Teacher Leadership Today

A Fresh Look at Teacher Evaluation

  A new report by Stanford professor and teaching quality scholar Linda Darling-Hammond takes a fresh look at the question of how (and why) to measure teacher effectiveness.

Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness: How Teacher Performance Assessments Can Measure and Improve Teaching, published by the Center for American Progress, is in part a response to frequent calls from advocates of student-test-centered evaluation for their critics to present viable alternatives. The report

...describes the ways in which assessments of teacher performance for licensing and certification can both reflect and predict teachers’ success with children so that they can not only inform personnel decisions, but also leverage improvements in preparation, mentoring, and professional development. It outlines progress in the field of teacher assessment development and discusses policies that could create much greater leverage on the quality of teacher preparation and teaching than has previously existed in the United States.

Darling-Hammond makes the case that large-scale school improvement will only come about when the United States catches up with nations that have "developed a national system of supports and incentives to ensure that all teachers are well prepared and ready to teach all students effectively when they enter the profession."

These nations, she says, have also created "a set of widely available methods to support the evaluation and ongoing development of teacher effectiveness throughout the career, along with decisions about entry and continuation in the profession."

Meeting the expectation that all students will learn to high standards will require a transformation in the ways in which our education system attracts, prepares, supports, and develops expert teachers who can teach in more powerful ways—a transformation that depends in part on the ways in which these abilities are understood and assessed.

The report is downloadable both in PDF format and from Scribd for mobiles and e-readers.

Cool Idea: Ed Week's Teacher Book Club

The folks at Education Week and Teacher Magazine have a great idea for those of us who don't have time to gather in living rooms over coffee, cokes and cake to discuss professional books: an online Teacher Book Club.

Their virtual club kicked off over the summer with some excellent discussion of charter school principal Linda Nathan's The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test (check out the archive here and see how it all works).

Ed Week's next Teacher Book Club chat starts October 29 and runs (asynchronously) for a week.The book is Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America by Helen Thorpe. The author followed four bright and ambitious students for five years from their Denver high school through college. At the heart of the story, says Ed Week commentary editor Elizabeth Rich, "are the personal identities of these four young women—two of whom are illegal immigrants—and how they balance who they are with their ambitions for the future."

You don't have to read the book (or finish it) before the chat. There's a backgrounder here in the form of an interview with Thorpe, who will be on hand during the week to interact with everyone who'd like to participate.

A virtual teacher book club is a great idea — and if you're able to drop by, you might leave an idea for a future book in this series. PS: You can follow the discussion on this page.

Waiting for the Real Superman

A post by teacher Susan Graham, who blogs at Teacher Magazine, was picked up by the Washington Post yesterday. Graham proposed that the new school reform documentary Waiting for Superman should have been called "Waiting for Batman" instead -- saying that the film's distance from the real problems of schools and its blunt approach to solutions reminded her more of the Caped Crusader than the Man of Steel...

So when Superman did step in, he didn’t impose his own solutions until human options had run out and innocent people were going to be hurt. Then he simply removed the barriers, got things back on track, and made it possible for everyday folk to continue to pursue truth, justice and the American Way.

Once ordinary humans could get a grip on the situation, Superman slipped out of the picture, put on his Clark Kent double breasted suit and horn-rimmed glasses and went back to his day job at the Daily Planet. He had no agenda of his own to impose. He didn’t try to fix Earthlings so that they become wannabe Kryptonians. Superman had the power to reshape our world, but what he seemed to want to do is to blend in and help out.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

TLN Teacher Voices in the Washington Post's "Answer Sheet" blog

Since the first of August, 10 educators in the Teacher Leaders Network have posted a total of 15 guest articles at The Answer Sheet, the popular education blog kept by Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss. The decision by Strauss to regularly feature teacher voices in her blog (and not just TLN folks) is unprecedented, and we're hoping teacher leaders across the U.S. subscribe to the blog and follow/submit commentaries there. You'll find the posts typically run counter to the prevailing "blame teachers" mentality that dominates big media.

Here are the TLN-authored articles that have appeared at The Answer Sheet so far:

Radical idea: Schools aren’t an awful mess
Nancy Flanagan
October 14

Still trying to make sense of NBC's Teacher Town Hall
Elizabeth Stein
October 8

Down the education rabbit hole
David B. Cohen
October 6

What public teachers really need
Dan Brown
October 4

Too many curricular aims creates assessment problems
Ken Bernstein
September 21

Has education reform jumped the shark?
Anthony Cody
September 20

Teacher: What my evaluation must include
David B. Cohen
September 19

Class size does matter after all
Larry Ferlazzo
September 13

Why kids in school need to play
Jane Ching Fung
September 10

How much power should we give to ed data?
Anthony Cody
September 2

Why paying parents to attend school events is wrong
Larry Ferlazzo
September 1

Why the National Writing Project should be saved
Mary Tedrow
August 26

How to give classrooms a mission
Larry Ferlazzo
August 23

The best kind of teacher evaluation
Larry Ferlazzo
August 17

Do We Need Another Hero?
Patrick Ledesma
July 31

Are You a Teacherpreneur?

  What's a "Teacherpreneur"? Find out in this excerpt from the upcoming book Teaching 2030, written by a team of accomplished teachers in partnership with Barnett Berry, president of the Center for Teaching Quality and a long-time advocate of advancing teaching as a profession.

The excerpt, which appears in a new issue of the Education Week publication Professional Development Sourcebook, describes Teacherpreneurs as

...teacher leaders of proven accomplishment who have a deep knowledge of how to teach, a clear understanding of what strategies must be in play to make schools highly successful, and the skills and commitment to spread their expertise to others—all the while keeping at least one foot firmly in the classroom.

   If that sounds in any way familiar, it's because the authors have identified some of the best teacher leadership practices in play today (in scattered settings across the nation), combined those practices into an advanced, hybrid teaching role — and then super- charged the result to produce part of their solution to improving American schools.

Read the excerpt, then visit this webpage to find out more about the book's contents and how to pre-order. Teaching 2030 will be available in bookstores in early December!

Researcher Kevin Welner on "The Manifesto"

As a researcher and a parent, I yearn for an end to the over-the-top propaganda, the slick think tank reports, the educational “leaders” more interested in blaming than in solving, the wasteful sinking of taxpayer money (and educators’ time) into reforms that have been shown not to work, and the stirring films that suggest that the heartbreaking denial of educational opportunities to innocent children can be miraculously solved by the latest fad.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

More Teacher Voices (and Teaching Secrets) at Teacher Magazine

 As part of our partnership with Education Week's Teacher magazine, the Teacher Leaders Network provides weekly articles sharing ideas about good practice and offering teacher commentary on important issues. Here's several of our latest contributions!

Teaching Secrets: Managing October Exhaustion — Elena Aguilar offers ideas about rejuvenating yourself as those feelings of being overwhelmed grow, a month or more into the school year. She frames her advice in the context of "alleviat[ing] fatigue so we can resume the good fight" on behalf of sane teaching conditions.

Difficult Choices: My Charter School Job Hunt — TLN Forum member Alison Stachniak, whose story of being passed over for a TFA candidate is told in the recent book Learning on Other People’s Kids, tells the lively tale of her job search among Chicago charter schools.

Why Great Teachers Quit — TLN'er Steve Owens, a current classroom teacher ambassador for the US Department of Education, reviews Katy Farber’s book Why Great Teachers Quit — sharing her views and solutions, and some of his own.

Teaching Secrets: Creating More Time for Learning — In Marsha Ratzel’s tour of her own classroom, she shares strategies she uses to establish classroom routines and create nearly a month of extra teaching time.

Find more recent teacher-authored articles at the TLN archive page at Teacher Magazine.

New Book Reviews: Teaching Critical Thinking — Working with ELLs in Content Areas

Our latest professional book reviews at the TLN Teacher Voices blog include:

• Secondary English teacher Vicky Gilpin says Critical Thinking and Formative Assessments: Increasing Rigor in Your Classroom by Betsy Moore and Todd Stanley is a "fast-paced guide [that] provide[s] access points to developing students’ critical thinking skills. The work might remind one of an excellent conference session: user-friendly, well-organized, and composed of numerous 'take-homes' for immediate use. Read review.

• Elementary ESL teacher Julie Dermody finds Teaching English Language Learners Across the Content Areas by Judie Haynes and Debbie Zacarian to be a book "I want to put into the hands of teachers in my district as they work to ensure their lessons are comprehensible for the growing number of ELLs within our classrooms." Read review.

You can browse many more TLN book reviews here.

 

Two TLN Views of NBC's Teacher Town Hall Experience

Several members of the Teacher Leaders Network were invited to be in the physical audience at NBC's Teacher Town Hall "interactive" experience two Sundays ago in New York City.

Two reports have now been posted: Ariel Sacks, a teacher in Brooklyn, shares her before and after impressions here: Teachers as Spectacle. And Elizabeth Stein, a teacher on Long Island, offers her insider observations at our TLN Teacher Voices blog.

Interestingly: TLN is a virtual network most of the time, and Ariel and Elizabeth have never met. Although both attended, they didn't come across each other in the crowd. Yet compare their impressions.

For another view, of a TLN member who was invited but opted for his godson's masquerade party (any metaphor is entirely unintentional), see Jose Vilson's post "The Union Said I Couldn't Wear My Favorite Color (and Other Absurd Assertions in Education Nation)."

See a Teaching Movie Being Made

It's definitely the season of the "teaching movie," with at least a half-dozen films appearing this fall that portray teaching from various perspectives. The most noted film, of course, is Waiting for Superman, produced by Davis Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth fame. Another film, not so well-funded but certainly associated with another star on the American artistic scene — Dave Eggers — is still in production as part of the Teacher Salary Project, an initiative launched by Eggers and colleagues as an outgrowth of their 2005 book Teachers Have It Easy.

If you visit the TSP website, you can leave your own story about a great teacher, learn more about the progress of the film, view a sizeable sample of film clips,  and even make a contribution to its completion. One tantalizing sample shows the first few minutes of a segment that will employ a split screen to track the day of a first-grade teacher and a real estate broker. What an intriguing idea. You can see this clip at YouTube as well.