Building Teachers Capacity For Success

Educators know that teachers are a school's most essential strength. In Building Teachers' Capacity for Success, authors Pete Hall (winner of the 2004 ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award) and Alisa Simeral offer a straightforward plan to help site-based administrators and instructional coaches collaborate to bring out the best in every teacher, build a stronger and more cohesive staff, and achieve greater academic success. Their model of Strength-Based School Improvement is an alternative to a negative, "deficit approach" focused on fixing what's wrong. Instead, they show administrators, coaches, and teachers how to achieve their goals by working together to maximize what's right.

“It’s not the doing that matters; it’s the thinking about the doing,” said John Dewey. As a teacher, you work hard to make a positive difference in the lives of your students. But this kind of progress doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen accidentally. It’s the result of intentionality, planning, effort . . . and thought. The difference between learning a skill and being able to implement it effectively resides in your capacity to engage in deep, continuous thought about that skill. In other words, recognizing why you do something is often more important than knowing how to do it. To help you deepen your thinking and reflect on your capacity as an educator, Pete Hall and Alisa Simeral return to the Continuum of Self-Reflection, which they introduced to coaches and administrators in their best-selling Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success, and redesign its implementation so you can take charge of your own professional growth. In these pages, you’ll find tools specifically made to enhance self-reflection on professional practice, including the Continuum of Self-Reflection and the Reflective Cycle. You’ll be able to assess your current self-reflective tendencies, identify opportunities to reflect on your instruction, and begin to forge a path toward continuous growth and educational excellence.

As a school administrator, instructional coach, or teacher leader, you know that reflective teachers are effective teachers. But how can you help teachers become self-reflective practitioners whose thoughtful approach translates into real gains for student achievement? In Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice—a companion volume to their teacher-oriented book Teach, Reflect, Learn—authors Pete Hall and Alisa Simeral draw on lessons learned from educators across grade levels, content areas, and district demographics to present a definitive guide to developing a culture of reflective practice in your school. Hall and Simeral expand on ideas originally presented in Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success to help you gain a clear understanding of your role and responsibilities—and those of your teachers—within each stage of the Continuum of Self-Reflection. Armed with the book’s real-life examples and research-based tools, you’ll learn how to determine the current location of all stakeholders on the continuum and how teacher-leadership activities, transformational feedback, and strategic coaching can move them forward. The end result? A schoolwide culture that both values reflection and uses it to ensure that teachers—and their students—reach their fullest potential.

While most educators believe working in teams is valuable, not all team efforts lead to instructional improvement. Through richly detailed case studies The Power of Teacher Teams demonstrates how schools can transform their teams into more effective learning communities that foster teacher leadership. The benefits of successful teacher teams include: improved performance for both teachers and students; meaningful professional development; group adoption of a new curriculum; shared insights into student work; better classroom management; support for new teachers; new roles for teacher leaders; and opportuniteis for mentor support.School leaders will find guidelines, methods, and concrete steps for building and sustaining effective teacher teams. Also included is a DVD with video case studies and one CD with reproducibles. The most important reason for building teacher teams is to enhance student learning through improved instruction, and that story is at the heart of this book.

There is increasing recognition that teachers will play a key role in preparing students for the challenges of the future. We expect teachers to equip students with the skill set and knowledge required for success in an increasingly global, digital, complex, uncertain and volatile world.

What if you had a collaborative process of looking at student data that could pinpoint student gaps in learning and suggest effective strategies to close those gaps? What if you knew not only what you should start doing to enhance student learning, but also what you should stop doing because it hasn't given you the hoped-for results? Enter Achievement Teams. This is not another program that's here today and gone tomorrow; it's a timeless approach that any school or district can replicate that focuses on the most significant variable in student achievement: teaching. In Achievement Teams, Steve Ventura and Michelle Ventura offer a framework based on John Hattie's Visible Learning research that makes teacher collaboration more efficient, rigorous, satisfying, and effective. Think of it as a systematic treasure hunt for best practices using real data on your students. The authors walk you through the Achievement Teams four-step meeting protocol: * In Step 1, teams focus on the evidence from a pre-assessment to provide specific feedback to students and teachers about concepts and skills that students did and did not learn. * In Step 2, teams use that evidence to establish SMART goals for both teachers and students. * In Step 3, teams summarize the collected data and make inferences around students' mastery levels. * In Step 4, teachers select high-impact strategies directly targeted to student needs. A post-assessment reveals what did and didn't work. The authors provide a plethora of resources along the way, including reflection activities to extend your thinking and a variety of helpful downloadable templates designed to facilitate the work. If you're a teacher or leader who is interested in maximizing student achievement, this book is for you.

At a time when there is a high demand for capacity building in schools, many administrators and practitioners find little if any empirical studies on how this can be achieved in practice. Through the eyes of an experienced researcher, schoolteacher, senior administrator and university lecturer, this book captures how a low decile school in New Zealand successfully built its capacity for improvement. Dr. Patricia Stringer allows the reader, who could be anyone with an interest in education, leadership and school development, to identify contextual problems and difficulties that limit capacity building and suggests pathways to overcome them. This is an easy to read and enjoyable book, but, one that digs deep into practice. The researcher spent over a year working with the staff, board and parents of this school discovering and recording authentic information about this school’s successful journey to success. For the researcher, this was an exciting experience; one that needs to be shared with the wider educational community. A must read book.

A school-wide model for addressing individual needs The greatest goal of education is to ensure equity while enhancing learning and academic success for all students. And yet, it is impossible for one teacher to meet the extensive needs of all students in his or her classroom. The traditional schooling model cannot provide for this complexity and leaves educators perplexed. The solution is a collaborative approach where “every child deserves a team” to surround them with supports that recognize their strengths and challenges. Collaborative Response offers a school-wide model for addressing students’ individual needs. The three fundamental components of the model are: collaborative structures and processes; data and evidence; and continuum of supports. In this book, readers will find: Entry points for beginning this work Potential pitfalls of the approach Case studies from schools that have adopted the model Access to a website with tools, templates, case studies, and more With a focus on quality classroom instruction, this book shares examples from schools and districts that have transformed how they respond to the needs of all learners.