark disjunction between the complexity and importance of teachers’ work and society’s valuing of that work was perhaps best captured by a September 24, 2018, Time magazine cover that portrayed an image of a woman and the words, “I have a master’s degree, 16 years of experience, work two extra jobs and donate plasma to pay the bills; I’m a teacher in America.” 

Not surprisingly, college graduates are increasingly opting out of teaching as a career option. In the past 10 years, both the total enrollment in teacher education programs and the number of individuals completing a preparation program dropped by almost a third; in some states, such as Pennsylvania, enrollments dropped by more than 50% (Partelow, 2019). Black male teachers still represent only 2% of the teaching force, even as evidence mounts that having a teacher of the same race supports student achievement (e.g., Dee, 2005; Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015).  

College graduates are increasingly opting out of teaching as a career option.

So how do we turn this tide? How might re-envisioning the narrative of teaching as a profession help restore the image of teaching as both intellectual and relational work, central to achieving equitable opportunities for young people and critical to the future of our fractured society?  

Earlier efforts to advocate for teaching have looked to classic sociological definitions of a profession (Etzioni, 1969), which include criteria such as autonomy and accountability (e.g., Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 1986), oversight of entry into the profession, and the existence of a specialized knowledge base for teaching (Shulman, 1987). The move toward requiring master’s degrees for teachers, the definition of pedagogical content knowledge, and the creation of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in the 1980s and 1990s were all explicit efforts to professionalize teaching by following the lead of the high-status fields of medicine, law, and architecture.  

However, critics have argued that teaching has few of the hallmarks of a profession — a specialized knowledge base, the ability to practice autonomously, and the right to control entry into the field. Others have argued against the very idea of professionalization, preferring to emphasize the artisanal nature of teaching as more a result of individual craft rather than collective expertise. Still others argue that the very idea of professionalism creates distance between teachers and the people they serve and may undermine the relational nature of teaching practice. Indeed, these sociological definitions of professionalism focus mainly on the organizational structures that define an occupation, and they say little about the work that people do.  

Recent decades have also seen the emergence of a countertrend, focusing on the creation of professional networks that put teachers and teaching at the center of efforts to professionalize teaching. Networks such as the National Writing Project (NWP) and Math for America, among others, provide teachers with opportunities to learn from each other, develop shared conceptions of high-quality practice, and work collectively toward the improvement of classroom practice. Others, such as the Fellowship: Black Male Educators for Social Justice, take explicit responsibility for recruitment into the profession (aiming, in this case, to boost the representation of Black male educators).  

These efforts focus less on the formal structures that regulate entry into the profession and more on the creation of a professional community in which teachers assume responsibility for providing support for both entry into the field and continuous learning. Further, they suggest how we might put teachers and the work of teaching at the center of the next effort to professionalize teaching. 

Respecting the work we do 

In his classic treatise A System of Professions, Andrew Abbott (1988) argues that professional practice involves at least four distinct elements. First, a profession has a clear domain of expertise that is distinct from the work of nonprofessionals. Second, to lay claim to professional expertise, professionals must have the ability to diagnose or assess a problem within this domain. Third, professionals must be able to reason and make inferences about the problem using specialized knowledge and professional judgment. Finally, to lay claim to professional status, practitioners must be able to solve or treat the problem or take action on the client’s behalf.  

It’s not difficult to apply these criteria to teaching: Teachers’ domain of expertise involves classroom instruction and learning. Their diagnostic ability has to do with assessing the educational needs of individual students and whole classes and determining how best to address those needs. In relation to the criterion of professional judgment, teachers also must draw upon their specialized knowledge of students, content, and context to identify students’ challenges, especially when assessments are not clear-cut. Finally, teachers determine what sorts of instruction are needed — or what “treatment” to provide, to use Abbott’s more medicalized language — and then bring it to life in the classroom. This definition calls attention to the professional work of teachers and what distinguishes it from the work of other professionals who work with young people, such as counselors or social workers. It also makes clear that there are both specialized knowledge and ways of reasoning among teachers that help them engage in this work.  

To highlight these aspects of teaching practice offers a way to ground teacher professionalism in the work teachers do, rather than asking whether the occupation has the same formal features as more established professions. The problem, though, is that teachers have never had much consensus around matters of teaching practice. All too often, teachers have been portrayed and even valorized as isolated artisans, each doing their own thing in the classroom. New teachers are urged to create their own materials, chart their own paths, and reject professional education in favor of learning from their own experience.  

The assumption that teaching is highly individualistic has often been used to resist efforts at specifying — or, some fear, prescribing or oversimplifying — what accomplished teachers actually do in the classroom. Yet, if we cannot describe the work that teachers do in some detail, then we risk resorting to vague generalities about it, leaving individuals to formulate their own idiosyncratic ideas about good teaching. And without clear definitions of good teaching, it becomes difficult to ensure equity for students across the tens of thousands of classrooms in our country. How can we advise teachers on how to build productive relationships across racial and class differences, differentiate instruction without watering down the curriculum, or meet individual needs in crowded classrooms without some common way of describing what such pedagogical practices look like? If we lack common understandings of the complex, elaborate, and elegant work we do, then that work becomes ephemeral and local, difficult to replicate. 

Of course, teaching is not the only profession that has been confronted with the need to create a common language of practice. For example, it was impossible for musicians to share their compositions widely until the invention of musical notation. Before the creation of a notation for capturing dance moves, choreography, too, was ephemeral. The development of multiple approaches to capturing movement, such as the Laban method of movement analysis, made it possible to document in exquisite detail dancers’ movements across a stage, which in turn allowed others to reproduce and reinterpret that choreography for others. Both music and dance notation represent languages of practice that allow artists to communicate in ways that make their art legible for reinterpretation and reenactment.  

But, some might argue, if we try to specify precisely what accomplished teachers do, don’t we risk framing instruction as a purely technical practice — a series of moves and behaviors — ignoring the relational aspects of the work? To the contrary, the more closely we describe successful teaching, the more clear it becomes that the work of teaching is deeply interpersonal. To engage students in learning, teachers need to build positive relationships with them (e.g., Hawkins, 1974; Grossman et al., 2009). And building such relationships — across cultural and racial differences in crowded classrooms with students who have not chosen to be in a teachers’ class — is complex and difficult work that requires knowledge, skill, judgment, and the negotiation of personal identity. Highlighting this feature of teachers’ work makes it more, rather than less, visible.  

That’s why, for example, the profession of clinical psychology has created very specific diagnosis and treatment protocols that draw on both empirical research and expert consensus to guide the work of therapists, including protocols that specify how they might go about building therapeutic relationships with clients (e.g., Society of Clinical Psychology, n.d.). Similarly, nursing — another female-dominated profession that requires not just technical knowledge and expertise but also relational skill — has spent the past few decades creating its own language of practice by capturing the diagnostic and treatment practices of nurses. For example, on its website, the professional association NANDA International describes its mission as “defining the knowledge of nursing and mapping the range of nursing diagnoses, [which] communicate the professional judgments that nurses make every day to our patients, colleagues, members of other disciplines and the public. Nursing diagnoses define what we know — they are our words.” Similarly, the Nursing Intervention Classification (Butcher et al., 2018), first developed in the early 1990s, is designed to capture specific nursing interventions, including not just physiological treatments but also the more relational work nurses engage in with individual patients and family and community members. By making visible the work of nurses, this system serves as a tool for communicating across practice settings, documenting outcomes, and designing curricula for nursing education. Such tools become the basis for care plans that incorporate nurses’ observations and interpretations of their patients and their determination of a treatment plan. At the same time, while these descriptions of nursing practice are highly specific, they are not prescriptive — the framework stresses the need for nurses to exercise their clinical judgment in determining the best approach to caring for a given patient.  

Such classification systems aim to capture the very specific work that goes on in an individual profession, providing a shared language of practice that can both inform current work and guide the preparation of future practitioners. In short, and as the anthropologist Charles Goodwin (1994) argued, a shared “conceptual infrastructure” is central to the development of a “professional vision,” a common way of looking at the world, which allows members of the same profession to see, discuss, and respond to problems in consistent ways. 

Over the decades, however, the teaching profession has invested relatively little time and effort in developing such specific, shared descriptions of its work — there is no technical language of teaching, as Dan Lortie (1975) lamented in his classic sociological study of the field 45 years ago.  

To be sure, there have been efforts to build classification systems that apply to teaching practice in general, such as Charlotte Danielson’s well-known framework, and to particular models of instruction, as exemplified by the early work of Bruce Joyce and his colleagues (e.g., Joyce, Weil, & Calhoun, 2017) and, more recently, by the effort to define the characteristics of project-based learning (PBLWorks, 2019). Similarly, TeachingWorks and the Core Practice Consortium have created both general and subject-specific descriptions of teaching practices such as “leading discussions” and “communicating with parents.” As yet, however, the teaching profession has nothing as comprehensive or detailed as the taxonomies that exist in nursing or clinical psychology, professions that also require both technical and relational skills.  

Next steps 

To move the teaching profession forward, I believe, we ought to follow the lead of professions such as nursing and clinical psychology in several ways. First, teachers and the work of teaching must be at the center of the conversation — as they are in models such as the NWP and the Fellowship, both of which provide opportunities for teachers to exert leadership around the definition of critical professional tasks (see Khachatryan & Parkerson, this issue). 

Second, we must redouble our efforts to develop a language of teaching that captures the specifics of teaching’s intellectual and relational work. To some extent, the foundation has already been laid by groups like the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and TeachingWorks, as well as educators in particular subject areas. Math educators, for example, have identified specific “talk moves” that teachers can use to orchestrate productive classroom discussions that engage students in helping each other make sense of new concepts (O’Connor & Michaels, 2019) and have built opportunities for teachers to learn to use these to improve the quality of mathematical discussions.  

But there is much more to be done to make visible the complexity of teaching. In particular, we need better ways to capture how teachers create trusting relationships with students — both when teachers and students share racial or linguistic identities and when they do not. For example, we must continue to build on Gloria Ladson-Billings’ efforts to describe the practices of teachers who are successful in supporting African American students, and to build on scholars’ subsequent efforts to provide more detailed descriptions of what culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies might look like (Ladson-Billings, 1994; Paris, 2012). Similarly, as we try to prepare teachers to address inequity in their classrooms and schools, we need richer ways to describe what the complex work of addressing inequality in learning opportunities in the classroom look like.     

Creating a richer language of practice will not, in and of itself, change the material conditions of teachers. We need to support both better working conditions and better pay for teachers, taking advantage of the momentum of the recent string of teacher strikes from Chicago to West Virginia, which demonstrates the willingness of teachers to take up this fight. To recruit and retain the next generation of teachers will require that we provide them with the basic requirements of a competitive salary, opportunities to work and learn together, and the support needed from other professionals — including nurses and social workers — to address the complex challenges related to the dramatic increase in the number of children living in poverty. However, language is power. The ability to define the professional work of teachers and to make visible the complexity of work that is deeply relational and contingent, involving both intellectual and emotional labor, would take us one step closer to claiming professional status. 

References 

Abbott, A. (1988). A system of professions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 

Butcher, H.K., Bulechek, G.M., Dochterman, J.M., & Wagner, C.M. (Eds.). (2018). Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) (7th ed.). St. Louis: MO: Elsevier.  

Darling-Hammond, L. & Sykes, G. (Eds.). (1986). Teaching as the learning profession. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 

Dee, T. (2005). A teacher like me: Does race, ethnicity, or gender matter? American Economic Review, 57, 158-165.  

Egalite, A.J., Kisida, B., & Winters, M.A. (2015). Representation in the classroom: The effect of own-race teachers on student achievement. Economics of Education Review, 45, 44-52.  

Etzioni, A. (1969). The semi-professions and their organization. New York, NY: Free Press. 

Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96, 606-633.  

Grossman, P. (2003). From a nation at risk to a profession at risk? In D.T. Gordon (Ed.), A nation reformed: American Education 20 years after A Nation at Risk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. 

Grossman, P., Compton, C., Igra, D., Ronfeldt, M., Shahan, E., Williamson, P. (2009). Teaching practice; A cross-professional perspective. Teachers College Record, 111 (9), 2055-2100. 

Joyce, B.R., & Weil, M., & Calhoun, E. (2017). Models of teaching (9th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.  

Hawkins, D. (1974). I, thou, it. In D. Hawkins, The informed vision and other essays. New York, NY: Agathon Press. 

Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). Dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. 

Lortie, D.C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.  

O’Connor, C. & Michaels, S. (2019). Supporting teachers in taking up productive talk moves: The long road to professional learning at scale. International Journal of Educational Research, 97, 166-175.  

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41, 93-97. 

Partelow, L. (2019, December). What to make of declining enrollment in teacher preparation? Washington, DC: Center for American Progress. 

PBLWorks. (2019). Gold-standard PBL: Project-based teaching practices. Novato, CA: Buck Institute for Education.  

Shulman, L.S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundation of a new reform. Harvard Education Review, 57 (1), 1-23. 

Author’s note: I would like to thank Naomi Garber, a recent graduate of the Penn School of Nursing, and Antonia Villaruel, Dean of the School of Nursing, for their help in understanding the tools of NANDA, NIC, and NOC and how they operate in the world of nursing professionals.