Professional Responsibility - If You Are A Teacher

20 Questions:

1. Is teaching a professional job?
2. Do teachers have professional responsibilities beyond their teaching contract?
3. What are professionals responsible for?
4. Why do you do what you do?
5. Do professionals have a responsibility to keep up-to-date on what is current in their respective fields of study?
6. Would you expect your doctor or dentist to be aware of new medical developments, assuming you consider doctors or dentists professionals?
7. Would you expect a detective to keep up with current trends in forensics?
8. How is it that many teachers are unaware of sweeping trends in education?
9. If you are a teacher, shouldn't you know what UBD is?
10. If you are a teacher, shouldn't you know what web 2.0 is?
11. If you are a teacher, shouldn't you be aware of the concept of disruptive innovation?
12. If you are a teacher, shouldn't you know what is in NCLB?
13. If you are a teacher, shouldn't you know what state education policy is? Or at least how to look it up?
14. If you are a teacher, shouldn't you know what bills are being passed around the state legislature?
15. If you are a teacher, shouldn't you know, understand, and be able to at lease paraphrase your state's academic standards in your content area?
16. If our teacher contracts don't explicitly address #9-#15 do we have professional responsibilities to address these on our own?
17. Should teacher contracts address these issues? Or is it our own professional responsibility to address these for ourselves?
18. Wouldn't teacher unions have an easier time negotiating "professional" salaries for teachers if more teachers exhibited "professional" behavior in their own learning?
19. Why is it that when a "professional" teacher takes great interest in all of these things they usually are asked to move into an administrative or leadership role?
20. If you are a teacher, what motivates you to care about these issues?