Quotes of the Week
“A large body of research on professional development shows that classroom practice is most likely to improve when teacher learning is linked to the specific content and materials they are teaching, the challenges their children are encountering, and their own knowledge and skill gaps.”
-Karen Hawley Miles et al. (see item #1)
1. Keys to Teachers’ Professional Development
In this important report from Educational Resource Strategies (ERS), Karen Hawley Miles and nine colleagues draw on an analysis of three school systems – Duval County, Florida, Washington, D.C., and Achievement First Charter Schools – to present a vision for building collective teaching capacity in the Common Core era – “so that every student can count on having effective teaching every year, in all subjects.” Here are the six steps they recommend:
-Learning goals and aligned materials provide the agenda for professional growth.
-Frequent interim student assessment reports help teacher teams adjust instruction in real time.
-Evaluation rubrics describe teacher performance across a range of skills and knowledge and inform next steps for individual, school, and system professional growth.
“The more tightly the components are linked to each other and to professional growth, the more likely it is that learning and action will be aligned,” say the authors. They salute Achievement First for doing this best, spending, for example, $750 per teacher on the “debrief” step of evaluation, which is key to ensuring that classroom observations and analysis of interim student assessments result in professional growth. This contrasts to Washington D.C.’s contractually constrained system, which spends only $300 per teacher on evaluation debriefs, spreads its “Master Educators” too thinly, and can’t use instructional coaches for evaluation. ERS has developed a Professional Growth and Support System Self-Assessment tool to help districts assess capabilities and target their resources in ways that will really make a difference.
-Creating school schedules that give teacher teams time to collaborate;
-Building the content knowledge and coaching expertise of teacher team leaders;
-Giving teams access to real-time student learning data for team analysis.
ERS’s professional resources inventory is a good starting point to identify needs and build capacity.
-Stage 1: Intern: A beginning teacher, preparing to matriculate to a full-time position;
-Stage 2: Beginning teacher in first, second, or third year – Key criteria: improving student growth, core instruction, classroom culture with coach/school leader support;
-Stage 3: Solid practitioner averaging 1+ years of student growth, focusing on academic outcomes and character, with strong parent communication;
-Stage 4: Senior teacher: At least a fifth-year teacher with two years of strong results and two years as a Stage 3 teacher: exceptional performance, closing achievement gap, ensuring student success after leaving Achievement First, reinforcing school values and teams;
-Stage 5: Master teacher: At least a seventh-year teacher with two years of superior results and two years as a Stage 4 teacher; a role model of rigor, character, exemplary student outcomes, transforming students’ lives and character for college and beyond, partnering with parents, improving teams and school.
Compensation for Achievement First teachers is aligned with these stages.
“A New Vision for Teacher Professional Growth and Support: Six Steps to a More Powerful School System Strategy” by Karen Hawley Miles, Anna Sommers, David Bloom, Kira DeVaul, Alyssa Fry, Melissa Galvez, Genevieve Quist Green, Allison Daskal Hausman, Chris Lewis, and Ashley Woo, Educational Resource Strategies (ERS), May 2013; the full report is available at http://www.erstrategies.org/library/a_new_vision_for_pgs (spotted in Public Education NewsBlast, June 27, 2013)
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