What do you think about the Gates Foundation giving $335 million to a few school districts and charter schools to learn what makes an effective teacher? We learn in the article why no Washington state districts were invited to apply. I can’t help but wonder if these same reasons won’ result in lack of success in the quest for RttT funding. By the way, our Governor announced we will not be going after funding in round one. Wonder what the legislature might be considering?
Foundation officials said they looked for districts with a lot of high-needs students, a history of tackling teacher-quality issues and a willingness and readiness to try bold new approaches to how teachers are recruited, trained, evaluated and paid.
Teachers unions — or teachers, if there was no union — had to be a partner.
State policy was also a factor, said foundation spokesman Chris Williams, and that hurt the Seattle School District. Washington state, he said, hasn't pursued the kinds of teacher-quality efforts the foundation would like to see.
One of the prerequisites for consideration was involvement with the local teacher association and its national affiliate an indication that the NEA and AFT are open to supporting change in teacher preparation, support, and evaluation. Consider this comment from an article in Education Week.
Each of the sites that made the final cut devised its application in collaboration with teachers, reflecting what Gates officials, in an interview, called “unprecedented” support from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, as well as from local teacher associations.
Each of the participants will be defining effective teaching, creating new teacher evaluation and compensation systems that include the use of student achievement data, and designing support structures for teacher growth. I believe that these are all steps that we should be taking. It would be nice to have financial support, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of identifying and supporting what quality teaching looks and sounds like and what data is used to make judgments about when it is in place.
Our Classroom 10 journey is our response to this work. We need to suspend old assumptions and be open to influence by the changes in place and planned. We must continue to find ways to engage the teacher and at some point the student voice in this work.
1 comment:
aside, maybe your classroom 10 pdf purposefully doesn't state the 10 characteristics... I linked my powerpoint on the classroom 10 characteristics on the high school page so that our teachers can find the information if they're planning at home or whatever and are looking for the list: http://tshs.tahomasd.us/stafflinks.html
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