TLN Teacher Voices

Secrets of Successful Learning Teams: An Interview with Anne Jolly

In this interview with author and professional learning teams expert Anne Jolly, you’ll learn at least three things:

• Details of a new edition of her book Team to Teach, a practical guide to organizing and sustaining PLCs and PLTs that promote continuous professional growth.

• Jolly’s eight secrets of PLC success.

• Her answer to the question: If you were asked to create a school reform design, what would its chief components be?

“Effective PLTs are teacher leadership hothouses,” Jolly tells us. “They’re places where teachers increase their professional knowledge and leadership skills – and they can also serve as perfect vehicles for teachers to begin to put leadership into action at several levels.”

NSDC describes Team to Teach as a “step-by-step book…written in plain, easy-to-read language.” Jolly provides backgrounders that set the stage for each of 10 chapters designed to familiarize teacher teams with a proven process that can help them become high-functioning working groups. The book also offers a comprehensive set of tools that facilitators will find useful along the way.

Anne is a second-career teacher who began life as a lab researcher and evolved into an accomplished middle grades science educator — and Alabama’s 1994 Teacher of the Year. A charter member of the Teacher Leaders Network, Anne continues to consult with schools and districts interested in translating the learning-community concept into a viable vehicle for everyday school improvement. We invited her to talk about Team to Teach and the current state of PLC development in American schools.

Continue below to read our conversation and learn more about Team to Teach.

Teaching Beyond the Moment

In another reflection on the school year past, an upper-elementary special education teacher in New England wrote:

There are various levels to my reflecting. There is the surface or situational level. This is the level where I ask myself questions that affected this school year only. Questions like:

• Did I implement best practices that targeted my students’ IEP goals, while aligning with state standards and district grade level curriculum expectations? Check.

• Did I collaborate with colleagues in ways that enhanced the learning for our students? Check.

• Did the students’ academic and social development progress? Check.

• Did I initiate opportunities that helped me strengthen the bridge of communication between home and school? Check.

• Did I participate in meaningful professional development opportunities to guide my learning and growth both personally and professionally? Check.

There are more questions like these, but you get the point. It was a great year, from a big-picture point of view.

Then there’s my never-ending situational reflection, which happend day by day as I teach through the year. This is deeper and shifts me toward asking questions such as: How is what I am doing helping this child for tomorrow and beyond?

As a special education teacher in inclusion settings, it is easy to get caught up in driving the curriculum. This never felt right for me, but each year is a new year of swimming against the tide because I must work with colleagues who are definitely driven by the curriculum schedule, the testing schedule, the contrived teacher guides, and their grade books.

It’s my job to swim right alongside, yet I am constantly feeling the urgency to teach beyond the moment. As I reflect on this year, I can say I am proud that I never tired when striving to find the balance between my “teach beyond the moment” philosophy and some of my colleagues’ “teach for a grade...or a test...or just keep driving the curriculum along” philosophy. Even so, disappointments did occur.

We taught math every morning. We balanced whole class lessons with small group lessons and, when needed, individual instruction. Yet I was still up against that “learn this for a grade” philosophy. A few students did poorly on a practice test. Following the completion of their work, my co-teacher had the students switch papers and grade one another’s (ugh).

Once the “grade” was given, the students reviewed their work. My co-teacher and I worked with students one-to-one to provide additional examples. The first student was so disappointed that he did not get a good “grade.” With encouragement and determination, he attended to this reteaching session. I began to see the spark in his eyes. He had that moment that all teachers love to see…and he said, “Oh, yeah! I get it!” He was able to apply this knowledge by completing a few more problems. I worked to get his focus on his effort and determination, not the grade. He was beaming. I was thrilled.

Next came the moment when he was able to self-correct his practice test. The beam in his eyes was still present, but dimming as he walked back to me to hand in his self-corrections. I continued to focus on how proud he should be of his efforts and determination. I mentioned that this is exactly what all successful students need to do every time they learn. He looked like he wanted to say something. I asked him what he thought about what I said, and he answered, “That’s good. But what is my grade?” Sigh.

Grades are important. I understand that. Yet this student's love of learning is being squashed by the fact that he is mixed up in striving for grades that just put a number on the moment. His learning differences require him to work harder than his same-aged peers. In addition to teaching the facts, I have strongly focused on providing him with strategies to encourage and empower his learning process. However, the emphasis placed on grades and learning "just for the moment" (or the big test) was far too great in this situation for me to overcome. But I will continue to strive to helps students find the balance, working to guide the transfer of their confidence and knowledge to future situations.

My focus is not only the product, but the process. This can be a sensitive area when the world of special education and general education merge within the integrated classroom.

Schools on the Brink

A brief reflection on the 2008-09 school year, from a middle grades teacher in Los Angeles:

When I reflect beyond my own classroom, I grow increasingly concerned about how next year will play out as we grapple with teacher layoffs and a state economy on the brink of collapse. Based on seniority, we're losing one of our terrific young sixth grade teachers and retaining a teacher whose students cuss at him and charge out of class with regularity. We're losing two of our administrators, our special ed coordinator, and our literacy coach to other schools because of layoffs and seniority issues.

And I continue to resent and reflect on how often I see the words "bad teachers" in local newspapers. Another one today...

NPR (June 17): LA's Urban Schools Hardest Hit by Teacher Layoffs

Reflecting on My Teaching Year

When Larry asked “What are your reflections on this past school year?” several teachers in the TLN Forum discussion group offered up their thoughts. We’ll post several of these over the summer.

Marsha, a middle grades math and science teacher, wrote:

My idea that if I taught lots of open-ended problems that my kids would still OK on the math state assessment came true. I didn't count any of these kinds of open-ended activities for grades because they aren't officially a part of our curriculum. Kids still did the work and the practice, and they learned to concentrate on what they were learning instead of their grade. I will repeat this work again.

My idea that by incorporating lots more data collection devices in my science classes I would advance scientific curiosity was accurate. They loved the probeware. They inquired, tested and became much more capable of posing testable questions and answering them.

One story: I had been using different kinds of probeware in science class, and the kids were beginning to catch on to how you study things. We decided to tape our probes to the surface of globes and have all sorts of different suns (50 watt bulb, 100 watt bulb, etc.) and compare the temperature differences at the equator, the poles and in our midwestern state, using different powers of Sun. They didn't think there would be any data to answer our questions. But when they had all their graphs displaying on the board, they were truly excited. Excited about data! Hurray! Even more, they were convinced they could someday become scientists. The kids that aren't very good at science felt like they understood what was happening and could explain it. It was probably one of the most satisfying teaching experiences of the year because the results made the investment of time worth it. I had about 6 kids who went home and did extension investigations on their own and then brought in data for us to examine.

I didn’t do so well with my idea that I could help foster a love for reading non-fiction and that it would influence their science writing. I felt like my lessons were always just a tad off-target, which kept us from building any momentum or enthusiasm. I need to regroup, rethink and consider if I might not capable of doing this. Maybe just re-calibrating is necessary.

Our grade-level community service projects were successful, and we added a new project. We partnered with Room to Read using a Read-A-Thon and ended up raising $2500 to build a library room in Cambodia. Our kids were completely into it and much of the money (their money, not their folks) came in the form of pennies, nickels and crumpled-up dollar bills. We supported holiday gift bags for six children in foster and group homes. We were able to deliver over 15 large 33-gallon bags filled with many of the basics (new undergarments, bedding, coats and shoes) and we fulfilled all their wishes for presents. And in addition we collected over 13 barrels of food for the nearby food kitchen. I know our kids are lucky to have so much, and in these times, they needed to use their abundance to help others. They did so with enthusiasm, graciousness and big hearts. They learned to organize each other and feel like they can make a difference in the world.

My biggest failure (but one where I learned a ton) was implementing the Argumentation and Evaluation protocol. It was supposed to help me foster better discourse and teach my kids how to critically evaluate articles and lab data. While I do think it worked with lab data, my kids didn't read at a high enough level to be able to use the techniques effectively with scientific articles. It's my first NSF grant, and I'm glad I did this for many reasons even if the technique wasn't as viable as I’d hoped.

New questions I'm pondering: Can I really ever figure out how to improve their writing in science? How can I get our community service spirit to extend to other grade levels within our building? How can I get other teams to see that the whole child is just as important as test scores?

It was a great year. I grew so much as a collaborating partner with my math job-alike colleague. I felt like I did a good job of balancing test prep and whole-child education, we did fantastic community service projects, and my kids tore it up on the state assessments.

Twittering with Parents?

When TLN Forum member Ellen B. asked about using Twitter with parents, tech-besotted Bill Ferriter, The Tempered Radical, had some good thoughts.

Ellen wrote:

I have been thinking about how easy it would be to keep in communication about my classroom with Twitter. What I'd like is feedback and/or stories about how it's worked for you.

1. Have you tried using Twitter with parents? How did that work for you?

2. Is there a downside, provided I have a school-only Twitter account?

I'm not looking to replace the other ways I communicate with parents, but I am looking to expand it beyond relying on my 8th graders to get papers home in a timely manner. Are there other ideas that have worked better for you?

Bill replied:

Twitter On, Ellen! While I'm not Twittering with parents yet---I don't want to have separate accounts for personal and professional use--it's definitely an idea worth pursuing because it's easy times ten for you. The messages that you post in Twitter are short, so it won't take you much time to update parents, and there is no concrete, direct way for people to reply---so you're not generating a ton of responses that you've got to spend time answering.

The other thing that I love is that you can Twitter from anywhere--including most phones--so posting the last minute thing that you think of after you shut down your computer and walk out the door is no sweat at all. The process of making updates is so much easier -- and the expectation for volume of content is so much lower than a teacher website -- that the process of communicating is no longer intimidating.

Another benefit is that parents don't have to be Twittering to follow your update. All Twitter users have their own publicly available page where people can read their Tweets. Here's mine:

http://twitter.com/plugusin

So parents could just bookmark that page and see your updates right away. And each Twitter page has it's own RSS feed, so if you have any tech savvy parents who are using feed readers, they can get your updates automatically.

What barriers can I see? The only one that pops to mind is that parents who are Twitter users can flame you in the @replies section if they wanted to--and those @replies can be seen by a broader community of people than the email blasts that parents pop off every now and then.

But that risk isn't prevented by NOT having a Twitter account for class updates. Parents using Twitter---or writing blogs, or talking at the grocery store, or sending email, or using short-wave radio (I know, I know, I'm exaggerating)---can always find ways to criticize teachers if they want to.

So in the end, I say go for it!

I Need a Little More Help with My Transformation

Making Learning Whole by David Perkins, Jossey-Bass (2008)

Reviewed by Mary Tedrow

Disclaimer: I read (incrementally) the entire text of Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education while sitting in front of my 11th-grade students in Reading Workshop, second block of the day. When I read under those circumstances, I find my mind runs on three tracks: A focus on the reading; a jump to what my students will need from me in the next 25 minutes; and, for professional titles like this book, a jump to how what I am reading will affect this particular classroom.

In this particular reading experience, I did not focus very well. I offer this confession because it led me to believe that, as a classroom teacher, I was not the audience David Perkins was looking for. Otherwise, my brain would have been firing more on the third track: making direct application to my classroom work.

That rarely happened.

Making Learning Whole is Perkins’ argument that education is damaged by breaking knowledge down into discrete parts, which he calls elementitis, a phenomenon that leaves students spitting out fractured facts that have little cohesiveness or application to the subject under study.

He advocates designing course instruction around a “junior version” of the ultimate goals in a course so students can learn the subject as a whole concept -- and then returning to aspects of the “game” that prove difficult to master. Perkins calls this working on the hard parts.

His ongoing analogy refers to how he and so many others learned baseball – first in the junior version of Little League. The complexities of the game are revealed over time and the hard parts are the skill drills any athlete will remember from their days of training.

He continues the baseball analogy through seven chapters that present each of his seven principles (my take on each chapter is in parentheses): Play the Whole Game (reduce elementitis); Make the Game Worth Playing (motivation); Work on the Hard Parts (practice, practice, practice); Play Out of Town (show that knowledge transfers); Uncover the Hidden Game (explore the underpinning structure of a subject; in the case of baseball it is the strategies that lead to winning); Learn from the Team (learning as a social rather than individual activity); Learn the Game of Learning (the old chestnut of growing lifelong-learners).

I agree with Dr. Perkins. I think John Dewey would also agree. I think most vocational teachers, or Yearbook, Art or Music teachers – or any number of others who have been lucky enough to teach a course like the Journalism course I taught for years – would agree. We have all worked with students in a junior version of grown-up games and seen the power it has on student achievement. Students learn through the process of doing over and over, working on the hard parts, uncovering – as Perkins would say – the hidden game concealed within the grown-up games.

I think where I’d quibble with Perkins is over his subtitle: How Seven Principles of Teaching can Transform Education. This book offers little practical advice that might help instructors who resist leaving their safe academic curricula to make the uncomfortable leap to teaching the whole game. Little is provided to bridge that gap through visualization or application of his theories. No helping hand is offered to teachers who struggle against a tide of mandates that encourage ever more elementitis, grasping for any means to offer substantive learning experiences for their students.

After explaining his take on what I read as constructivism, Perkins offers a one-pager at the end of each of his seven principle chapters titled “Wonders of Learning.” All of the five or six paragraphs at the end of each chapter begin with “I wonder” as in “I wonder how to develop a good theory of difficulty for what I’m teaching?” Questions, I assume, designed to set readers on the course to transformation.

Frankly, I wondered when I’d have the time to re-think my entire theory of teaching while most of my waking hours are consumed by mandated state tests, data collection, grade reports, increasing student enrollment, committee meetings, grading and responding to student work. I need a little more help to go through my transformation. I suspect those who don’t spend leisurely hours in a think tank environment might as well. The theory is great, but without more step by step assistance, Perkins’ ideas are unlikely to revolutionize the practice of teachers too busy to look beyond next week’s plans.

As I thumb back through this book, I don’t see the usual evidence of my high engagement with a professional title – the highlighting, post-it notes and scribbled plans in the margin. On a couple occasions, however, what Perkins said did lead me into thoughts about my own students and their next 25 minutes.

I like the graphic on page 104. It shows three ways to respond to student confusion. It might be helpful for reaching those teachers who are stuck in “blame the student” mode. I also made note of questions he offered to get students thinking. The ones I wrote down: What’s going on here? What makes you say that? and What makes this hard? I’m always looking for good inquiry questions.

The sports analogy works, the theory is acceptable. But in all honesty, David Perkins did not offer enough to overcome my distraction, and I won’t be recommending this book to my teaching peers. I suspect it will be required reading in his Harvard Graduate School of Education courses.

Mary Tedrow teaches high school English and journalism and co-directs the Northern Virginia Writing Project. She is a National Board Certified Teacher and a former Fellow of the Teacher Leaders Network.

City Kids on the Front Row

City Kids, City Schools, edited by William Ayers, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gregory Miche and Pedro Noguero. The New Press, 2008.

Reviewed by Marjorie Larner

If you were suddenly transported to a desert island with your urban school in tow, and you could only have one book, I would strongly recommend City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row. Whether you are looking for practical ideas for the classrooms; research and statistics; essays from related fields of social justice, politics and history; or spoken word, poetry, memoir or fiction, you can find a beautifully written, relevant and thought-provoking selection.

This book will stimulate discussion, deepen understanding and inspire further teaching and learning to reach every child in our schools. This is not light reading, nor is it disheartening or tedious. There is a vitality and energy in each selection that leaves me with more understanding of what I can do and why I must continue in the effort— feeling motivated rather than discouraged.

As a collection, it works as a resource where you can search by writer, topic or genre. It is also a powerful read with a cumulative impact if you start at the beginning and read sequentially. I find myself regularly going back and re-reading, finding pieces to share with colleagues, to use in workshops and seminars or to offer to students for examples and inspiration. My copy became so full of sticky notes that I had to start color-coding them.

City Kids, City Schools is a treasure trove for anyone with interest and concern for our children and education, looking for authentic perspectives, information, and real stories from people in the front row, engaged in the everyday struggle of school. The list of well-known authors and everyday heroes is long. You can move from

• Linda Christensen’s account of discovering a way (through a “Curriculum of Empathy”) to get her students involved in a novel by teaching them to “enter the lives of characters in literature, history, or real life whom they might dismiss or misunderstand…”

• to Marion Unas Esguerra’s poem “morning papers,” dealing with “issues of language, culture, prejudice, and assimilation that many immigrant children in urban areas—and their parents—must confront...”

• to Grace Boggs’ call to "root students and faculty in communities…and engage them in the kind of real problem solving in their localities that nurture a love of place and provides practice in creating the sustainable economies, equality and community that are the responsibilities of citizenship.” 

As Ruby Dee writes in the foreword, “City Kids, City Schools holds the banner high for a more rewarding quality of life (by) reminding us of our responsibility as citizens to work for, to insist on, and to ensure a free, quality education to every child. It will not happen without our vigilance, our profoundest commitment—especially those of us whose voices, like mine, like those in this book—have been nourished by some of the great minds that steady and enlighten our lives. This book engages all our sensibilities toward the glorification of our remarkable species.”

If you were allowed a second book on your desert island, consider an earlier and similar collection also edited by William Ayers (and others), titled City Kids, City Teachers (1996), now available in a new edition. In the foreword to that book, the late Ossie Davis wrote a summary that applies to both of these wonderful resources. “In this book, our cities’ students and teachers share their problems, their prospects, and their plans. It is vital that all of us look deep into these pages, to listen and to learn….Look to these pages for guidance and light.”

Marjorie Larner is an instructional coach in the Colorado public schools and a facilitator for the National School Reform Faculty. Also see Larner's recent interview of Managing Diverse Classrooms (ASCD, 2008)

Teacher Voice on Teacher Evaluation

Want to stir some lively conversation among any gathering of teachers? Bring up teacher evaluation and assessment. For decades, teachers, administrators and policymakers have sparred over the issue -- with little in the way of progress. Most teacher evaluation is still principal-driven, drive-by, and checklist oriented. That could change as the new Administration begins to target -- and fund -- teaching quality initiatives, in concert with the Gates Foundation and other philanthropies.

Will teachers have a voice in this debate? Two TLN members from California aren't waiting to be asked. In a recent joint interview with the New York group TeachersCount, Anthony Cody and David B. Cohen described some fundamental changes they'd like to see in teacher evaluation and assessment -- and warned of the consequences of a narrow approach to making judgments about teaching quality.

Here's a sample:

1. What are some of the problems with current teacher evaluation practices?

Anthony Cody: Time is a big factor. Recent surveys of principals have revealed they have inadequate time for observing and evaluating their teachers. My experience as a Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) coach in my district supports this because over the course of two years I saw dozens of evaluations that were incomplete. Many of these teachers should have been enrolled in PAR, and might have wound up being terminated, but their principals did not have the time to follow through.

This also reflects another weakness of our practice -- that evaluation is the sole responsibility of a few site administrators, and is primarily used as a means of eliminating “bad” teachers. Evaluation tends to occur in the form of a few isolated observations, with little connection to the professional growth of most teachers.

David Cohen: We also see that the tools and training for evaluation are rather uneven. Too many evaluators are going into classrooms armed with checklists that aren’t nearly up to the task of capturing the complexity of what they might observe. And it’s not just the materials, but the evaluators themselves who need development.

I’m fortunate to work in a district where secondary school teachers are mostly evaluated by a fellow teacher serving as the instructional supervisor. Unlike traditional department chairs, these teachers have had some additional training in conducting evaluations. It’s a long-standing and popular practice at this point, with the added benefit of providing teachers with evaluators who know the subject matter. If your principal used to teach English, and you're the AP physics instructor helping students with the calculus involved in their lab work, there seems to be an inherent limitation in that evaluative relationship.

2. What improvements would we see in your ideal evaluation system?

Anthony: We may be able to get beyond the time crunch for the principal if we re-imagine evaluation as something more positive, more collaborative and more integrated with professional culture at a school site.

David: This is a shift in mindset: let’s appeal to the best in professional educators. I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t want to be effective in the classroom. But we know that in order to maximize effectiveness, we need the opportunity to analyze and reflect on our work, and use that process to improve.

The current pace of teaching, and the student loads for secondary school teachers in particular, present huge obstacles to that kind of work: when you’re trying to monitor and manage the learning of 150 students or more, you’re in survival mode too often. If more schools would build in time for careful study of our own work, collaboration with colleagues and guidance by teacher leaders and administrators, we’d be far ahead of current practices. I’m certain we’d end up talking more about students’ learning and achievement, which goes a long way towards solving other issues in the classroom (like classroom management) without letting those issues consume you.

Other interview questions include:

3. Why do teachers resist the use of student performance in teacher evaluations?

4. What are the benefits of improved evaluation if tenured teachers are almost impossible to remove?

5. How does teacher evaluation fit in with current reform efforts?

6. What is the role of teacher evaluation in elevating teacher quality? Should we have performance pay to reward teachers with the best evaluations?

7. How has NCLB affected teacher evaluation?

Read the entire interview with Anthony and David here.

You Had Me at the Cover

The Book Whisperer, by Donalyn Miller, Jossey-Bass (2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Rigsbee, NBCT

I was excited but a little nervous as I pulled the brown envelope holding Donalyn Miller’s book The Book Whisperer out of my mailbox. As a reading teacher, I have been familiar with Miller’s work for a couple of years, having read her Book Whisperer blog upon occasion. But my new role as book reviewer made me reach for that envelope with trepidation.

How could I possibly be unbiased? The book would contain commentary on my very life…would how I teach reading be questioned? Would I see myself on those pages and have my work affirmed, or would I feel threatened, my teaching techniques rejected by another teacher, half the country away?

But upon pulling the book from the unassuming envelope, I found myself wanting to whisper: “You had me at the cover…you had me at the cover.”

The cover represents all things good and beautiful – a clear blue sky, a princess dress, beach sand, and the focal point…an open book. Immediately I wanted to be that little girl standing on that shore in my princess dress, sun beaming on my face, wind lightly blowing the pages as I read. Yes, Donalyn Miller, you had me at the cover.

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child was recently released by Jossey-Bass and can be seen advertised on numerous education sites and e-newsletters, with its pretty blue cover beckoning to teachers across the country. And well it should, as this book is chock full of literacy wisdom that I myself would like to see schools embrace as they look for strategies that will boost student achievement in reading but also bolster students’ reading dispositions. In classrooms like Miller’s, students are learning to love reading and to adopt literacy as a life-long habit.

I did find my practice validated as I turned the pages of The Book Whisperer. Ms. Miller and I have similar ideas about what a classroom should look like and feel like when it comes to reading. I, too, have studied the works of Atwell and Fountas & Pinnell and agree that one classroom plus one book times six weeks and a pile of comprehension worksheets is not the way to go. Miller does an exceptional job of describing the logistics of her classroom, which most likely looks different from what many would picture. 

Teachers in my own school have asked, “But how can my students all be reading different books at the same time?” The Book Whisperer explains in detail not only how this type of classroom can happen but also how students learn to love reading and even perform better on those pesky standardized tests as a result (not one of Miller’s students has failed her state’s reading assessment in four years!).

The Book Whisperer, ironically, spoke to me loudly. For example, I was highlighting early into the book and this quote on page 18 struck me as something that should be on a poster:

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.

Ms. Miller does the job of changing children’s lives through reading in her classroom. She tells them that “reading is a university course in life,” and then she enrolls them in that course and leads them to be successful in it, day by day.

There were many times during the reading of this book that I nodded in agreement (Round Robin and Popcorn reading do not work!), and there were times when I cheered out loud (Miller called Accelerated Reader “the worst distortion of reading I can think of.”) There were other times when I questioned my own teaching. Miller’s desire for teachers to think about the cute activities that we’re so proud of, activities that have little literary merit, made me squirm as I thought of the Life Saver airplanes my students make when we read about the Wright Brothers.

And there were times when I wished that Ms. Miller was sitting right with me, and we were just two reading teachers having a conversation, because I did find myself questioning some things as I read. My classroom is full of what Miller calls “Developing Readers” (they’re called remedial in my school) – and I feel that the example of Kelsey whose mother reads “to her and with her” doesn’t fall in line with my student Devon who refuses to read and instead draws pictures of his brother’s tombstone in class. (He doesn’t have a mother reading to him.)

And Devon, like most of my students, but unlike Miller’s, gives me one-word answers to questions on my reading survey (an answer to “What kind of books do you like to read?” would elicit “None” from a student like Devon.) I have my own tricks that I use with Devon, of course, but I would love to know more about what Ms. Miller does in her classroom to motivate students who could be defined in a category even lower than her “Developing Readers.”

And although Miller does a good job of describing her “vast library,” I still can hear the pushback from classroom teachers who will say, “I don’t have thousands of books, and I can’t afford to buy them. What can I do?”

These are questions I hope to ask Donalyn Miller someday, as we pursue the teacher-to-teacher conversation that started as I read The Book Whisperer. I found Ms. Miller to be a flexible (so what if her students don’t read all 40 books as required?) and knowledgeable educator (she knows the research that literacy scholars have conducted and she understands the results of the “action research” from her own classroom).

And like all good books, The Book Whisperer leaves the reader wanting more. I’ll wait patiently for the sequel while I re-read Whisperer during my school’s Book Study (I’ll be sharing her idea with my principal immediately).

Thank you, Donalyn, for showing us what literacy instruction can and should be. My hope is that The Book Whisperer will change the teaching of reading, even if one classroom at a time, and that every teacher who sees this book will be invited in, as I was, by the very cover.

Cindi Rigsbee is a literacy teacher/coach at Gravelly Hill Middle School in Durham NC. She blogs at The Dream Teacher and is currently a finalist for 2009-10 National Teacher of the Year.

Review: Strength-Based School Improvement

Building Teachers' Capacity for Success by Pete Hall & Alisa Simeral, ASCD (2008)

Reviewed by Ellen Holmes, NBCT

The authors of Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success do not sugar coat what sort of diet the teaching profession will need if it is going to get into shape. They are not afraid to challenge long-held notions regarding tenure, differences in teacher quality, and the measurement of success.

Just as any good doctor will tell a patient who wants to change their weight, it takes time, persistence of focus, and actually doing the things that we know are good for us. Many of us have searched for “silver bullets” to speed along this health improvement – we have focused on buying products and programs – but have not focused on changing daily, life-long habits. As a result, we almost always fall far short of our goal.

In the world of school improvement this same pattern of failure exists. We know that the number-one way to improve student learning is to improve teaching, and yet most school improvement efforts are focused on things and programs to teach with. It is the rare case that job-embedded, formative, on-going, needs-based professional development is systematically tailored towards individual teachers. Today’s teachers have more information about how students learn, how to teach, and better tools for measuring student outcomes than any other generation of professionals before them -- but there exists a significant gap between knowing and doing. In Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success, an approach for setting us on a healthful professional path is clearly defined, beginning with the first chapter, "Strength-Based School Improvement."

For perspective, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I am an employee of an NEA state affiliate. I am tasked with supporting schools in the midst of planning and implementing school improvement plans and activities. In these schools there is always a tension between tenure and teacher quality. Because I work in a collective bargaining state, it is not always easy to get the “right people in the right seats on the bus.”

The framework of peer coaching and formative evaluation outlined in Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success certainly seems to provide a promising structure for elevating discussions about teacher quality above the usual frustrated tones that tenure clauses can create. One of the many strengths of this text is that the role of administrators and peer coaches are clearly defined in this framework regarding their roles as leaders. Peer coaches are servant leaders (I read that as “teacher leader”) and administrators are visible leaders. For me, these clear definitions are ones I will now routinely integrate into my professional development sessions.

Although I am a teacher association employee, I am at heart a National Board Certified Teacher concerned with the future of my profession. Professional self-reflection is a part of my own improvement repertoire, and I can personally vouch for the truth that this action is probably the single most important one required for improving teacher quality.

Within Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success, the authors have provided a “continuum of self-reflection.” The book carries the subtitle A Collaborative Approach for Coaches and School Leaders, and it describes how administrators and teacher leaders in coaching positions can use the continuum to determine the best strategies for helping teachers become better practitioners. I believe this would also be an important self-monitoring tool for practicing classroom teachers themselves. Each of these tools and other supporting materials can be downloaded as PDFs from a web source that is unlocked with a provided code. This kind of resource is truly valuable to me and to others who also find themselves engaged in a constant search for better and better tools to help schools improve.

I am left wondering -- dreaming, really – about what would it be like to work in a school where this framework for strength-based school improvement was in place. This is definitely a book I would want my colleagues and administrators to read.

Ellen Holmes is a Distinguished Educator at the Maine Department of Education.