self-directed professional development

eternal optimist. You have to be; you absolutely have to b

Alas, after the 3 to 5-year career-exit mark, we are likely left with 50% of new teachers who remain, but many have lost their original optimism for the work

burn in. These teachers embody characteristics of being burned out, but choose to continue teaching, often existing as toxic influ-ences on the school culture, themselves and students. Burned in teachers survive, but they do not thrive

worry about the teachers we’re losing physically as well as the teachers we are losing spiritually, mentally, and emotionally”

, an in-school elective for Black male students, which aims to foster positive cultural iden-tities, social and emotional competence, and academic skills

ensuring stu-dents from marginalized groups have opportunities to enroll in advanced or honors-level coursework in high schoo

eachers responded with more severe disciplinary actions to students with stereotypically Black names than those with names that are stereotypically White

We might speculate that MTP-S teachers developed trusting relationships with their Black stu-dents—treating them as individuals and possibly disrupting negative behavioral ste-reotypes about Black students.

mplement alternatives to suspension and expulsion

very Student Succeeds Act identifies school climate as an indicator of student success, requires local education agencies to detail how they will reduce the overuse of exclusionary discipline, and permits districts to use federal funding for intervention services such as parent engagement, school-based mental health services, and multitiered systems of support

ound evidence of a link between in-school and out-of-school suspension and low achievement

5 of the 10 principles address prevention, four are intervention oriented

address varying levels of the school ecology including intrapersonal (educator beliefs and attitudes), interpersonal (quality of individual and group interactions), instructional (academic rigor, cultural relevancy and responsiveness of instruction), and systems levels (access to behavioral supports and avenues for collaborative approaches to resolving conflicts)

few investigations have focused specifically on the discipline gap and even fewer have demonstrated a shrinkage of that gap

Individualsfrom some countries associated diversity primarily with new immigrantswhile others were concerned about indigenous groups and long-term resi-dent minorities

They also often declarethat there is no time left for teaching to and through cultural diversity afterattending to the other standards mandates they must meet

explore, experiment, or make any modifications in their instructionalbehaviors

Consequently, teachers may concentrate on only “safe” topics about cul-tural diversity such as cross-group similarities and intergroup harmony, andethnic customs, cuisines, costumes, and celebrations while neglecting moretroubling issues like inequities, injustices, oppressions, and major contri-butions of ethnic groups to societal and human life.

ome teachers resist individually by erroneously equating cul-turally responsive teaching with being racist and discriminatory by high-lighting differences. Others resist by claiming incompetence

ome of the negative beliefs that need to be reconsidered and evenabandoned are the living conditions of students of color are so dysfunc-tional that they cannot concentrate on learning, and some ethnic minoritystudents disassociate from school achievement to avoid acting White

It is radical because it makes explicit the previ-ously implicit role of culture in teaching and learning, and it insists that educationalinstitutions accept the legitimacy and viability of ethnic group cultures in improving

Since all Americans do not have the same set of beliefs, attitudes,customs, values, and norms, a single system of education seems impossible to serveeveryone. .

ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant toand effective for them”

acquire more accurate knowledge aboutthe lives, cultures, contributions

that accurate information aboutethnic and cultural diversity was necessary for both minority and majoritystudents to counteract the negative discriminations

This does not imply that there will be no traditional lecture formats. Somelecturing is necessary either to clarify complex informational ideas or to present materialnot readily available. But students will experience a variety of instructional methods andthey will be actively involved in the learning experience

In a teacher-centered situation

Questions

ehavioral learning theory assumes that cooperativeefforts are powered by extrinsic motivation to achieve rewards

his perspective viewsteaching as a "conversation" in which teachers and students learn together through aprocess of negotiation with the curriculum to develop a shared view of the world.

een from this perspective, cooperative does not empower students. Itemploys them to serve the instructor's ends and produces a "right" or acceptableanswer. Collaborative does truly empower and braves all the risks of empowerment

Second-order barriers associated with teachers include teach-ers’ beliefs about the role of technology in their classroom, beliefs about their own teaching, and the willingness or ability to change their practice

igh-speed internet access and lack of teacher PD are first-order barriers. These barriers are more likely to exist in schools serving poorer children

Furthermore, the effective integration of technology may be more dependent on curriculum and instruction than the particular techno-logical tool

n the context of access, skill, and usage, these cases demonstrate that even when abundant access was avail-able, the absence of skill and usage on the part of teachers limited students’ skilland usage.

In both the LAUSD and Turkish cases, the lack of technical support and lack of time invested in teacher professional development were identified as central rea-sons for program failure. In the case of LAUSD, teachers were initially provided with only two or three days of training on the general use of the device

The technological device itself is viewed as the solution to an instructional challenge

He or she must possesscertain attitudes and skills to encourage studentsuccess in the inquiry-based classroom.

. In addition, a teacher’s attitude at work has been shownto influence student achievement

Approximately eighteen percent of teachers coach a sportat the school they teach, and one-third of teachers sponsor a school club. Over one-half of teachers indicate that they serve on a school or district wide committee, whileonly ten percent serve as a curriculum specialist. Almost ninety percent of teachersparticipate in some form of professional development

Teachers are now rated under a four-point scale that must incorporatestudent test scores, classroom observations, and parental feedback

According to the 2008 NCTQ State Teacher PolicyYearbook, only two states, Iowa and New Mexico, required that student academicperformance be considered in the criteria for awarding teacher tenure

The history of teacher tenure in the United States began in 1909 when New Jerseybecame the first state to pass comprehensive tenure legislation for K-12 teachers. Bythe 1940s, seventy percent of teachers were covered by tenure protection; and today,nearly every state has passed legislation granting some form of tenure.

I find that in the year that teachers are evaluated for tenure, they spend significantlymore of their own money on classroom materials. The teachers also participate morein school committees and extracurricular activities during the evaluation year

roponents of tenureargue that once teachers demonstrate competency during a probationary time period,they should be protected from arbitrary dismissal. Opponents of tenure argue that theprocess of firing poor performing teachers is too time-consuming and expensive. Oncea teacher receives tenure, school districts must follow a detailed and costly sequence ofsteps to fire a poor performing tenured teacher. As a consequence, few tenuredteachers are fired for poor performance in the United States.

Tenure reforms will have little effect if prin-cipals are reluctant to dismiss ineffective probationary teachers and may have a negative effect if potentially effective prospective teachers are deterred from en-tering the profession due to increased risk

At-tacking tenure as a protection racket for ineffective teachers makes for good headlines. But it does little to close the achievement gap and risks compounding the problem”

could affect student achievement by increasing the effort of teachers while they’re in the classroom and by decreasing the number of discretionary absences, which in turn would raise student achievement

reduced teacher absences by about 10%

ere is that people will work harder if they know that performance affects their job security

enure and dismissal policies have the potential to improve the quality of the teacher workforce by as much as .01 to .04 standard deviations of student test achievement, but the magnitude of the effect depends on a number of factors, including the policy design, the underlying variation of teacher quality, and the rate of self-selected exits.

enure mutes the economic incentives for individuals to be productive on the job. • Tenure limits the ability to use dismissal as a key workforce quality management tool

And, as noted above, the job security afforded by tenure also likely helps make teaching a more attractive profes-sion than it may be otherwise, perhaps drawing more talent into teaching.

It is possible that weakening this aspect of a teacher’s job could make it a less desirable profession.

cal legal costs of fi ring tenured teachers vary by state, it can often be several times a teacher’s annual salary, exceeding $250,000 (Associated Press, 2008)

And evidence suggests that very few tenured teachers are ever fi red. For example, of the over 100,000 Illinois’ tenured teachers, only 44 were dismissed from 1991 to 1997 (Goldstein, 2001)

Vergara vs. California lawsuit as well as recent high-profi le legislative battles in states like Ohio and Wisconsin.

We believe it necessary to answer the questions outlined previously to have classroom observations lead to meaningful improvements in practice at scale

Third, we need to know more about how to sample instruc-tion in consequential evaluations to maximize the likelihood of observing a representative slice of teacher practice

While principals provide more consistent ratings of teachers, outside observers’ scores are more closely related to VAMs

Minimizing “rater effects” requires minimizing the more sub-jective biases that different observers bring to observations.

we know little about whether the findings of generalizability studies would be consistent in high-stakes context

a single test may only represent a portion of the broader construct of interest

The 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk (Gardner, 1983) spurred greater standardization of evaluation systems for personnel decisions (

ill real-world classroom observations differ-entiate among teachers? Will they be reliable?

Classroom observations, on the other hand, are used nearly universally to assess teachers. They have high levels of face valid-ity because they assess teaching practices that teachers themselves can observe.

Most agree with the high-level assertion that teacher evaluation ought to be meaningful, which entails reforming the content and structure of evaluations. Despite this general consensus, there has been a great deal of con-troversy surrounding the substance of proposed reforms

A number of studies suggest that teachers become more effective as they receive feedback from standards-based observations and as they develop ways to evaluate their students’ learning in relation to their practice

Evaluation ratings would combine the evidence from multi-ple sources in a judgment model, as Massachusetts’ plan does, using a matrix to combine and evaluate several pieces of student learning data, and then integrate that rating with those from observations and professional contributions

perhaps those who eschew test prep in favor of more exciting, but less testable, learning experiences

This approach results in effectively ranking teach-ers against each other within a school. Thus, even if a school has worked hard to select, develop, and retain only effective teachers, some will, by requirement of the model, be labeled ineffective.

She worries that statisticians’ efforts to parse out learn-ing to individual teachers may cause teachers to hunker down and focus only on their own students, rather than working collegially to address student needs and solve collective problems.

and perceptions that the measures are unfair to teachers working in challenging schools where “things that a teacher cannot possibly control” substantially influence how children do in school

Even using multiple years of data, the error range is still so large that “half of all teachers in grades four to eight cannot be statistically distinguished from 60 percent or more of all other teachers in the city.” Corcoran noted, “It is unclear what this teacher or his principal can do with this information to improve instruction or raise student performance”

. Suffice it to say that they pose considerable challenges to deriving accurate estimates of teacher effects, and as the ASA suggests, these challenges may have unin-tended negative effects on overall educational quality

School factors such as class sizes

individual teachers are the only contributors to students’ learning over the period of time used for measuring gain

whether VAM metrics can accurately identify individual teachers’ contributions to student learning and hence offer a credible measure of teacher “effectiveness.”

“Active learning” suggests moving away from traditional learning models that are generic and lecture based toward models that engage teachers directly in the practices they are learning and, preferably, are connected to teachers’ classrooms and students

alf of a study group would teach the lessons to their students, and the entire group would collaboratively analyze the teaching and student work, and revise the lessons for the other half to use.

he Reading Recovery theory of change asserts the critical role of the teacher in identifying students’ strengths and needs, and facilitating their learning by providing appropriate opportunities to acquire and use new reading skills.

researchers found positive effects on student learning only for those teachers who began with a higher level of content knowledge, signaling that the effectiveness of PD may depend in part on how solid a content foundation teachers have with which to absorb its lessons

argues that external approaches to instructional improvement are rarely “powerful enough, specific enough, or sustained enough to alter the culture of the classroom and school.

educatorsWith

they also pointed to an urgency to keeppace with the changes, and ever evolving practices in their schools(

“The assistant principal visits my classroomand offers feedback twice a year. She really does not mentor, but shedoes offer advice.

Of the 20 teachers in thestudy, nine reported that they had received some form of men-toring during their beginning years, while 11 teachers said that theywere never formally mentored as new teachers.

too many peoplebelieve our veteran teachers are unwilling to change or are inca-pable of learning‘new tricks.’I have found that this cannot befurther from the truth.

While teaching involves intensive interaction with youngsters,the work of teachers is done largely in isolation from colleagues.School reformers and researchers have long pointed out that thisisolation can be especially difficult for new teachers, who, uponaccepting a position in a school, are often left on their own tosucceed or fail within the confines of their own classrooms

Early Career Stage

less effective than moreexperienced teachers

Recognizing thatexperienced teachers have their own unique perspectives onteaching and learning and understanding how and why they wouldlike to be mentored, can jumpstart a vital conversation about schoolimprovement through the lens of teacher growth and retention

it is easy for administrators toallow second-stage teachers to‘slip beneath the radar

students with an AC teacher were more likely to be matched with a teacher of their own race/ethnicity

he nonexperimental analysis is also not sufficient to measure a causal effect

Similarly, the experimental methods cannot determine whether classroom practices contribute to student achievement

The variation provides an estimate of uncertainty about whether placing an AC teacher rather than a TC teacher in the classroom will lead to differences in student standardized achievement scores.

here may be differences in the classroom practices experienced by students of teachers trained through different routes

although there were no statistically significant differences

AC teachers who reported currently taking courses, either to complete certification requirements or to finish a degree, and those who reported not taking any courses

ious correlational research suggests that AC teachers are less effective in their first year, but “catch up” with a year or two of experience (Boyd et al. 2006). This does not appear to be the case for the teachers in this study

statistically significant in California

The effectiveness of teachers might differ between lower and upper grades because of differences in pedagogical skills necessary to teach younger versus older elementary school student

0.05

The reading scores of students taught by AC teachers were not significantly different from those of students of TC counterparts,

There was no statistically significant mean difference in the test scores of students taught by AC teachers and the scores of students of their TC counterparts.