.4 Reasonable Professionalism

What are the ways that you go about developing, charting, and defining your own professional identity? You have a responsibility to yourself to have a sense of integrity. You have a responsibility to understand the criteria for success.

Some of you will teach in tougher schools than others. If you teach in a suburban school, you can fail and never know it because the kids will propel you along. Kids and their families are programmed for success. If you teach in areally tough inner-city school where the kids don't have that kind of support group, what is your criterion for success? Developing appropriate criterion for success is really a powerful issue. That criterion is going to change. In a class like this it is easy for me to have a criterion for success. Most of you are going to get A's and B's, maybe a few C's. You really have to work at it to get a D or F in this class. If you do what is expected of you, and what's programmed, you are going to succeed. In some classes this isn't the case. In some classes, kids will arrive with a three year deficit in reading. If you are an English teacher and kids are three years behind in reading, what is criterion for success? Getting them up to grade level? No. If you can move a kid that is three years behind at all in six months, you've done a lot because they are starting to learn.

Another thing is you have to have a sense of reasonableness. However much time you spend in preparing your lesson plans, it is never enough. Whatever you do, it isn't enough. When you grade papers, you could always write more comments. When you are preparing for a class, you could always get more materials. You could always have a nicer bulletin board. Whatever you do is not enough so you need to get a sense of reasonableness. People who do poorjobs never have to worry about reasonableness. They never know what they don't know. It is the top people that have to gain a sense of reasonableness because these are the people that are painfully aware of all that they could do. This is where the teacher work week of more than fifty hours comes from. Figure out how to work smart and spend about forty hours a week. That's reasonable.

We have to figure out how to make productive futures for our students. We want our students to see themselves in the future. We need to help students feel that education is a way to produce a productive future.

	What is the best way to develope and chart a proffessional identity for yourself?	Answer Here
	Mr. Reed is a new teacher at Eastern High School that has just recently left college and only has the experience that he gained from his observations, practicum, and student teaching to his advantage. How can he as a new teacher establish his own professional identity while staying within the guidelines put forth for him by his state board of education, local school system, and school?	Answer Here