““We didn’t want to find rogue teachers who were going off and doing something on their own,” he said. “We were looking for wide-scale or potentially scalable programs.” Weiner identified several kinds of unconventional roles: Lead teacher, who serves as a mentor, curriculum developer, and co-teacher for a small team of teachers in the same […]
“Practical measures are used to identify improvement goals and to learn continuously whether the changes that are introduced are, in fact, leading to improvement.”
“For any given time since diagnosis, crude annual breast cancer mortality rates and risks decreased with increasing calendar period. Crude five year breast cancer mortality risk was 14.4% (95% confidence interval 14.2% to 14.6%) for women with a diagnosis made during 1993-99 and 4.9% (4.8% to 5.0%) for women with a diagnosis made during 2010-15.”
“Uncommon as it may be, encouraging teachers to collaborate by observing one another lets these solo practitioners to learn from one another through comparing and contrasting their ways of teaching lessons. Doing so reduces teacher isolation and insulation baked into the age-graded structure of one teacher with one group of students in classrooms arrayed along […]
“Surely, observing a fellow teacher elsewhere in the school or the district for a few lessons followed up with a discussion–without making judgments of a “good” or “bad” lesson—offers a splendid opportunity to learn new and, perhaps, better ways to carry off a reading, math, or science lesson while interacting with students. Teachers learning from […]
“The revised Ed.M. is centered on three pillars: foundational learning experiences, role-specific expertise, and context-specific knowledge.”
“Over the years, though, I have become more mindful about my mentoring approach. I have learned a lot from my mentoring successes, as well as my mentoring failures, and accumulated a lifetime’s worth of wisdom in this area. I am not so presumptuous as to believe that I have discovered the one true way of […]
“The Stanford Design Lab, a leading group in the design education field, breaks down design thinking into five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Each of these buzzwords represents a concept already broadly known in the field of teaching. Teachers of writing, for example, could find significant overlap with the basic tenets of effective […]
“In the report that follows, we share findings on coach workload, the coach-teacher relationship, the use of technology in coaching, professional support for coaches, and funding for coaches.”
“Those who were asked to give advice gave more critical and actionable input. In fact, advice-givers gave comments on a whopping 34 percent more areas of improvement and gave 56 percent more ways to improve. Three more studies by the researchers produced similar conclusions.”
“Classrooms are just too complicated for research ever to tell teachers what to do. Teachers need to know about research, to be sure, so that they can make smarter decisions about where to invest their time, but teachers, and school leaders need to become critical consumers of research – using research evidence where it is […]
“Research by Hall and Hord (2014) suggests that an ideal approach to developing teachers and changing schools simultaneously includes both top-down and bottom-up initiatives.”
Peer coaching is about cultivating a network of allies that can provide mutual support in creating positive change to improve performance. In addition to its many benefits for learning, these relationships address the roots of loneliness at work.”
Coaches provide ample, ongoing opportunities for teachers to converse about their practice and collaborate regularly with teaching colleagues, while offering timely and descriptive feedback that helps teachers become more reflective practitioners… More importantly, instructional coaches are partners, guides, teachers, collaborators, and colleagues who support the learning community.”
“The primary reason teachers gave for leaving their last job was career advancement or development, with 60% of teachers who left voluntarily citing reasons related to this category.”
“Why do we react this way to feedback that is ostensibly supposed to help us? Essentially, it’s because all of us are so awful at delivering negative feedback. It’s a self-reinforcing vicious circle that trains us to avoid what would make us better at work and in life.”
We profiled four school systems that, with an intensive focus on improving the quality of instruction through professional learning, have seen above-average results with a relatively high-need student population. These systems have replaced traditional professional development efforts, such as one-off workshops and general coaching, with a more strategic model that includes…”
“Collaborative, job-embedded professional learning… Effective instructional materials… An environment that supports students to direct their own learning and promotes community engagement.”
“Teaching done well is complex intellectual work, and this is so in the primary grades as well as Advanced Placement physics. Teaching begins with knowledge: of subject matter, of instructional materials and technologies, of cognitive and social development. But it’s not just that teachers know things. Teaching is using knowledge to foster the growth of […]