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    Excellent Educators: A Wise Giver's Guide to Cultivating Great Teachers and Principals
    Excellent Educators: A Wise Giver's Guide to Cultivating Great Teachers and Principals
    Excellent Educators: A Wise Giver's Guide to Cultivating Great Teachers and Principals
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    Excellent Educators: A Wise Giver's Guide to Cultivating Great Teachers and Principals

    By Laura Vanderkam

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    About this ebook

    The strongest influence on whether a student learns (and how much) is the teacher. Never mind fancy facilities, new technology, top curricula, or more school spending—research shows that the intelligence, skill, and dedication of the instructor is two to three times as important as any other contribution to student outcomes. If we want to improve schools, we must raise the quality of teachers.

    Yet credentials, degrees, years on the job have little to do with classroom excellence. Fascinating investigations have recently given us clearer pictures of what a successful teacher looks like. Now leading schools are beginning to hire and mentor teachers differently, with a clear-eyed focus on their demonstrated ability to transfer knowledge to their students. New techniques for measuring and enhancing the teacher’s capacity to add value in the classroom are the most promising elements in school reform today. Putting them into effect, though, requires wise and brave school leaders. Without bold, sober, demanding principals, few schools will build a truly excellent set of instructors.

    This book is for public-spirited donors who want to foster educational excellence by elevating teachers and principals. It reviews the latest academic research and on-the-ground experience of reformers and offers practical advice on multiple fronts. It is written for philanthropists and allies active in the field who want to make a positive difference.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhilanthropy Roundtable
    Release dateApr 28, 2014
    ISBN9780989220262
    Excellent Educators: A Wise Giver's Guide to Cultivating Great Teachers and Principals
    Author

    Laura Vanderkam

    Laura Vanderkam is the author of three previous books, including 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, and All the Money in the World: What The Happiest People Know About Getting And Spending. She has also written two other popular mini-ebooks, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast and What the Most Successful People Do On the Weekend.  Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reader's Digest and Fortune, among many other publications.  She lives with her family outside Philadelphia. Vist www.lauravanderkam.com

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      Book preview

      Excellent Educators - Laura Vanderkam

      The Philanthropy Roundtable

      Excellent Educators

      A Wise Giver’s Guide to Cultivating Great Teachers and Principals

      Laura Vanderkam

      Karl Zinsmeister, series editor

      Copyright © 2014,The Philanthropy Roundtable. All rights reserved.

      Published by The Philanthropy Roundtable

      (Smashwords Edition)

      1730 M Street NW, Suite 601,Washington, DC, 20036.

      Free copies of this book are available to qualified donors. To learn more, or to order more copies, call (202) 822-8333, e-mail [email protected], or visit PhilanthropyRoundtable.org. An e-book version is available from major online booksellers. A PDF may be downloaded at no charge at PhilanthropyRoundtable.org.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act, without the written permission of The Philanthropy Roundtable. Requests for permission to reprint or otherwise duplicate should be sent to [email protected]. Cover: © Cimmerian/istockphoto; © Maciej Noskowski/istockphoto

      ISBN 978-0-9892202-6-2

      LCCN 2014938490

      First printing, April 2014

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Preface: The Human Heart of Great Schooling

      1. Good Teaching Trumps All

      Not for love or money

      2. What Quality Is and Why It Matters

      • Figuring out teacher quality is worth the trouble

      • Teaching must be taught

      • Improving teaching requires work

      3. Reinforcing Teacher Quality

      •Recruiting teachers outside the old channels

      Sidebar: Charter schools attract excellent teachers

      Sidebar: The Catholic TFA

      • Training

      • Can traditional schools of education be fixed?

      • Teach For America as an alternative

      • Relay Graduate School of Education

      • Match’s graduate school of education

      • TNTP

      • The Urban Teacher Center

      Sidebar: Measure, and then act

      • Workshops vs. evaluations

      • REACHing in Chicago

      • IMPACT in Washington, D.C.

      • Keeping good teachers

      • We could have fewer and better teachers

      • What about paying good teachers more?

      • Why school leaders matter for teacher quality

      4. Reinforcing Principal Quality

      • Who should lead?

      • The residency model

      • The MBA model

      • In-house principal training

      • What about boosting the skills of principals already on the job?

      • Thinking bigger—toward systems that work

      5. Levers for Change

      Sidebar: Three views on teacher unions

      • Change public policies

      • Fund research on specific problems

      • Fund charter schools

      • Fund big ideas

      • Work for better teacher licensure policies

      • Help pay teachers more, or at least differently

      • Invest in new teacher and principal training programs

      • Bring alternative teacher providers to your community

      • Create a better teacher-hiring ecosystem

      • Promote smart uses of technology to enhance teaching

      • Fund prizes for excellence

      • Work with teacher unions

      • Invest in grassroots advocacy

      • Support termination fights

      • Shape the conversation

      About The Philanthropy Roundtable

      About the Author

      Endnotes

      Preface

      The Human Heart of Great Schooling

      Research demonstrates that the most important factor in the success or failure of a school is its teachers. The intelligence, skill, and dedication of the instructors overwhelms factors like the amount of money spent, or the quality of the facilities. If you want to improve schools, you have to improve the general level of teaching. And degrees and credentials—as you’re about to learn—have little to do with teacher excellence.

      Principals, meanwhile, are the people who select teachers. They guide and assess and train and dismiss them, throughout the year, and over their careers. Without bold, wise, and sober leadership a school is unlikely to build more than a middling set of instructors.

      The central role of teachers and principals in educational success is why we have created this book for donors. It offers concrete, research-proven advice on how to bolster those two professional positions. We steer philanthropists to the factors that can really make a difference, and dispel many myths and misunderstandings floating about in this arena.

      The Philanthropy Roundtable gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of the Rainwater Charitable Foundation in supporting the publication of this guidebook.

      Whatever your philanthropic priorities, we hope you will consider joining The Philanthropy Roundtable. You will enter a network of hundreds of top donors from across the country who share lessons learned and debate the best future strategies. We offer intellectually challenging and solicitation-free meetings, customized resources, consulting, and private seminars for our members, all at no charge.

      For more information, please contact any of us at (202) 822-8333 or [email protected]

      Adam Meyerson, president, The Philanthropy Roundtable

      Dan Fishman, director of K–12 education programs

      Anthony Pienta, deputy director of K–12 education programs

      Chapter 1: Good Teaching Trumps All

      Brett Pangburn’s sixth-grade English class at Excel Academy in East Boston is a pleasant enough place. There’s nothing particularly striking about it at first glance. Student work decorates the wall. The classroom is neat, orderly, and welcoming.

      But linger in the back of the classroom for a minute and you soon start to see extraordinary things. On a mid-September morning, just a few weeks into the school year, none of these preteens stare out the window at the row houses defining the area. None of them seem to be mentally transporting themselves anywhere else. Instead, the sixth graders track their English teacher as he moves around the classroom—the whole classroom—gliding between desks as if he owns the place. This possession of the classroom’s physical space is all the more interesting given that at Excel, a charter school serving primarily Latino and lower-income children, the teachers change classrooms between periods, not the students. Pangburn has just walked into the class a few minutes before; the kids have been here all morning. Still, the classroom is his, and two dozen sets of eyes stay on him as he discusses language clues.

      Pangburn asks one child for the answer to a multiple-choice question. The child answers correctly. Pangburn nods—and then he ups the classroom engagement level by pivoting to another child to ask a follow-up question on why the other multiple-choice options weren’t right. The girl’s hand wasn’t raised, but it doesn’t matter, because in Pangburn’s class, everyone will be called on. Everyone has to think. That’s what great teaching ensures.

      As a middle-school tutor years earlier, Pangburn recounts in an interview, he discovered that his first preteen charges seemed like really bright kids. But they didn’t know anything. The work they were doing was a joke. You think, huh, these kids sound really bored. They’re not being challenged.

      While student-teaching at dysfunctional Boston schools, he likewise observed that there were issues. But in my mind the issues weren’t with the kids. It was the adults in front of them.

      After transitioning to teaching from a legal career, Pangburn humbly accepted that I didn’t know what I was doing. I tried to figure out who’s good and go watch them. After observing expert teachers, he’d try their techniques. Then he’d have these expert teachers come watch his class.

      It’s about being reflective, he says. I’m hungry for feedback. If something doesn’t go well, he wants to fix it.

      Excel students show up with various disadvantages. More than half speak a language other than English at home. Only 16 percent of their parents have pursued any education beyond high school. About a quarter of the children receive special-education services. More than two thirds of Excel’s fifth graders arrive reading three or more years below grade level.

      Yet by seventh grade, the year after many of these students have had Pangburn, 100 percent will score proficient or advanced on the English-language section of Massachusetts’ state test. This is all the more remarkable given that Massachusetts has one of the harder achievement exams in the country. Excel students’ advanced and proficient ratings means they can truly compete with the rest of the world.

      Great teaching can close achievement gaps. That’s why smart philanthropists are so anxious to make teachers more effective. As Sid Richardson Foundation president Pete Geren puts it, the three most important factors in quality education today are, number one teachers, number two teachers, and number three teachers.

      Changing the quality of education often becomes a question of who. Who is in front of our children, working to stretch their brains? How do these people get there? And how do they get better at what they do?

      Of course, great teaching cannot succeed in a vacuum. Excel is a high-performing charter school with a strong school culture. Pangburn recalls walking in for the first time and seeing that the students were smiling, and nobody was yelling. Better yet? The adults in the room clearly thought the children could do rigorous work, and were helping them to do that work, and pushing them to do that work. I was blown away, and thought this is the kind of place I want to be.

      There are teachers with the capacity to be excellent in schools around the country. These teachers work hard to challenge their students, only to see their work undermined in some cases by ineffective teachers in subsequent years. They see their precious planning periods eaten up by pointless meetings and paperwork. Getting master instructors and mentors in to offer helpful feedback and coaching isn’t part of the culture. Colleagues don’t share lesson plans and collaborate to meet student needs. And they lack the data to know how they’re doing.

      Good teaching can exist on its

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