The “Op-Chart” in the Sunday Times takes a fascinating look at the incubation of “street cops,” “Presidents,” and “Lawyers,” and many other roles and processes. It takes three years to make a good street cop, four years to make a President, five years to make a lawyer and six years to make a friend. I could not help but wonder: How long to make a teacher?

In every case the relationship between formal education and experience is the crucial variable. You can learn everything you should know about the principles of law in three years or the essentials of education in two years of schooling, but applying that knowledge to real cases and real students is the most critical phase of the incubation period.  In fact “Teach for America” made its reputation on shortening the formal instruction of a teacher and intensifying the field experience, essentially making it “on-the-job” training.

You can make a case for a teacher’s learning curve beginning with a year of formal preparation, followed by two years of hard knocks in the classroom, as the TFA model would advocate.  Research has shown that the students of these teachers are performing nearly at the same level as traditionally-prepared teachers at the end of two years in the classroom.  As I noted in “School Reform: the Popular Narrative”

In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year (Darling-Hammond 47).

So, by the standards of Teach for America it takes two years to make a teacher and three years to disillusion one.  Arguably the reward system of TFA does not promote longevity in teaching, but I would argue that something else is going on in that third year, based on my own experience in the classroom and the experience of teachers who attend our Summer Invitational Institute for teachers of writing.

As the current Common Core State Standards reveal, there are two kinds of learning in English Language Arts and in the other academic subjects: formal content and “capacities of the literate individual.”  The “capacities” are given cursory attention in the ELA section of the Common Core State Standards. Among them are “independence,” “adapting their communication in relation to audience, task, purpose, and discipline,” “comprehending and critiquing,” “citing specific evidence,” “using technology and digital media capably,” and understanding “other perspectives and cultures” (7)

For most teachers the centrality of these “capacities” or “habits of mind,” as they are often called, becomes evident after three years of teaching to a formal curriculum, i.e. the standards in place in their state or district.  They discover, by trial and error, that students fail to consolidate what they learn in the formal curriculum because they are not acquiring the necessary “habits of mind” along the way. They discover that habits of mind are not casually absorbed in the process of mastering the content of the curriculum, but must be taught explicitly as part of the curriculum.

This is where the Common Core State Standards misses the mark. It treats the processes of learning as incidental to the content of learning and gives the processes, i.e. the habits, short shrift. Every teacher who makes it beyond the second year of teaching eventually becomes aware of the centrality of these “habits,” and it either inspires them to reinvent their teaching or drives them out of the profession.

There are many reasons for teachers leaving the profession, but I would argue this is a significant cause: the discovery that teaching is not only the delivery of content, but the assimilation of hard-won habits.  And I would argue that this is a developmental process. You have to watch students learn and forget before you see the underpinnings of that learning, the habits, the meta-cognitive skills, the conscious disciplines.

Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” skills in the preparation of teachers, there is only so much about habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is a late-developing awareness for most teachers. To be frank, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the essential truth of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize their impact on my students until then.

So how long to make a teacher? Four years at best, and for the slow learners like me, eight, nine or ten years.  To think that teachers are made by the straightforward delivery of the formal curriculum is to maintain a short-sighted view of education. It is the unfortunate view of the current Common Core State Standards and the microwaved preparation of teachers modeled by Teach for America.

I think the Chinese proverb paraphrased in today’s Times says it best: It takes ten years to sharpen a sword (New York Times, p. 9).

Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Flat World and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.

Common Core State Standards Initiative: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects, 2010.