Hi, hello, and welcome back to the Teachers in Transition podcast. I’m Vanessa, and I taught in the performing arts for 25 years before leaving the classroom and going to work in the hiring world. This is where we talk about the teacher experience, career transition, and what happens when you finally realize that maybe you haven’t been the problem.
Today we’re continuing our series on the Four Horsemen of Education. The first two Horsemen were Capacity and Resources. Today, we head back to the stable to see what’s up with Horseman #3: Accountability.
In our Career Transition and Job Search segment, I’ll talk about using trackers in your job search. Then, in our Teacher Hack, I’ll share a simple spreadsheet trick that can make those trackers a whole lot easier to create and use.
Perspective Pivot: The Third Horseman — Accountability (2:41)
Today we’re talking about the third Horseman in my series on the Four Horsemen of Education, and this one is accountability. Accountability hasn’t exactly disappeared. In fact, if you’re a teacher, you’re probably thinking, “What do you mean accountability disappeared? I’m held accountable for everything.” And that’s exactly the problem. Accountability has become asymmetrical.
Teachers are being held accountable not only for what they do, but for what students do, what parents do, and what the system fails to do. And before we get too far into this, I want to give you one of my favorite sayings, because it’s going to come up again: If we don’t have a consequence, we don’t have a rule. I used to say that to students all the time, and I thought I would stop saying it when I left education. I have not.
A rule without a consequence isn’t really a rule. It’s a suggestion. And education has spent years removing consequences from students and transferring them to teachers. The consequence didn’t actually go away. We just changed who has to experience it.
A student doesn’t turn anything in and is failing the class. Who gets questioned? The teacher. Did you contact the parent? How many times? Did you email? Did you call? Did you text? Did you document the contact? Did you offer tutoring, another opportunity, extra time, reteaching? Did you make sure the student knew what was missing? (You can't see it in the audio, but I am rolling my eyes through this part.)
I used to wonder where the line was, and then a few parents started complaining that schools were turning away their kindergartners for the ever-so-tiny deficiency of not being potty trained. I’m sorry? What?
Meanwhile, any parent has 24-hour access to the online gradebook. Remember when online gradebooks were supposed to increase accountability? Parents wouldn’t have to wait for a progress report anymore. They could log in whenever they wanted and see exactly what was happening. Somehow, what we ended up with was one more system for teachers to maintain while still expecting teachers to personally notify parents about the information already sitting inside that system via email, text, phone call, and interpretive dance on the front lawn.
Teachers do all those things—except maybe the dance part. Maybe. Raise your hand out there if you’ve had a parent who unsubscribed from school emails, blocked school phone numbers, clearly never checked the gradebook, and somehow still had the audacity to ask why no one told them their child was failing.
I had a principal once who was backing us up while we were talking about how impossible some of these communication expectations had become. She said the front office had heard everything from, “I need you to call me every time my child coughs,” to, “I don’t want to hear from you unless he stabs somebody.” Those were actual parent expectations. There is no communication system on earth that can simultaneously satisfy both types of parents.
And it gets worse when we move into behavior. A child gets angry and trashes a classroom, and what does the teacher get asked? “Did you try building a relationship with the child?” Did you know the child’s triggers? Did you de-escalate? What could you have done differently? (there go my eyes again)
But nobody asks whether anyone ever taught that child to accept no for an answer. Did anyone teach that child that being angry does not give you permission to destroy a classroom? Did anyone teach them how to be disappointed, how to be frustrated, how to hear the word “no” and keep control of themselves? Oh wait, they want teachers to teach that too.
And that pattern repeats everywhere. The student doesn’t do the work, and the teacher gets more work. The parent doesn’t check the gradebook, and the teacher gets more work. The student behaves badly, and the teacher gets another intervention to implement, another form to complete, another meeting to attend, another strategy to try. In other words: MORE WORK. The consequence did not disappear. We just changed who had to bear it.
One of the biggest drivers behind all of this was something literally called accountability: state accountability and standardized testing. Oh, I hate those tests. I hate those tests with the blazing heat of 1,000 suns. Policymakers decided we needed a standardized way to prove that schools were doing their jobs. So we standardized the standards. We standardized curriculum, pacing, benchmarks, testing windows, interventions, data collection, and outcomes.
If you are familiar with the YA book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, there’s a scene in there that describes what I think these policymakers are after. Our protagonists find themselves in another world, a completely synchronized world. Every child on the street is playing ball in the driveway and bouncing those balls in complete synchronicity. It’s creepy as all get-out! This is what policymakers want in our classrooms.
But just to keep things spicy and keep us guessing, those same policymakers turned around and required teachers to differentiate. Meet every child where they are. Individualize. Build relationships. Respond to the needs of every learner. Okay. With what freedom? With what time?
Because no matter how hard we work to standardize the test, the kids don’t come standardized. I’m going to say that again: The kids don’t come standardized.
Teachers know this. Parents know this. Parents want to know that their child will not be treated like a standardized cog in an educational machine, and they shouldn’t be. Their child has different strengths, weaknesses, interests, abilities, and needs from the child sitting beside them.
But we have built an increasingly standardized educational system and handed the responsibility for making that system feel individualized to the classroom teacher. That puts parents and teachers in a ridiculous position, because in many cases they actually want the same thing. The parents want their child seen as an individual, and the teacher wants the professional freedom to teach the children who are actually sitting in front of them. The system itself is the thing demanding standardization.
I think about my own first-grade teacher. I was bored out of my mind with what we were doing (I think it was single digit addition. Do you know what she did? She walked down the hall and got a third-grade math book. That was it. She knew me, she knew what I could do, and she made a professional decision to give me work at the level I needed.
We talk endlessly now about differentiation while making genuine differentiation harder and harder to accomplish Teachers have less freedom over what they teach, when they teach it, how quickly they move through it, how they assess it, and what materials they use. And then parents come in asking for individualization because they can see their child disappearing into the machine. And where does that demand land? Once again, on the teacher.
There’s another consequence to all of this. When adults have to walk children through every step to ensure success, children become helpless and passive in their learning. They get fewer opportunities to try something and fail, make a bad choice, experience what happens next, fix it, and try again. Those experiences matter so much. This is why play-based learning is SO important, and it's practically GONE in today's educational environment.
Remember playing with blocks? You’d try to build a tower, and maybe it fell, so you experimented with different ways to make it taller and taller. That’s learning.
I recently saw a post on Threads from a 10th-grade U.S. history teacher who gave his first test of the year. It was a Scantron test, just a good old-fashioned fill-in-the-bubble Scantron. He put a pencil on every desk because he no longer trusted simply writing “use a pencil” on the board. Then he walked the class through the first couple of questions and had everybody fill them in with him so he knew they understood what to do.
By the end of the period, about a quarter of the students had answered exactly zero additional questions. Another quarter had circled their answers instead of filling in the bubbles. Five tests had no names on them, and two students had somehow completed the entire Scantron in pen. My favorite part of the post was basically, “Where did you even get a pen?” because he had literally put a pencil on every desk.
I keep coming back to my little saying: If we don’t have a consequence, we don’t have a rule. What consequence did those students expect for doing nothing? What consequence did they expect for ignoring the directions? Apparently, not much of one. I have to wonder how many of them had the consequence of a zero. I imagine it was none of them. A parent would have complained. Someone would have said that it’s not an academic failing to have used pen and not pencil. Grade it and count it anyway. In other words, more work for the teacher.
Children learn the systems we build around them. If not doing something results in the deployment of another safety net in the form of reminders, additional chances, and whatnot, then doing nothing starts to make perfect sense. The system has taught you that somebody else will pick up the responsibility. The student has no accountability.
And now AI has landed right on top of all of this. We’re worried that students are handing their thinking over to a machine, but we spent years building systems where an adult stepped in whenever the work became difficult, unclear, frustrating, or inconvenient and did that thinking for them because so many of the standards have been pushed down into lower and lower grades so that now it’s developmentally inappropriate. Now AI is offering to step in instantly, twenty-four hours a day, without even requiring the student to raise their hand. The only surprise is that it’s a surprise.
I think part of the answer may actually be going a little more old-school. Kids need opportunities to think, struggle, play, experiment, and try something without knowing exactly how it is going to turn out. They need to fail sometimes, figure out why it failed, and try it again. That is how you build independence. They need to write things by hand inorder to build fine motor coordination and hand strength.
And like any large-scale improvement, things get messier before they look clean. But we really have to consider doing SOMETHING.
Because this isn’t just an education problem anymore. Those children eventually leave our classrooms, and our entire society is now dealing with the consequences of not allowing teachers to hold students accountable. School is one of the places where children are supposed to learn how to live around other human beings, and that requires learning some things that aren’t particularly comfortable.
I can't be the only one who has seen the videos of young people wondering why they got fired for being late? Or not wanting to wear the uniform? Or failing to turn in required documents in a timely fashion?
Cuz ya know: Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes you have to do something you don’t want to do. Sometimes you are frustrated, and sometimes you fail. Sometimes you make a mess and you have to clean it up. Sometimes you make a choice, and the consequence of that choice belongs to you – positive or negative.
We thought we were removing consequences from children, but we weren’t. We were postponing them. First, we transferred those consequences onto teachers during their school years: more work, more documentation, more interventions, more emails, more phone calls, more accommodations, more follow-ups, more forms, more strategies, more blame, more everything—and the kitchen sink. Eventually, those children grow up, and the rest of society inherits the consequences.
Accountability is not punishment. We need policymakers to learn that! Accountability means there is a relationship between responsibility and what happens when you do, or do not, fulfill that responsibility. Teachers cannot continue carrying the consequences for everybody else in the system.
Students have to carry their part. Parents have to carry their part. Administrators and states have to carry their parts. And teachers? Let teachers be accountable for teaching, and give them back enough authority freedom actually do it.
Career Transition And Job Search – Track what matters
It’s time for our Career Transition and Job Search segment. I know, it's a little out of order today, but for good reason! And since we’ve spent this whole episode talking about accountability, let’s talk about one place where accountability can actually help you in a career transition or job search: tracking what you’re doing.
If you’re conducting a job search, I want you to have at least two spreadsheets that will be our trackers. You need an application tracker, and you need a networking tracker. This is because without tracking what you’re doing, it is incredibly difficult to figure out what is and isn’t working if you are just sending applications off into the interwebs and hopin’ for the best.
Your application tracker doesn’t have to be fancy. Track the job, the company, when you applied, where you found it, and columns for what comes next. Did you get a screening call? An interview? Did you make it to the second round? Did you get rejected? Did you get ghosted into the great abyss? Track it.
Do the same thing with networking. Start with columns for the name and the contact info - whether that is a phone number, email, and/or a LinkedIn page. How do you know them? (column) Is there someone you know who can introduce you to someone else you’d LIKE to know? When did you reach out? Did they respond? Did you have a conversation? Did they offer to introduce you to somebody? Did you promise to send them something? When should you follow up?
Put it in the tracker instead of trusting yourself to remember that Ashley from your old campus said three weeks ago that she has a cousin who works in Learning and Development somewhere. Remember—the biggest lie we tell ourselves is, “I’ll remember that!” No, we won’t.
In fact, to make it easier so you don’t have to remember all the things I said here, please feel free to email me (Vanessa@teachersintransition.com) or msg me on LinkedIn, and I'll send these trackers over to you. Just to help you out.
Because these trackers are not just organizational tools. They’re diagnostic tools. They help you figure out where your job search is breaking down.
If you’re looking and looking but can’t find jobs that actually fit what you want to do, there’s a problem. If you’re finding good jobs and applying consistently but never getting interviews, there’s a problem. If you’re getting first interviews and never advancing, there’s a problem. If you’re networking and nobody is responding, there’s a problem. And if people are happily having conversations with you but those conversations never turn into introductions, referrals, leads, or next steps, there’s a problem there too.
Those are not all the same problem, which means they don’t have the same solution. You don’t need to rewrite your résumé because one interview went badly. You don’t need to take another certification because nobody is responding to your networking messages. You need to find the place where the process is breaking down and put your effort there.
This is one of the reasons I tell people to track the process instead of just counting applications. “I’ve applied for 100 jobs and nothing is working” doesn’t actually tell me very much. I want to know what happened to those 100 applications. If 98 of them went nowhere, we need to look at your résumé, your positioning, the jobs you’re targeting, or how you’re applying. If 40 of them turned into interviews but none of them turned into offers, I’m looking somewhere completely different.
Track it. Find the break. Fix the break.
Sometimes you can look at that data and immediately see what you need to change. Sometimes you can see where the process is breaking down, but you have no idea why. And sometimes you’re simply too close to your own job search to see the pattern at all. That’s when you bring in somebody else who knows what they’re looking at. There is no prize for figuring out your entire career transition by yourself.
One of the reasons it’s hard to proofread our own work is because our brain very helpfully autocorrects things into what it knows we really meant. A new set of eyes doesn’t have that same blind spot. Sometimes your job search works exactly the same way.
There’s another little career-transition bonus hiding inside these trackers, too. Build them in Excel. Or build them in Google Sheets, but if Excel is listed in the job descriptions you’re targeting, this is a fantastic excuse to start playing with Excel and getting more comfortable with it.
Excel is a standard workplace skill, and most of us barely scratch the surface of what it can do. If your current definition of “I know Excel” is “I can put words and numbers into the little boxes,” fantastic. Start there. Then learn a new thing. Learn how to sort and filter your data. Learn conditional formatting by making all the yeses green and the noes red. Learn a basic formula. Learn how to make a table. You do not need to become an Excel wizard overnight.
And conveniently, I have one tiny spreadsheet skill we can add to your toolbox right now. Because if you’re going to build these trackers, there is absolutely no reason for you to type the same status over and over again.
Remember - If you’d like me to send these trackers to you, just send me a quick message at Vanessa@teachersintransition.com, and I will happily send them over.
So now, let’s head into this week’s Teacher Hack and learn something new.
Teacher Hack: Drop Down Menus
It’s time for this week’s Teacher Hack, where I give you something that will hopefully save you in at least one of the three ways we tend to pay for things - with time, money, or stress. And since we were just talking about using trackers in your job search, let’s learn one tiny spreadsheet trick that can make those trackers a whole lot easier to use: drop-down menus.
Let’s say you have an application tracker, and one of your columns is called “Status.” Instead of typing “Applied,” “Interview,” “Rejected,” “Offer,” or whatever else over and over again, you can create a drop-down menu and just choose the status you need. It’s faster, it keeps your data consistent, and you don’t end up with different spellings of interview and Interview scheduled all meaning the same thing when you try to sort your data later.
In Google Sheets, select the cells where you want the menu, then go to Insert and choose Dropdown. Add the choices you want, click Done, and there you go. You can even color code them! Google makes this MUCH easier than Excel. You can also copy that cell down the column so the same menu appears everywhere you need it.
In Excel, select your cells, go to the Data tab, choose Data Validation (which is a little graphic picture looks like a small box with two horizontal lines), and under Allow, choose List. Then enter the choices you want available in your drop-down. You can designate a tab in your spreadsheet of listicles and just select the range. Once you’ve set it up, you can select an option instead of typing the same information over and over and over again.
And this isn’t just useful for a job search. If you’re still in the classroom, think about all the trackers you already have: forms, interventions, missing assignments, inventory, student progress, accommodations, whatever administrative nonsense has landed in your lap this week. Anywhere you repeatedly enter the same handful of answers, a drop-down menu can save you some typing and make your spreadsheet easier to sort later.
So that was your Teacher Hack for this week: If you keep typing the same thing into a spreadsheet, stop typing it. Make it a drop-down. Your fingers have enough to do.
If you’re listening to all of this and thinking that maybe it’s time for you to start figuring out what comes next, let’s talk.
I help teachers figure out how the skills and experience they already have translate outside of education, identify where they might fit, and build a strategy to get from where they are now to where they want to be.
You don’t have to know exactly what you want to do next before you reach out. In fact, figuring that out is part of the process.
If you’d like to talk about where you are, where you’d like to go, and what might be getting in the way, you can schedule a discovery call with me. The link is in the show notes or just head over teachersintransition.com/calendar.
And if you have any specific questions you want answered about your career transition or your job search, you can send that over to my email or leave a text or voice message. That information comes up in a just a minute here in the outtro.
And my weekly plea to help grow the podcast - One of the best ways you can help this podcast is to like and share with another teacher you know who may be struggling. Word of mouth is the primary way a podcast grows.
So until next time, remember that the person you need to be most accountable to – is you!
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That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques. And I want to hear from you! Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099.
I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!
