Setting term limits on teachers seems counterintuitive as a way to address a teacher shortage while educators face increasingly transparent public accountability. Considering term limits seems a reasonable way to examine what and maybe how current schooling practices limit student learning and learning rates.

In the early 1970s, Carl Calkins, then a special education doctoral student, ran a summer camp for youth with disabilities. He found that campers learned more with counselors who had no formal teaching experience; his evaluation data lead him not to hire pre or inservice teachers for subsequent camps.

Carl's little study came to mind as I have mused over the idea of teacher term limits. It has helped to give focus to an emerging case statement outline.

Here's one principle for that outline:

A Given: Teachers can only instruct what we know individually and together.

Response:

1. Teacher term limits would open school positions to people with experiences addressing practical and competitive uses of skills taught in schools plus important information and skills seldom covered, such as nanotechnology, astronomy, risk analysis, profit making.

2. This potential labor pool includes former engineers, middle level corporate executives, contractors, trades and small business people, consultants, and others displaced by global economic shifts.

3. This expanded pool includes those who have helped develop and relied on high tech communication technologies (including Tablet PCs, UMPCs, and other mobile PCs), mathematics and science to conduct their businesses.



4. They routinely boil down academic subjects to efficient ways of addressing practical problems students also may face daily.

5. This process would redefine "good teaching" and "best teachers" as related to practical and competitive utilitarian responses to identified local and global problems.

6. Current "good teachers" could accept competitive positions and conduct their own businesses at the end of their teaching terms in order to hone and update their skills before reentering school teaching as former business people.


That's another step in formulating a case for teacher term limits. I'm not sure how much further I want to go with this topic. I'm uneasy with a strict utilitarian approach to schooling, so, probably I should work out this teacher term limits topic further.
I wonder what others would add as reasons to adjust what teachers know through term limits in order to teach?


Tablet PC Education Blog