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Six Characteristics Of Effective Improvement Routines In Schools
Kappan
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3/22/21
“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 not the primary goal. Ultimately, the point must be to build educators’ capacity to deliver consistent, high-quality instruction to all students across all classrooms.”
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Does Experience Matter?
Education Endowment Foundation
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9/8/20
“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 years, before plateauing for the remainder of their careers (Rivkin et al, 2005)… However, some more recent research appears to contradict this longstanding hypothesis. In their review of US research published on this subject since 2003, Podolsky et al (2019) suggest that effectiveness increases throughout a teacher’s career… In their review of 30 studies, Podolsky et al find that, after a steep initial incline upon entering the profession, teachers tend to follow an upward trajectory of effectiveness that continues into the second, and at times third decade of teaching.”
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On The Need To Create A Common Language To Describe The Work Of Teaching
Kappan
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2/24/20
“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 individuals to formulate their own idiosyncratic ideas about good teaching. And without clear definitions of good teaching, it becomes difficult to ensure equity for students across the tens of thousands of classrooms in our country.”
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Excellent, Short Reflection On How Cognitive Science Can Help Teachers
SchoolsWeek
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1/20/20
“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.”
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“How School Leaders Create The Conditions For Effective Coaching”
ASCD
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11/27/19
“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 strong system of logistics.”
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Teachers Should Have More Peer Observations Than Formal Evaluations
Harvard Graduate School of Education
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11/2/19
“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.”
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Collaboration And Peer Networks Are Essential For Teacher Growth
Atlantic
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9/19/19
“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. When teachers plan classroom activities together, educators have a chance to implement improvements as a cohesive effort across the building, develop a shared vision and common language around learning goals, and learn how to detect outcomes using a broad range of data, including markers for key skills, such as resilience or collaboration, that can’t be captured using standardized test scores.”
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“Let Teachers Work And Learn In Teams — Like Professionals”
ASCD
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7/1/19
“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 measure on the contributions they make, as team leaders and members, to the systematic improvement of their school's performance.”
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PD: More Teacher Choice Or More Shared Expectations?
Education Dive
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3/25/19
“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 be a shared vision of quality teaching and learning across the district.”
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Teachers Are Trying Out In-Ear Coaching
EdWeek
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2/26/19
“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 teacher will meet to debrief after the lesson.”
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An Excellent Support And PD Network Model For Math Teachers
KQED
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10/29/18
“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 their findings to monthly conference calls where they get ideas, feedback, coaching and encouragement.”
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How Teacher-Led PD Raised A School District From Bottom To Top
American Federation of Teachers
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9/1/18
"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.”
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Effective Mentors Are Crucial For The Future Quality Of New Teachers
Chalkbeat
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7/16/18
“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.”
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Why Metrics (For Students, Employees) Aren’t Effective Assessments
Aeon
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4/24/18
"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 experimentation includes the possibility, perhaps probability, of failure. At the same time, rewarding individuals for measured performance diminishes a sense of common purpose, as well as the social relationships that motivate co-operation and effectiveness. Instead, such rewards promote competition.”
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Daniel Willingham Offers Proposal For Reforming Teacher Training
Education Next
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3/27/18
“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.””
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Three Types Of Feedback During Teacher Observations
Principal Center
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1/5/18
"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 order to support positive changes in the teacher’s practice."
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Game-Changing PD in Louisiana Through Curriculum Development
Education Next
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9/1/17
"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.”
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Rethinking Accountability For Educators
Brookings
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4/13/17
"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 reported (identifiability); medical rounds require doctors to explain cases and treatment plans to their colleagues (reason-giving); and surgery is conducted with other hospital staff attending (mere presence of another).”
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Tennis As A Model For Ongoing Learning For Teachers
Pacific Standard
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7/16/16
“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.”
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Great Early Summer PD: A Week Of Cognitive Science And UbD
St Paul’s School
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6/1/16
"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 developing the habits of collaboration between teachers.”
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Even Psychologists Find Use Of Badges Helps Their Practice
FiveThirtyEight
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5/12/16
"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 that psychologists are eager to engage in such signaling… Nosek’s team reports that since Psychological Science adopted the badges, data sharing has risen nearly tenfold in papers it publishes, reaching nearly 40 percent of all papers published in the first half of 2015.”
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What Teachers Need For Excellent PD: Not Compliance, But Agency
Medium
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4/26/16
"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.”
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Substitute Teacher-Collected Video for Observation? (Harvard Report)
Harvard Center for Education Policy Research
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3/25/16
"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”
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7 Lessons From Working With Micro-Credentials/Badges
EdSurge
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1/30/16
"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.”
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Continuous Improvement: Rethinking School Development
EdExcellence
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9/9/15
"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 with a series of small pilots instead of leaping into large-scale implementation. Guided by “improvement science” pioneered in the medical field, Learning to Improve shows how education could finally stop its reform churn.”
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Hattie’s Call For Collaborative Teacher Efficacy And Growth
Pearson
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6/16/15
"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 is also a role for the system: to provide the support, time and resources for this to happen. Putting all three of these (teachers, leaders, system) together gets at the heart of collaborative expertise.”
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ASU: What Are The Four Things Mentors Need To Know?
Medium
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6/9/15
"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 different stages of their development process.”
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What Determines Whether Teachers Stay, Improve, and Succeed?
Shanker Institute
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5/28/15
"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 difficult to observe and measure seem to be most influential, including the quality of relationships and collaboration among staff, the responsiveness of school administrators, and the academic and behavioral expectations for students.”
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Survey: What Causes Teachers Stress
EdSurge
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5/19/15
"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 standardized testing.”
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How Might You Reorganize Your School As A Team of Teams?
Fast Company
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5/12/15
“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.”
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3 Researchers: First Steps For Improving Education
Stanford
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5/8/15
"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 professional autonomy to make judgments about the work… [But] the more we distrust the capacity of people in schools, the more we're pressed toward scripted curriculum and micromanaging that work."
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Continual Improvement Is Better Than Focusing On Best Practices
Educational Leadership
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5/1/15
“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 and one unit at a time.”
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On How Best To Help Teachers Get Better
EdWeek
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4/15/15
“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?”
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Gates Foundation Report On Professional Development: What Works
Gates Foundation
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12/5/14
"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 with the professional development they are now offered by their school or district and the areas where district leaders think they should focus more professional learning time.”
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A Look at Teacher Training, Nation-Wide [Paywall]
New York Review of Books
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12/4/14
“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 encouraging is that we now have a strong body of knowledge about how good teaching happens and--even more--about how to help people do it.”
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Evaluating Teacher Evaluations
NPR
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9/26/14
“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 recommend complementary sources of evidence that can be combined with student teaching evaluations to provide more meaningful and reliable formative and summative assessments of teaching.”
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Four Characteristics of Great Teachers
Wall Street Journal
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9/4/14
"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."
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Is Verbal Ability the Greatest Indicator of Teacher Success?
Forbes
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8/31/14
“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.’”
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Gates Learns About Reshaping Professional Development
EdSurge
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8/18/14
“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, where they sit listening to lectures. ‘We would never do that with kids,’ Katie said, ‘but we still do it with teachers.’”
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Book: “Building Better Teachers.” (Answer: Collaboration and Time)
Atlantic
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8/13/14
“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.”
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On Teaching Math in the US (and How Teachers Get Better)
New York Times
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7/23/14
“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 but also about math and the shape of students’ thoughts and how to mold them.”
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Darling-Hammond Parses PISA: Why Teacher PD Matters Most.
Huffington Post
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6/30/14
“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 determine where they are willing to work.”
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What Makes Good Observations: Teacher-Driven, Not Top-Down
Educational Leadership
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5/1/14
“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.”
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How Teachers Get Better: Small, Connected Groups
Educational Leadership
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5/1/14
“When peer coaching (as happens in small, reciprocal groups) was added, an estimated 95 percent of teachers transferred the new knowledge to their classrooms.”
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Harvard Designs New Spaces to Promote Innovation, Interaction
Harvard Magazine
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2/19/14
“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.’”
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6 Principles for Designing the Ideal School
KQED
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2/5/14
“[Three teachers] traveled across the country documenting noteworthy teaching practices at district public schools, charter, private, and parochial schools."
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What’s the best Professional Development? (It’s social and self-driven.)
EdSurge
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12/16/13
“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.”
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Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) Improve Teaching (Lit Review)
Science Direct
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1/1/08
"All eight studies that examined the relationship between teachers’ participation in PLCs and student achievement found that student learning improved.”