Isolation Is The Enemy Of Improvement

Many of the problems afflicting American education are the result of a critical shortage of qualified teachers in the classrooms. The teacher crisis is surprisingly resistant to current reforms and is getting worse. This important book reveals the causes underlying the crisis and offers concrete, affordable proposals for effective reform. Vivian Troen and Katherine Boles, two experienced classroom teachers and education consultants, argue that because teachers are recruited from a pool of underqualified candidates, given inadequate preparation, and dropped into a culture of isolation without mentoring, support, or incentives for excellence, they are programmed to fail. Half quit within their first five years. Troen and Boles offer an alternative, a model of reform they call the Millennium School, which changes the way teachers work and improves the quality of their teaching. When teaching becomes a real profession, they contend, more academically able people will be drawn into it, colleges will be forced to improve the quality of their education, and better-prepared teachers will enter the classroom and improve the profession.

This book is designed to help school leaders critically examine what they should expect from students, how they will know when students have achieved those expectations, and how to design and implement instruction to ensure that every student achieves agreed-upon goals. It asserts that leaders are first and foremost teachers. Chapter 1, "Teaching to High Standards: Understanding What Teachers Need to Know and Be Able to Do," reviews the instructional demands of standards based reform, detailing specific teacher knowledge and skills critical to ensuring that all students achieve to high standards. Chapter 2, "Identifying Teacher Skills in Practice," presents two classroom vignettes illustrating the teaching behaviors described in the previous chapter. Chapter 3, "The Work of Instructional Leadership: Supporting Teachers to Build and Sustain Critical Skills," discusses the kinds of learning opportunities teachers need to build and sustain critical skills, offering examples of how instructional leaders can provide such opportunities by creating new structures for teacher learning and using familiar structures more effectively. Chapter 4, "Leaders as Teachers: Leaders as Learners," identifies potential challenges as instructional leaders take on greater responsibility for focusing on, exploring, and influencing classroom practice. An appendix presents tools for fostering and assessing instructional skills. (Contains 23 references.) (SM).

Contains a set of six operating principles through a fictional dialogue that provides practical guidance to school leaders, including identifying core beliefs, creating a shared vision, and developing and implementing an action plan.

This anthology presents the recommendations of education leaders, and each chapter contributes to a sound conceptual framework and offers specific strategies for developing PLCs. These leaders have found common ground in expressing their belief in the power of PLCs although clear differences emerge regarding their perspectives on the most effective strategy for making PLCs the norm in North America.

Many, perhaps even most schools, are not reaching their potential to be places of collective learning. The authors believe that one of the greatest impediments to realizing this vision is the deleterious effect of traditional systems of teacher evaluation. Rather than infantilizing teachers, we need to empower them. Traditional forms of teacher evaluation have failed. They are riddled with negative expectations about teachers and what motivates them. Taken together, these underlying assumptions form a pernicious cloud of counterproductive expectations that many teachers will "live down to". Inadvertently, the traditional system of teacher evaluation has created a vicious cycle of "self-sealing logic." It is now time for teachers to reclaim their profession, the process of which involves a relentless focus on adult learning: professional learning that is self-directed. The more dynamic and stimulating the culture of adult learning, the more dynamic and stimulating student learning will be.

* Can a school-led system truly become self-improving? * What is the difference between good and great schools? * Who should inspect and regulate? * How should local authorities change? * Is the landscape ahead one of all schools in partnerships? The English schools' system is at a crossroads. This landmark collection of essays brings together some of the country's leading education thinkers and practitioners. Their polemic is intended to help teachers, school leaders, governors, researchers and policy makers think deeply about future directions. 'As a Minister, I would ask which organisation was responsible for resolving a particular problem in education, only to be told: 'Don't worry, Minister - it's no longer the DFE. That is now a responsibility of the School-Led System. They will be delivering it.' Often, when you probed a little deeper, you discovered that the school-led system was nowhere near as well formed and ever present as some Ministers and senior civil servants liked to think.' David Laws 'This is a time of great possibility. Teachers are attempting to do extraordinary things. If we had more courage to shape our schools around what we believe to be a good education, then we could make life so much better not just for teachers but for the students we serve.' Peter Hyman 'For a self-improving system to be truly successful and to have a significant impact, it requires the highest performing schools to be outward reaching and to establish deep partnerships.' Rachel Macfarlane 'A self-improving school system must not become a self-regarding or, worse, a self-protecting school system. The role of external challenge is key to this.' Russell Hobby

In a professional learning community, isolation is the enemy of school improvement. But what does collaboration among teachers look like when you can’t easily identify with a team? This book will help singleton teachers first develop clarity on learning essentials, then find creative entry points to form collaborative teams. Drawing from their own experiences, the authors offer practical solutions for eliminating the practice of isolation for all educators. Collaborative teams will: Understand what meaningful collaboration is and how singletons can utilize the PLC process Build the groundwork for meaningful collaboration using strategies for your specific situation Implement meaningful collaboration as a singleton across separate schools or within the same school Align disparate singletons under the same unifying PLC process Contents: Chapter 1: Meaningful Collaboration Chapter 2: Singleton On-Ramps for Collaboration Chapter 3: Preparation for Meaningful Collaboration Chapter 4: Course-Alike Entry Point—The Virtual Team Chapter 5: Common-Content Entry Point Chapter 6: Critical-Friend Entry Point Chapter 7: Putting It All Together Afterword: Final Thoughts References and Resources Index

In this second edition of Improving Instruction Through Supervision, Evaluation, and Professional Development we’ve maintained the conceptual framework while updating sections to provide the most recent research on instructional strategies that have the most promise of helping all students learn. Modifications of the law resulting from the reauthorization of the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act—Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) (2015)—and their implication for practice are embedded throughout this new edition. Updated data collection tools for classroom observations are also provided. We included a link to a website that contains all the observation tools in electronic format so that observers can have the opportunity to collect data on a tablet or laptop, save the observation data as a PDF file and e-mail those data to the teacher observed. This new edition recognizes the reality that all principals are responsible for supervision, evaluation, and professional development of their teachers—tasks that are neither simple nor without conflict. The primary audience of this text is aspiring and practicing principals. We hope to help them understand both the theory and practice of supervision, evaluation, and professional development. However, observing instruction, collecting data for reflection, and having conversations about teaching, are not the sole provinces of principals. Master teachers, teacher leaders, and teacher colleagues can also benefit from the supervisory sections of the book, especially the chapters on high-quality instruction, improving instruction, and the classroom data collecting tools. The book provides numerous tools specifically designed to collect a variety of data in classrooms to improve instruction. Embedded in each chapter are exercises to apply Theory into Practice by responding to a set of questions posed by the key issues of the chapter. After the explication and illustration of the key concepts and principles of the chapter, actual Instructional Leadership Challenges as described by a successful practicing principal for reflection and analysis.