Speaker 1: In 1926, my grandmother taught in a one-room schoolhouse near Gothenburg, Nebraska. I love imagining her stepping into that classroom at 18 years old with a room full of students only a few years younger than she was. After a couple years of successful teaching, my grandmother received two offers. The first was a contract to return to the schoolhouse in the fall, and the second was a marriage proposal. The story goes that my grandmother went to her father for advice and he said, Francis, this is your choice, but just remember that marriage lasts a lifetime. Young and in love, my grandmother retired from teaching at age 20 to marry my grandfather, and when she left the classroom so early in her career, I have no idea what it cost the state of Nebraska, possibly not a lot in dollars given her one summer of teacher training. Today, however, is a different story. Within the last decade, as so many teachers have left the classroom, several national studies have tried to calculate the financial costs of teacher attrition. One study estimated the cost of teacher attrition here in New Mexico to be over $12 million a year. A second study estimated that the national cost could be as much as $7 billion a year. Even allowing for a wide margin of error, these costs are breathtaking, and they don't begin to account for the wisdom, expertise, and potential that just walk out the door. So what has happened? It seems that our cultural conversation about education has been reduced to a conversation about standards, testing, and accountability. And under pressures to quantify everything, we've forsaken the very things that should lie at the heart of teaching and learning, imagination, creativity, wonder, possibility. All the great scholars of teaching and all the great teachers and school leaders, many of whom are in this room today, would argue that teaching well is a fine art, a complex balance of knowledge acquisition and imagination, rigorous work, and tenderness. To teach well involves far more than content mastery, and the programs that we design to support and inspire teachers should be as sophisticated and nuanced as the craft itself. Several years ago, when I was first dreaming of creating the Sophia Center for Professional Development at Bosque School here in Albuquerque, I imagined a place where educators from across the community could come together to do meaningful work. And in that design phase, I asked every educator I knew to tell me what they thought teachers and school leaders would want and need from such a place. And their ideas profoundly shaped the mission and the program offerings of the Sophia Center. But I'll never forget one teacher's email reply to my inquiry. In response to my carefully crafted, well-researched questions about what teachers need from professional development, all her message said, in giant font and all caps, was great coffee, real half and half. And of course I had to laugh, because I'm someone who absolutely believes in the transformative capacity of a great cup of coffee, and I know that I'm not alone in this belief. But the more I thought about it, there was something profound in her message. As a longtime public school educator and advocate, this was her way of saying, teachers want to be honored as professionals with wisdom and expertise. Teachers need to be treated with dignity and respect. In other words, no more bad coffee. If we want good teachers to remain in the classroom and continually refine their practice, we have to reimagine and redesign professional development. Instead of the convenience of top-down models or the one-shot conference experience, let's make professional development the home ground of collective inquiry, shared expertise, and inspired conversation among professionals. Let me describe what I know is possible and works. Professional development days structured less like a string of back-to-back meetings and more like design studios in which teachers are given the time and the resources to work on innovative projects of their own creation, seminars and workshops in which local artists, scientists, mathematicians, writers are invited to collaborate as professional colleagues with classroom teachers. Monthly gatherings in which kindergarten teachers alongside university professors, school leaders alongside district representatives come together to investigate everything from the foundational role of wonder or creativity in education to how we manifest ethical assessment practices or teach cultural competence and empathy in our schools. And finally, imagine faculty and staff meetings happening in schools across the community in which agendas which might typically be defined by to-do lists are redefined and offer time for teachers to read deeply in their fields and to reconnect with the vision and the hope that led them into the classroom in the first place. This kind of professional development is not only possible, it's essential and it doesn't require huge sums of money, far less than the price tag attached to teacher attrition. What is required is a willingness on the part of the whole culture to reimagine teaching as a professional practice defined by large and spirited inquiry, engagement with complex ideas and the centrality of teachers' voices. My grandmother farmed alongside my grandfather their entire lives and I am one of ten grandchildren who had the blessing of my grandmother as teacher. She gave me my first Anne of Green Gables books and my first copy of Heidi. She modeled that you could love the outdoors and love books, that you could go out and feed the chickens in your muddy overalls and come in and sing at the piano after dinner. True experiential learning. And if my grandma were still living, I would love to be able to tell her that even though she left the classroom after only two years, her teaching, like her marriage, lasted a lifetime.