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Liz Prather:

Absolutely. Well, I think a lot of administrators, they had an expectation that teachers come and they're hired and they come to the classroom with a really solid foundation of instructional practices and understanding of education and what education means, what education is. And how to break down a very complicated or complex process like a sentence or a paragraph or a piece of writing. And then able to explain it to someone who doesn't have a grasp or hasn't had many successes in the classroom. And that baseline foundation is not there right now. It will come, I know that it will come, but it's not there now. And so the teachers that are in the classroom and have been in the classroom are really struggling to meet the demands of their own students, become trainers and role models and mentors for these young teachers. They want to be better and they want to be there for the kids.

Edie:

Hi, this is Edie. Welcome to the Dispatch, a Heinemann podcast series. Over the next several weeks, we'll hear from Heinemann thought leaders as they discuss the most pressing issues in education today. In today's episode, we hear from Heinemann author Liz about the pressure of the teacher shortage and how we can support teachers who come to education through alternative certification. What's the pressing issue in education right now that you keep thinking about or talking about with your colleagues?

Liz:

Yeah, so take your pick. There's a lot.

Edie:

Just one.

Liz:

There's a lot.

Edie:

Just one.

Liz:

I think what I hear mostly from teachers, the pressure of the teacher shortage and not only having a lot of empty vacant positions, especially in my state of Kentucky, we have a lot of... about 2000 still that haven't been filled.

Edie:

Vacant positions.

Liz:

Vacant positions of teaching, but the alternative routes to certification. Also, we have option nine in Kentucky, which allows someone with a bachelor's degree to become a paraprofessional and work towards certification after three years. So what we're seeing with veteran teachers, it's a lot of on the job training of young teachers. And so there's not the depth of instructional practice and classroom management and just the depth of content knowledge. It's just not there. So we don't have teachers and the young teachers that we do have, which they're incredible. They're ambitious and they want to be there.

They have a heart for kids, but they don't know how to plan a lesson. And they are struggling really with just the basic kind of instructional practice that many of us got going through a traditional educational program or certification path. So that's a big issue. Funding's a big issue in Kentucky. I know probably across the United States, our funding is based on student attendance, and we just have chronic absenteeism across the board. A lot of kids not coming to school. And we also just have a lot of administrators and districts that are kind of doubling down on programs instead of authentic, critical thinking and teaching. And one-on-one and a lot-

Edie:

Do you think they're leaning into that a little bit because of all of this alternative certification and sort of leaning into that program almost as a solution to this? I don't know, I'm wondering if that's-

Liz:

Absolutely. Well, I think a lot of administrators, they had an expectation that teachers come and they're hired and they come to the classroom with a really solid foundation of instructional practices and understanding of education and what education means, what education is. And how to break down a very complicated or complex process like a sentence or a paragraph or a piece of writing. And then able to explain it to someone who doesn't have a grasp or hasn't had many successes in the classroom. And that kind of baseline foundation is not there right now. It will come, I know that it will come, but it's not there now. And so the teachers that are in the classroom and have been in the classroom are really struggling to meet the demands of their own students, become trainers and role models and mentors for these young teachers. They want to be better and they want to be there for the kids. But then also they're having some pushback from the administrators who just want to buy another program and another program or another piece of technology.

Edie:

Something, quick fix.

Liz:

Yeah.

Edie:

That doesn't exist.

Liz:

It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. And we know what works and we know what works. And it's two people sitting across the table from one another, having a conversation and telling stories and breaking down complex ideas, teaching a kid how to think, teaching a kid how to write, teaching a kid how to read. And those kinds of things have always been problematic in a system that was inequitable and had a lot of shaky systems in place. And of course, as a thousand people have already said, the pandemic and the shutdowns exposed a very flawed and faulty system. But let me say this, it is not all lost. So many wonderful things have occurred since the pandemic. Yeah, I think that it will improve. We got some horrible news in Fayette County where I teach or where I once taught, 56% of our eighth graders are not proficient in reading.

Edie:

That's in Kentucky.

Liz:

That's in Kentucky. And that should be a wake-up call for everyone. ACT scores in reading are the lowest they've been in years. So these are things that go to the heart of everything, our economy, our democracy, everything.

Edie:

So do you think that data you just mentioned is largely due or partly due to the absences or the low attendance?

Liz:

Sure, sure. A lot of distraction. It feels as though that we can't get any momentum going in the classroom toward things. We're torn in so many different ways. We have so many different initiatives and so many different programs, and some of those are worthwhile. And some of them feel very scattered. And I think that the students feel torn by the expectation to make up for lost time. They feel this kind of anxiety, and the teachers feel it too.

Edie:

This is from coming out the pandemic

Liz:

Coming out of the pandemic. It was just like, we've got to hurry, hurry and make up for these three years that we've lost. And that doesn't help anybody. This kind of anxiety about immediately covering in nine months what we should have done in three years. It's just not going to happen. So it's going to be 10 years, it's going to be a decade before we can resume, I think. And it will happen because teachers are the hardest working people on the planet.

Edie:

Truth.

Liz:

And they will do what it takes. And I'm now in a position having left the classroom, I've retired in 2022, and I'm now working with teachers and districts all over the state of Kentucky in the area of writing. And oh my goodness, the teachers just are selfless and incredibly committed to moving that needle for their students. Even the young teachers who may not know, they don't even have really enough understanding about professional learning to ask, "What is it that I need?"

Edie:

Yeah, "What do I need? What do I need to know?"

Liz:

What do I need to know? And so-

Edie:

And is that where a lot of, like you mentioned, the veteran teachers are, that's where a lot of that added work of guidance and is coming in, right?

Liz:

Exactly. And see, I think that is actually much better than possibly a traditional college. If you have a college professor, no offense toward college professors, but if you have a college professor who hadn't been in a classroom for 20 years trying to teach students about instructional practices. But you have the lady or the man right across the street or right across the hall who's been doing this and doing it very well and being very successful at helping kids become better thinkers. And they come across and said, "Have you ever thought about doing this way? Have you ever thought about structuring a lesson this way?"

Or, "Let me watch you and let me sit in the back and scribe what the kids are doing when you give this instruction so you can tell... then I will tell you back and show you where's the leverage points that when you say this, they do this? Did it have any impact?" Getting that feedback, we need those coaches in that classroom to help young teachers know if they're making any difference, to know what instructional moves to make. And I think that's actually maybe... I mean, I think it is better if you have that. The problem is these veteran teachers are not getting any kind of recompense. They're not getting any kind of extra pay.

Edie:

It would be great if the model could be acknowledged as the right model and then move forward from there. So it doesn't become an added. It doesn't contribute to the burnout of the job.

Liz:

Right.

Edie:

Yeah.

Liz:

And those veteran teachers, they know their way around the kind of perennial issues that students have, the defensiveness and the acting out, just the classroom, the behavioralism, the behavioral problems that we have. And that in itself is never something that was ever been treated. It's never been addressed really in a traditional certification path. Classroom management has always been one of those things where when you ask about it's always like, "You'll figure it out. You'll figure it out when you get in your classroom." Well, that causes a lot of burnout. It causes a lot of teachers to leave the profession because they don't know how to manage 30 14 year olds and how to teach them how to write an argument. And that's just an unbelievable task.

Edie:

So I'm going to switch gears a little bit. You've long been a teacher of writing. And I know you're also a prolific writer yourself. So I'm curious, what's on your bookshelf right now?

Liz:

Oh, well, I decided in January that I was going to sign up for a program called The Poetry Gauntlet. And it's offered by our local literacy center, the Carnegie Center for Literacy. And it's run by poet Chris McCurry. And 12 people are accepted, and they commit to writing a hundred poems in the calendar year. So I have written a hundred poems this year. So on my nightstand, on my bookshelf-

Edie:

I see you like to take it easy on yourself. Yeah, no problem.

Liz:

Right, no problem. Oh, it's been such a great challenge. We meet once a month, and it's just been such a good community to be in. I've thought about so many times as I've gone through this process, I wish I was still in the classroom. I'm learning so much about writing poetry and expression and just the line breaks and the syntax and diction and the weight of lines. And just all kinds of things about poetry that I'd not really brought to the classroom would not have, I didn't have access to that kind of deep spending time and immersion in that genre.

So on my bookshelf right now are a lot of poets, Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler, which is incredible. Ada Limón, our Poet Laureate, The Hurting Kind. She's also a Kentucky, not native, but she lives in Lexington. I've also been reading a lot of craft books and just doing a lot of research as well. And that's something that I really had not thought about in relation to poetry, is how much actual historical research I would need for some of the poems that I'm writing about, 16th century mysticism in Spain, or things like that, that were kind of off the beaten path that I didn't realize I would need to do. And I did not give my students that kind of time because-

Edie:

The time for research.

Liz:

The time for research, right. It was like, "This is just kind of emotive or confessional or expressive." But there are so many, I mean, there's just so many gorgeous forms of poetry that kind of bridge and intersect history and the personal and the public. And to have my students use that as a means of argumentation to actually see the sonnet as a form of argumentation. So it's been a wonderful journey, and those are the kinds of things I've been reading lately.

Edie:

Oh, nice. And so with this challenge, are the poems self-driven, they're not assignments necessarily there?

Liz:

No. No, they're not. We meet once a month, like I said, and we read some craft articles, and we read books of poetry, and we discuss poets, and we do workshops and things like that. But the goal is just to write whatever it is that we're writing. I had an idea when I signed up, I was going to write my family... My family has been tobacco farmers for 350 years in the United States, and I was going to write... I wanted to write a whole collection about tobacco.

And never wrote one tobacco poem, did not write one poem about tobacco, wrote about, my mother wrote about teaching a lot of great... really some things that you just can't write in an essay that I was able to give voice to in a poem about teaching. And some of the dark misgivings and doubts that I had as a teacher, especially as a young teacher, and how guilty I feel about or felt about some of the things that I missed and some of the opportunities I had with students that I'll never be able to go back and correct and fix. And so poetry is a great caregiver in that way.

Edie:

So I feel like you've struck a very hopeful tone throughout this whole conversation. So I would like to focus on that now. And just as you think about some of the challenges you mentioned in the beginning, what at this point gives you hope?

Liz:

The kids. The kids. The kids always give me hope. I don't know, I would've ever stayed in education for 27 years if at the very center of the practice was these precocious, funny, nerdy, great kids that come every morning and make me laugh and ask me questions and challenge me. And the kids in the latter part of... My students in the latter part of my career made me just such a better person, just in general. They're so kind. They were kind and they were accepting of others. They were broad-minded. They think globally. They are very compassionate toward one another. That's the thing that the news, and I think a lot of people get wrong about schools, that it's this place of bullying. And of course there is bullying at schools, but there's so much incredible warmth and support and compassion for each other, and acceptance, just complete unconditional acceptance.

And that's what I think I'm the most hopeful for. And they accepted me as someone who was asking them to do this very incredibly vulnerable thing, which was to, "I want you to trot out your thoughts on a piece of paper, and I want you to defend them. And it may be scary, and you may be exposing something you don't even know you're exposing. But this is the risk that we take as writers." And they had to trust me and I had to trust them. And that's a rare day when you can go home and you've had a group of people that have been in community together and loved each other and supported each other and learned something too. So all of that is happening in classrooms all over our country. And it never gets the press that... It never gets that press. It's always about probably where I started this interview, which is 56% of our eighth graders can't read it proficiency. That's what they hear.

Edie:

That's the headline.

Liz:

That's the headline. But the stories are bigger and deeper and more powerful, and they're richer and they're more long-lasting. Those connections that I made with those kids and how they've touched my life and how hopefully I've touched them and taught them something that will have dividends years and years and generationally. So the kids, I go into schools and I don't have a relationship with the kids that I go into these schools and model classes. So they don't know me, they just know I'm some woman from the State Department or Morehead State University. They just see me-

Edie:

Oh, right. This is with your current role as the director or co-director?

Liz:

Yeah. So I'm working presently as the co-director of the Kentucky Writing Project. And so I go into these districts and do model lessons for teachers about writing, or I work with professional learning communities, and we talk about writing and instructional practices around that. But the best times are when I go in and I talk to kids and they're just so open and just so funny. And I was working with a district a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about writing an argument. And so the question was, should teenagers be able to buy energy drinks? And so I had given them a text and we'd read it, and we were kind of doing some annotation.

And one of the quotes, or one of the facts that one of the students wrote on the butcher paper on the wall was that caffeine, coffee that adults drink has just as many milligrams of caffeine or whatever as an energy drink. And of course, I was holding... I was clinging to my five shot Americano. And so one kid just, she raised her hand. She was like, "What about that? What about that?" I mean, it was just this very innocent and wonderful moment where she was just joking with me in a kind way, and I don't know. It was a connection. It was a connection. Yeah, I wish the people in places that create policy and pass legislation could see that and work on that level with students. I think they would have a different... as to what the priority should be.

Edie:

Thank you for tuning in today. For more information and a full transcript, please visit blog.heinemann.com.

Liz Prather is a writing teacher at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, a gifted arts program at Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky. A classroom teacher with 21years of experience teaching writing at both the secondary and post-secondary level, Liz is also a professional freelance writer and holds a MFA from the University of Texas-Austin.

Liz is the author of Project-Based Writing: Teaching Writers to Manage Time and Clarify Purpose, and Story Matters: Teaching Teens to Use the Tools of Narrative to Argue and Inform.