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professional development for educators ’ Category
“Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
‘Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain’t been there before.”
― Shel Silverstein
I have officially been observing and teaching in a high school classroom for nearly three weeks now. I have to say, despite the fact that I rise much earlier in the morning, have upped my daily intake of strong black coffee, and find myself struggling to remember what I should do if technology fails me (this happened while conducting a poetry lab and I couldn’t for the life of me get Pandora to operate at the “music station”) or kids become rambunctious; I feel surprisingly upbeat, optimistic and excited to get in front of the classroom and teach.
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professional development for educators |
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Tags: Jamie Kimmes, Shel Silverstein
Observe other teachers.
Good or bad, in your content area or out, at your grade level or not, observing other teachers is the single best way I invigorate my teaching practice. After a particularly disastrous transition from rural Mississippi to Oakland, California, I dedicated my prep period once a week to observing strong teachers around the city. Someone, somewhere, was teaching my students successfully, and I was determined to find them and learn what worked. These observations helped fine-tune my practice by showing me ways to use time effectively, give regular student feedback, and improve my classroom management. Sometimes my only take-away was “Well, I’m definitely not going to…”
Read a book.
Not an education book, though. A book about leadership or psychology or time management. Teachers are leaders and we should investigate [at least some of the] literature available about motivation. From Carol Dweck’s Mindset and Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers to Stephen R. Covey’s The 8th Habit and Robert K. Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership, we don’t have to re-invent the wheel when trying to motivate ourselves and our students to achieve excellence.
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professional development for educators |
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Tags: Cassie Duprey, observation, teacher prep
As a teenager, there was nothing I hated more than icebreakers. I used to dread the first week of school; it was inevitable that we’d be slogging through some folksy getting-to-know-you activity in every one of our six periods. You know the ones—Two Truths and a Lie, toss a ball, learn a name. Couldn’t we all just sing that song from The King & I and call it good?
We use icebreakers on the first day of class because it’s tradition. We did it in school; teacher preparation textbooks encourage us to do it. Fortunately, the Southwest Washington high school didn’t know or care about my long history with those cutesy games. Without meaning to, they softened my longtime cynicism. They invited me to Challenge Day.
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professional development for educators, teaching strategies |
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Tags: acceptance, challenge day, icebreakers, professional development, safety, students
Why can’t we fix the teacher evaluation system? Maybe our newest tool, the 2010 Model Core Teaching Standards from the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Committee (InTASC) will be the fix. These standards, adopted as the evaluation tool for graduates of Oregon Colleges of Education and the proposed basis for teacher evaluation in all Oregon school districts, may help. The process, though, can have both positive and negative consequences.
First, the positive. A set of “professional practice standards, setting one standard for performance that will look differently at different developmental stages of the teacher’s career” (Council of Chief State Officers, Model Core Teaching Standards, p.1) can develop a common language for K-12 educators and teacher preparation programs. Such a common language would be helpful to the many mentor teachers who so carefully guide our novice teachers through their first student teaching experiences. Right now we in the Colleges of Education have forms that reflect TSPC (Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, the licensing agency) requirements with descriptors that often do not parallel those used in the daily practice of classrooms. How much better it would be to have the new teacher, the veteran teacher, and the university supervisor speaking the same language.
The standards for judgment also could become clearer if those standards reflected “stages of development.” Instead of the student teacher equating the evaluation scale with a grade (“I want a 6 because that means an A”), the scale could reflect teachers’ growth process as an educator. Too many people assume that, because both the new and the veteran teacher have job descriptions that are exactly alike, all teachers at initial licensure will perform exactly like a more veteran teacher. While more years of service do not guarantee greater proficiency, allowing for well-described and well-understood standards of development should open doors to better evaluation and enhanced professional development. Just as state standards for curriculum have allowed for a more common understanding among teachers of what an average third grader or tenth grader should know, the application of these standards can allow better conversation about teachers’ work.
Now, the negative.
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professional development for educators, teacher performance evaluations |
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Tags: model core teaching standards, professional development for teachers, teacher effectiveness, teacher evaluation, teacher preparation
I love reform. I’m excited that as a state and nation we are looking at making changes to public education. But sometimes in moving forward, it’s good to look back.
I’ve been moved to look back at my earlier career by the publicity around Jose Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and product of the California middle school where I taught. I’ve been thinking about the Jose days (mid-90s) and the staff and organization of that school. Of course, he is only one student, but there were many new immigrant kids who did quite well there. So what were we doing there that worked?
One thing that we did have was lots of faculty communication across the grade levels. I taught an intense and rigorous program partly because it was jointly developed by all the teachers on the 5th grade team. We met every Wednesday during prep, opened our plan books and shared. As a 5th grade teacher in a 5-8th grade school, I was reminded in staff meetings and in passing about where kids needed to be in order to be successful in later grades. There was a mindset that we were preparing kids for college. It helped that we were a Silicon Valley school sitting in the shadow of Yahoo, Netscape and SGI, where innovation and hard work were cultural norms in the neighborhood.
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education reform, professional development for educators, student achievement, teaching strategies |
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Tags: classroom tactics, collaborative culture, education reform, innovation, learning styles, professional development for teachers, reflection, student achievement, student engagement, teacher effectiveness, teaching strategies
It’s Chalkboard’s core belief that the best way to improve Oregon schools is to strengthen and support our teachers. So we’re thrilled to see this goal put into practice with the Oregon Educator Professional Development Commission’s new teacher resource website, which officially launched on Monday.
The site, www.OregonTeacherQuality.com, serves as a one-stop-shop for educator professional development tools and resources, including links to State and Federal standards, educator preparation programs, and a searchable database and calendar of over 100 useful articles, publications, websites, and events. It looks to be a great first step for anyone interested in becoming a teacher, and will also serve to reinvigorate and engage veteran teachers, keeping everyone up-to-date on the latest research, ideas, and available supports. Read the full press release here.
We’re especially excited about this development as an example of the public sector, private sector, non-profits, and the government coming together for the united purpose of improving educator effectiveness – and therefore, Oregon schools. The Oregon Educator Professional Development Commission was established in 2009 through Senate Bill 443, a joint effort of Chalkboard, the Oregon Education Association, the Oregon Department of Education (which, since then, has been responsible for coordinating the Commission’s work), and others. Two years later, we are now seeing their work reach teachers in a very real, meaningful way.
What do you think of the site? While the it is set to grow, check it out now and offer your own feedback to shape this valuable resource. We can’t wait to see where it goes.
Category:
Chalkboard Project, professional development for educators, teacher effectiveness |
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Tags: education agenda, innovation, inspiration, professional development for teachers, resources, teacher effectiveness
My class of teacher candidates and I are reading Teaching 2030, a book that uses wonderful ideas from practicing teachers to discuss their changing roles. As the title suggests, the authors (Barnett Berry and the TeachersSolutions 2030Team) offer analyses of the present to project a positive future. The book discusses the union movement and its effects on the present roles; learning ecologies and technological changes; differentiated pathways and careers for teachers; and teacherpreneurism and innovation. It is the latter concept – teacherpreneurism – that most intrigues my teacher candidates and me.
First, a definition. Teacherpreneurism is not educational entrepreneurism: recruiting people from outside schools to “fix” what is inside the present schools. Instead, teacherpreneurs are “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 successful, and the skills and commitment to spread their expertise to others – all the while keeping at least one foot firmly in the classroom.” (Teaching 2030, p.136) In other words, the goal of these people would be to work from within to make schools better. The premise is that good teachers, especially, but not exclusively, young ones, want to stay within teaching but not within the cradle to retirement of working only in a classroom. Instead of moving to administration, these newly envisioned roles would allow teachers to work with students but also with their colleagues and students beyond their own classroom in a variety of ways – and they would be paid accordingly, both in personal satisfaction and in salary differentiation.
When my students talked about these ideas, they became interested in what happens in schools now and wondered why these sorts of opportunities don’t seem to exist. So I had them watch videos of the CLASS Project, especially the Sherwood District which is trying anew salary schedule to allow teachers to move in that direction. http://educators4reform.org/participating-districts/sherwood-school-district/ I wanted them to see that in Oregon change has begun. (A side note: many were really surprised how the teachers in the CLASS project talked about the lack of supervision and evaluation before implementing these changes. Most of them have a very limited understanding of the profession they are entering, and I often think how their lack reflects society as a whole.)
We here in Eugene are experiencing yet another round of deep cuts, school closures, and furlough days. All of this publicity discourages my class – will there be jobs for them? And that is why I have them read this book so they can envision an alternative kind of schooling. While Rahm Emmanuel’s comment of “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” came back to bite him, I do agree that this present funding crisis offers us a way to rethink how we teach. Or, more specifically, how children learn. Whether we reexamine our outdated high school Carnegie units and the structures that result or apply technology to allow for individualized instruction in our over-crowded classrooms or some other yet-to-be-thought-of idea, we have the opportunity to create a new future. We Oregonians pride ourselves on innovation in environmental and health issues; why not in education?
Category:
CLASS Project, education reform, professional development for educators, teacher advocacy |
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Tags: advice from students, collaborative culture, education reform, innovation, teacher advocacy, teacher frustration
I was in the middle of my lesson when the literacy coach for my building interrupted me. “Ms. Honnold?” she asked. “I wonder what would happen if you had a student write the steps on the board as you went over them. You know, to give the visual people in your class a way to access what you’re talking about.” As she spoke, the students in my class looked on, clearly unused to someone giving their teacher feedback.
It could have been mortifying. And I’m sure some of you, reading this, are reliving all the horrific teaching moments where someone called you into question in front of your students or undermined your authority in some way. But it wasn’t like that. Instead, it was exactly what I now think of as teacher collaboration at its best: two professionals working together, in the moment, to figure out what is going to serve students best. (more…)
Category:
education reform, professional development for educators, teacher advocacy, teacher effectiveness, teaching strategies |
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Tags: classroom tactics, collaborative culture, education reform, learning styles, reflection, teaching strategies
The minute I signed my name to the papers in front of me, I became a statistic, one of the nearly 50% of teachers who leave after only 3-5 years in the profession. And holding my resignation papers in hand, I couldn’t help but think of how weird it was to become just another number—especially because I’d always seen myself as a teacher who would make it. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have a special calling for teaching, it’s something I’ve been good at, and something I’ve mostly enjoyed. Why would I—or the 50% of other new teachers like me—quit?
For me, it wasn’t the money. Even though teacher compensation is pathetically low—I once calculated my take-home pay, with all the extra hours I put in, at something like $14 an hour—I knew before I started that I wouldn’t make much. I wasn’t in it for money. I didn’t leave because of the difficultly, either: my students and all the challenges they daily brought me were, without a doubt, the best part of my job. I didn’t leave because of nasty coworkers (my coworkers were awesome) or an unsupportive administration (my principal was awesome too) or any of the myriad reasons people cite when they talk about teacher retention or the lack thereof. (more…)
Category:
education reform, professional development for educators, teacher advocacy |
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Tags: education statistics, teacher advocacy, teacher attrition
