“Educators are innovators… They recognize the urgency of this moment and want to use every tool at their disposal to meet each students’ unique needs.”
“A difference between traditional and interdependent mentoring is that traditional mentoring can be one-sided. New teachers may feel compelled to show deference to experienced veterans, and mentors may be asked to respond to problems they’re not comfortable solving without additional help. In contrast, interdependent mentoring partnerships prioritize both teachers’ contributions. Mentors are appreciated for their […]
“While many teachers are routinely observed, evaluated, and coached by other adults, they hardly ever receive formal feedback from their students. And this — useful evidence, solicited in real time from the attentive, perceptive, and astute students with whom they interact daily — can provide the most nourishing feedback of all.”
“Over the past forty years, factors associated with raising a school’s academic profile include: teachers’ consistent focus on academic standards and frequent assessment of student learning, a serious school-wide climate toward learning, district support, and parental participation. Recent research also points to the importance of mobilizing teachers and the community to move in the same direction, building trust among […]
“We have focused our recent research on one interesting aspect of the transition for new teachers: the influential role of the induction mentor teacher in an educator’s first year. Through a case study approach, we looked at the in-depth experiences of seven recent graduates from our teacher preparation program, collecting interview and focus group data […]
“Based on an examination of research, the report finds four common prevailing features in high-quality professional development, regardless of whether it’s focused on in-person, hybrid or virtual models: a focus on content, support for collaboration, the provision of feedback and reflection, and personalized coaching and support.”
“Because of their complexity, just getting such routines off the ground can seem like a victory in itself, but we cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is that improvement routines be employed thoughtfully, and that everyone involved has a shared understanding of their purpose. It is important that routines run smoothly, but this is […]
“There has been a longstanding belief in education that, after the early years of their career, a teacher’s experience has little to no influence on their ability to help pupils learn (Rice, 2003; Hanushek and Luque, 2003; Rockoff, 2004). It has been thought that teachers undergo a steep learning curve upon entering the profession, lasting three to five […]
“The assumption that teaching is highly individualistic has often been used to resist efforts at specifying — or, some fear, prescribing or oversimplifying — what accomplished teachers actually do in the classroom. Yet, if we cannot describe the work that teachers do in some detail, then we risk resorting to vague generalities about it, leaving […]
“When adults continue to learn at their jobs they are better at creating that experience for other people. She says if schools are going to be places where students consistently push against the edge of what they don’t know, testing new theories, and trying things out while learning from mistakes, those same qualities must be […]
“Cognitive science does not provide a recipe for what teachers should do, but rather should inform their repertoire of approaches. And of course, it forms only one part of teachers’ extensive knowledge and expertise.”
“At the same time, a coaching culture is wasted unless leaders design and implement positive conditions for coaching. We focus on ways school leaders can establish the four conditions that help coaches transform leading, teaching, and schooling: A strong model of high-quality instruction. A strong model of coaching. A strong model to build capacity for coaching. A […]
“The study found that low-stakes peer evaluations resulted in improvements in teacher job performance, as measured by test scores. The study found improvements for both the observed teacher and the teacher doing the observation.”
“In this model of professional development, peer networks became the main mechanism for transferring collective wisdom and acquiring tacit knowledge that can’t be learned by reading a book or listening to a lecture—skills such as designing a strong lesson plan with precise pacing, rhythm, and clear focus, for instance, or building positive relationships among students. […]
“The meetings of these groups aren’t talkathons or just opportunities for teachers to spend time together in a group hoping to learn. Each team has a serious, important assignment with deadlines. And each assignment is expected to result in improvements to student performance. Opportunities for teachers to move ahead in their careers depend in significant […]
“Isolated examples of professional learning based on individual educator needs are a poor substitute for engaging teachers in ongoing collaborative learning that draws on their expertise to examine student data and design learning agendas that benefit everyone in the school… when teachers or schools have too much control over PD decisions, there tends to not […]
“The premise is simple: A teacher wears an earpiece during a lesson, which is being livestreamed for an instructional coach who is somewhere else. Throughout the lesson, the coach delivers in-the-moment feedback to the teacher, who can add something or switch gears based on what she’s hearing in her ear. Typically, the coach and the […]
“Teachers in the BMTN [Better Math Teaching Network] choose to focus on deepening their students’ abilities in one of three areas: connect, justify and solve. They are grouped with other algebra teachers at schools across New England working on the same skill. They each test small changes in their classrooms, iterate on those changes, and bring […]
With a strong cadre of teacher leaders in place and a professional culture where staff share effective practices across classrooms, teachers constantly explore new ways to meet the needs of their students. Beyond their impact on classroom instruction, these factors have also led to high levels of teacher retention.”
“Three studies released this year offer real evidence that good teaching can be passed down, in a sense, from mentor teacher to student teacher. In several cases, they find that the performance of the student teachers once they have their own full-time classrooms corresponds to the quality of the teacher they trained under.”
The source of the trouble is that when people are judged by performance metrics they are incentivised to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something not yet established, indeed that hasn’t even been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. And […]
“K–12 teachers, I will argue, have little use for psychological theory, but could benefit from knowing the observations—developmental patterns and consistencies in children’s cognition, motivation, and emotion. Such knowledge roughly equates to “understanding children.””
Reflexive feedback conversations involve both parties in talking, listening, reflecting, and taking action. The idea of reflexivity, which comes from the social sciences, suggests a two-way street—a feedback relationship that runs in both directions. Leaders who use reflexive feedback are more effective at changing teacher practice because they’re willing and able change things other than the teacher, in […]
The brilliance of what happened in Louisiana is they didn’t make a single choice for any school district in the state. They simply provided good information, training, and incentives.”
Behavioral science has identified four discrete accountability mechanisms: evaluation, identifiability, reason-giving, and the mere presence of another. Good professional accountability practices will employ all four behavioral mechanisms, though in various ways. Consider the practice of medicine: Doctors must pass a series of exams to be certified for practice (evaluation); board certifications for specializations are publicly […]
“In tennis, experience is valued, but performance more so, making ongoing improvement a primary focus of professionals. But this focus would not be in place without systems that recognize and reward effective professional learning; sufficient time and energy allocated to the goal of professional growth; and strong coaches and leaders available to support improvement.”
The conference will start by considering and reviewing the ideas of cognitive development, the neuroscience of education, backwards planning, and recursive learning. The focus will then shift to learner-centered teaching and measuring the effectiveness of learner-centered teaching practices. Two major emphases of the conference are creating material that teachers can use when they leave, and […]
As silly as they might seem, Nosek said the badges served a well-established purpose, by giving researchers a visible means to communicate information about their identities, beliefs, values and behaviors. People use such signaling all the time… Badges give scientists a way to signal that they care about research transparency, Nosek said. And it appears […]
Teacher agency emerged as a factor that needs to be elevated in the discourse about professional learning. This report emphasizes the importance of teacher agency and pinpoints strategies that education leaders and policymakers can use to leverage agency in designing more effective professional learning.”
In this paper, we describe impacts on teacher and principal perceptions of the observation process. We report six sets of findings from the first year of implementation”
Micro-credentials can personalize professional learning to meet teachers’ individual needs, and allow them to quickly take what they learn and apply it to their classrooms. This new wave of personalized, competency-based professional development provides a way for teachers to earn recognition for the skills they acquire through formal and informal learning opportunities.”
After thirty years of constant reform and little improvement, it’s clear that there’s a fundamental flaw in how the education field goes about effecting change. Quick fixes, sweeping transformations, and mandates aren’t working. Ongoing professional development isn’t working either. What might work much better is a sustained, systemic commitment to improvement—and a willingness to start […]
The greatest influence on student progression in learning is having highly expert, inspired and passionate teachers and school leaders working together to maximise the effect of their teaching on all students in their care. There is a major role for school leaders: to harness the expertise in their schools and to lead successful transformations. There […]
This training provides: (1) an explanation of roles and responsibilities for mentors, student teachers, and university supervisors; (2) an introduction to co-teaching; (3) a description of the rubric used to evaluate student teachers, so that there is a shared understanding of what “proficient” teaching looks like; and (4) strategies for coaching a novice teacher at […]
Put simply, teachers who work in supportive contexts stay in the classroom longer, and improve at faster rates, than their peers in less-supportive environments. And, what appear to matter most about the school context are not the traditional working conditions we often think of, such as modern facilities and well-equipped classrooms. Instead, aspects that are […]
Amongst major factors contributing to teacher stress, the survey results cite the adoption of new initiatives without proper PD (71%) and the negative portrayal of educators in the media (55%) as the two biggest factors. The survey results also identified the top three ‘everyday stressors in the classroom’ as mandated curriculum, large class size, and […]
“Sharing information and creating strong horizontal relationships improves the effectiveness of everything from businesses to governments to cities. His research suggests that the collective intelligence of groups and communities has little to do with the intelligence of their individual members and much more to do with the connections between them.”
The status of teaching depends on the knowledge base and its acquisition by teachers… There’s an inverse relationship between our ability to produce well-informed, thoughtful, objective teachers and our intention, as a society, to micromanage their work. The more we entrust the people in the schools the more we’re willing to give them the collective […]
“Research and practical experience suggest that professional development focused on continual improvement of teaching is more effective than imitation of best practices. The best practice culture tends to search for and celebrate outlier teachers. But better teaching doesn’t come from imitating what star teachers do. Better teaching is built by steady, relentless, continual improvement—one lesson […]
“How is teacher professional growth hindered…? The absence of downtime… their workload… the lack of autonomy… structural isolation… very little feedback about their effectiveness… What would a national teacher strategy look like?”
Teachers and administrators share similar perspectives about the ideal professional learning experience. When asked what effective professional development looks like, teachers describe learning that is relevant, hands-on, and sustained over time. District and school administrators have a similar view of what good professional development looks like. But there is a real disconnect between teachers’ satisfaction […]
“What is the matter with teacher preparation and how can we make it better? …Green’s thesis is simple: most teachers are never actually taught how to teach. After encountering a very thin introduction to the theory and practice of teaching at education schools, they’re sent into classrooms to learn on the job. What should be […]
“Here we examine student course evaluations from a statistical perspective. We argue that averages of rating scores should not even be calculated, much less compared across instructors, courses, or departments. Instead, frequency tables should be used to summarize scores. It is crucial to report survey response rates, not merely the number of respondents. Finally, we […]
Clearly, great teachers begin by loving children. But beyond that, a growing body of research points to some basic tenets of top-notch instruction—including these four actions and mind-sets parents can look and listen for when they visit a classroom, meet an educator or review their children’s schoolwork.
“Several decades after the Equality of Education Opportunity Study (a.k.a. the Coleman Study) revealed teacher verbal competence to be a strong predictor of student outcomes, an Abell Foundation study on teacher certification found that ‘the teacher attribute found consistently to be most related to raising student achievement is verbal ability.’”
“We’ve known for a long time that most students won’t learn if you just stick them in a classroom and make them listen to a lecture. They have to put the learning to use and make it relevant to their own lives. And yet most teachers still get their professional development at seminars and conferences, […]
“The PISA results are not ambiguous. Every single country that outperforms us has significantly smaller teacher workloads. Indeed, on the scale of time devoted by teachers to in-class instruction annually, the United States is off the charts.”
“After a geometry lesson, someone might note the inherent challenge for children in seeing angles as not just corners of a triangle but as quantities — a more difficult stretch than making the same mental step for area. By the end, the teachers had learned not just how to teach the material from that day […]
“OECD studies show that higher-performing countries intentionally focus on creating teacher collaboration that results in more skillful teaching and strong student achievement. U.S. researchers have also found that school achievement is much stronger where teachers work in collaborative teams that plan and learn together. Teachers repeatedly confirm that opportunities to work with their colleagues often […]
“When peer coaching (as happens in small, reciprocal groups) was added, an estimated 95 percent of teachers transferred the new knowledge to their classrooms.”
“Existing approaches to observation generally serve the observer. Teacher-driven observation flips this approach, placing the observed teacher as leader and primary learner in the observation process.”
“The report begins with a series of stage-setting adjectives, meant to capture SEAS faculty members’ aspirations for their new campus: ‘Open. Connected. Active. Transparent. Livable. Sunlit. Social. Flexible.’”
“[Three teachers] traveled across the country documenting noteworthy teaching practices at district public schools, charter, private, and parochial schools.
“What we need are new (and constantly evolving) technologies built specifically to allow educators to curate, create, share, and collaborate on the things that matter to them personally.”
All eight studies that examined the relationship between teachers’ participation in PLCs and student achievement found that student learning improved.”