Posted by: Jai Glossop in School Entry on March 24th, 2011
In the past 2 blog posts, I garnered some ideas on a different approach to teacher coaching.
Instead of the traditional — to spread out what is often an hour per week of interaction between coach and teacher — I asked what a 50-hour-all-in-one-week coach and teacher collaboration might look like.
Some of my peeps have sent even more ideas, so I wanted to post them.
Norm Atkins of Relay University (formerly TeacherU) points out
Yes. I think tennis camp is good complement to tennis lessons. (But beware) just one week. In tennis, intense repetition helps, but needs to be repeated over time or is lost…..
Bill Olsen of Noble Street College Prep has some crazy ideas! I love it. He gets us out of the normal “box” — which is simply thinking about teacher moves during a lesson.
1. 7 days of exercise around the teacher’s fitness goals with the goal to create a sustainable exercise habit.
Posted by: Jai Glossop in School Entry on March 19th, 2011
Yesterday I blogged about 4 paths to teacher coaching that doesn’t accomplish much.
I focused on “Failure 3″ which I think is common in “No Excuses” type charter schools, including ours.
Do traditional schools face more of
Failure 1 (Lack of Trust/Lack of Openness to feedback)
and
Failure 2 (Questionable Technical Fixes)?
I don’t know. My guess is yes.
The Washington Post recently ran an excellent article* written by Stephanie McCrummen. The headline was “D.C. teacher evaluation becomes a delicate conversation.”
(Quick semantic point. What the article describes is evaluation mixed with coaching. At the bottom of my blog today, I offer a thought about that).
A cautionary note before I dive in. The article includes excerpts. Who the heck knows what the full transcript looks like.
Posted by: Jai Glossop in School Entry on February 25th, 2011
“Why is it,” Dr. Reedom mused recently, “that you can have a group of students in one teacher’s room and every student is engaged and on task and having success, but you can take that same group of kids and put them in a different teacher’s room and it is complete chaos? We have all seen this happen—what is behind this?
Really, it is more about what the teacher is doing than what the student is doing. And so as it turns out, what the teacher does matters a great deal.”
A former teacher and school administrator and currently a nationally acclaimed trainer, Dr. Reedom sees a direct correlation between the perhaps mundane classroom management strategies a teacher employs and the teacher’s capacity to deliver high-quality instruction.
“I don’t care how much you know about chemistry, or math, or literacy: if you can’t build relationships with students, you’re not going to have success as a teacher. When teachers know how
Posted by: Jai Glossop in School Entry on February 21st, 2011
These 2 lines show large groups of teachers in a study. Before I share what the graph shows, what is your gut reaction to what you see?
My reaction is: each line goes up steeply at the beginning, but then levels off.
Okay, new graph below. These are 3 groups of teachers. What is your gut reaction?
My reaction is: those 3 groups of teachers seem very similar.
Now let me explain. Both graphs are from a 2010 paper by Jennifer Rice King.
1. The first graph is teacher success (as measured by value-added student test scores) based on years of experience. It looks like steep teacher growth — they get better for some reason in Year 2 — and then levels off in the later years.
Posted by: admin in School Entry on February 18th, 2011
In days of yore the knights of the realm fought valiantly to protect their castles and children just love these stories of bravery and gallantry and what better way for kids to develop their imaginative skills than by letting them pretend to defend their own little wooden toys castles and kingdom from all those enemies only a blink of an eye away. Whether it’s Teddy launching a surprise attack on the ramparts or those naughty dinosaurs attacking the drawbridge, a little knight or princess will spend hours making sure the castle’s safety remains intact and that all those enemies are repelled. Toy castles for boys and girls are truly a mine of endless imaginative fun and all playrooms should have a corner devoted to them. Raise the drawbridge!
Posted by: Jai Glossop in School Entry on February 14th, 2011
Expectations.
It’s a challenge for all teacher prep programs. What a 20 to 22 year old college undergrad or grad student expects rookie teaching to be like. Versus the gritty reality in February, after 6 months in the trenches.
I blogged 2 months ago about an excellent article Brent M passed along to me on this very topic.
But that’s all wonky. There’s a graph and stuff. I challenged my colleagues to tell the same story differently, more emotionally. With music.
Colin chose these 2 videos to tell the compare/contrast story. First is what the future teacher imagines.
Posted by: Jai Glossop in School Entry on February 9th, 2011
Duke beat Carolina last night. We’re ranked 5th in the nation. Or 7th. It depends who you ask. There are 4 major ranking systems.
The ranking is almost entirely based on outputs: wins and losses. There’s a little bit of personal judgment involved.
Ed Schools get ranked, too. How? This is a recurring theme of this blog.
Joe at KIPP DC and Nick at New Visions sent me this NY Times article.
Now U.S. News & World Report is planning to give A through F grades to more than 1,000 teachers’ colleges, and many of the schools are unhappy, marching to the principal’s office to complain the system is unfair.
Here is the letter from concerned deans.
Disclosure: I’m on NCTQ’s advisory board. I have seen some of the early drafts of grading system. Here is how US News describes the effort.
Now I blogged about the US News existing method a year ago. I wrote:
Yesterday I blogged about 4 paths to teacher coaching that doesn’t accomplish much.
Duke beat Carolina last night. We’re ranked 5th in the nation. Or 7th. It depends who you ask. There are 4 major ranking systems.