“We offer a variety of courses focused on particular great books, ancient languages, and other related subjects. These courses offer opportunities to focus one’s learning in a welcoming intellectual community. Our courses are open to adults 16 years or older from all educational backgrounds and walks of life. Most courses meet weekly for between 1-2 […]
“In the coming year, we may need to prioritize collaboration over information, constructing knowledge together rather than trying to find it and use it for individual purposes. The time we have spent on searching could be reallocated to time spent on gathering.”
“Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is an educational non-profit that trains educators in schools, museums, and institutions of higher education to use a student-centered facilitation method to create inclusive discussions. Our intensive professional development programs provide individuals with the tools to become skilled facilitators of complex conversations. Our accessible classroom curricula are supportive of critical thinking, […]
“One of this past year’s great joys was participating in a reading group on Socratic Dialogues with The Catherine Project. Every Tuesday night for 3-4 months I joined a zoom call with more than a dozen strangers from around the world to talk about Plato’s writing for 90 minutes. It was free and it was excellent. As […]
“How can we reimagine PD to be a space for teachers to (re)discover their agency and find purpose in their work? By organizing PD in accordance with the tenets of principled resistance, schools and districts can help teachers feel in charge of their own development and confident to act in service of their educational convictions.”
“A practice that leads to intended results that takes into account context.”
“It is time for schools and districts to abandon the search for the one perfect curriculum — it does not exist. Instead, they should focus on how to better implement the systems they have in an engaging, effective way. They should invest in the training and support of teachers to master the instruction of that […]
“Over the past two decades, it’s become more clear that curricula matter for student learning. For instance, a number of compelling experimental studies have found positive impacts of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM)… Yet, as the field learns more about curricular use and adoption, it is also becoming evident that just using HQIM may not be […]
“A message cutting across all five actions is “focus to flourish”. Education systems have been tremendously successful at achieving specific educational goals, such as expanding schooling, because that is what they committed to, that is what they measured, that is what they were aligned for, and that is what they supported. In order to achieve […]
“A few years into my principalship at Boston’s Mather Elementary School, teachers prodded me to shift to mini-observations — short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, each followed by a face-to-face conversation. I used this approach with faculty support and good results for almost a decade. A growing number of schools have adopted versions of mini-observations, moving […]
“In the first year of the COVID pandemic, two states waived many of their typical requirements for teachers, allowing anyone with a bachelor’s degree to teach. After reviewing end-of-course exam results, supervisor evaluations, and other data, researchers concluded that the students of this group of emergency-hired teachers did not differ significantly from students taught by […]
““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 […]