Teacher Quality: A Declaration
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1. Schools are communities composed of many talented, unique individuals. Individual teachers, while they have their own identity and pedagogical beliefs, are also members of a larger culture and community of educators. This duality between self and community often produces polarities.
2. Recognizing these polarities, informed leaders foster not only individual but also collective efficacy, consciousness, flexibility, craftsmanship, and interdependence. They strive to develop self-directed professionals with the cognitive capacity for high performance both independently and as members of a community.
3. To develop fully educated students, developing, protecting, and liberating intellectual capacities is the most critical role of leadership.
4. Leaders wear many hats. By mediating through consulting, presenting, facilitating, and coaching, leaders influence cognitive development. Mediating is an overarching and powerful role for enhancing cognitive capital. To become skillful, leaders must develop and practice the process skills necessary for mediation.
5. Teachers, like all humans, have intellectual capacities that can be grown, transformed, and refined throughout a lifetime. Such intellectual capacities are often hidden, sometimes repressed, and never fully developed. Under certain conditions teachers function with diminished capacity because of stress, mistrust, fatigue, or other emotional factors related to school culture and organizational procedures.
6. Mindfulness fosters effectiveness in all human pursuits. Innate within all humans are the basic drives of efficacy, consciousness, flexibility, craftsmanship, and interdependence. These are the drivers of our interactions, relationships, thoughts, decisions, and actions. These drives guide moment-to-moment decisions of classroom teachers, which in turn produce the observable actions and behaviors. By enhancing these drivers, skillful leaders produce greater mindfulness in teachers, staff, students, and the school community.
7. Teacher qualities are dynamic, interacting with and influenced by many environmental factors; often the most significant of these factors is the school culture, which, without effective leadership, is influenced by events outside our control such as the socioeconomic status of the community and students.
8. The quality of school leadership is one of the most powerful contributors to the development of teacher quality and cognitive capital. Standards, test scores, and rubrics, which propose to define quality, but which are developed and imposed without the teacher’s involvement, comprehension, and commitment, lead to short-term, shallow results and ultimately to failure (Danielson & McGreal, 2000).
9. The ultimate purpose of any supervisory system must be to help teachers to become self-supervising, self-evaluating, and self-modifying. As Jane Austen is quoted as saying, “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
10. The role of leadership is to help teachers develop cognitive capital and to gain the power of attending to developing and guiding themselves. In the same way, teachers should be helping students gain the power of attending to and guiding themselves as well.
—Arthur L. Costa, Robert J. Garmston, and Diane P. Zimmerman Cognitive Capital: Investing in Teacher Quality, by A. L. Costa, R. J. Garmston, & D. P. Zimmerman, 2014, New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Copyright 2014 Arthur L. Costa, Robert J. Garmston, & Diane P. Zimmerman.