Reforming Tenure and the Teaching Profession

allison.hacker,

You do an insightful job of framing this paper in terms of transactional and transformation changes, and then make a strong argument for the revising the tenure system toward a more thoughtful and rigorous process.  Your idea about making transactional changes that signal and in this sense might also support a deeper, transformational shift is intriguing in terms of the theory of change that this suggests.

The idea of having a team of veteran teachers assess their colleagues acknowledges teacher knowledge as well as the importance of developing collaborative collegial relationships.  And I like your idea of the student role as well, and can imagine ways of scaffolding this effectively for students.  On the other hand, I want to question tenure as the way to go to ensure quality teachers/teaching.  This seems to me an intrinsically different system than we use to assess and reward (or not) the work of many other professions; why then is it deemed helpful in teaching?