Resources

Call Them Teacher Learning Days
"Break the Inservice Habit!" declares the headline on this issue of NSDC's Tools for Schools newsletter. If you want parents and the larger community to understand and respect the need for teacher learning time, "Stop using the word inservice. Remove it from school district literature and excise it from your vocabulary. While you're at it, stop using 'institute days,' 'released days,' 'PLC days,' even 'staff development.' Those phrases confuse rather than illuminate. Replace those phrases with simple, easy-to-understand phrases: teacher learning, professional learning, or staff learning." You'll find a variety of tools here that can help you better align community and teacher beliefs about teacher learning—plus a list of FAQs that parents have about the purpose of staff development time, and suggested answers. (National Staff Development Council, 128k PDF file)

Does More Instructional Time Increase Achievement?
Changes in instructional time, says this study summarized in the ASCD Research Brief (5/10/05), do not generally increase or decrease student achievement, unless the changes are dramatic. Curriculum and instructional quality appear to have a much greater effect on achievement than do total hours of instructional time. The researchers' goal was to examine the time various countries allocated to the school year across four subject areas -- math, science, civics, and language -- to see if a relationship existed between time spent in school and student achievement. The researchers looked at three international assessments conducted between 1999 and 2000.

Bringing Parents Back Into Middle & High School
When students hit their teen years, parents often disappear from school halls, leaving the formal education of their children largely to teachers and administrators. It's a mistake -- research indicates that parent involvement in middle and high school can be one of the strongest predictors of a teenager's scholastic achievement. What's behind this parent behavior? In a free handbook for educators, counselors, administrators and parents, consultant Sue Blaney explores the dynamics of the often-tentative relationship between parents of adolescent students and their child's school and offers some prescriptive advice on what educators can do to improve connections and build trust and new relationships. (240k PDF file)

Educating The Whole Child
Educators often talk of the need to "educate the whole child." But what does that really mean? In this think piece at the ASCD website, titled "A Framework for Education in the 21st Century," the Association lays out its own definition. "Meeting the needs of the whole child means providing a balanced curriculum, linking health needs with learning expectations, and ensuring fair and comprehensive assessments." The article goes on to develop this thesis: "These positions were adopted against the backdrop of the current environment of high-stakes, punitive accountability that pushes educators to narrow the curriculum at the expense of the needs of the whole child. Addressing the needs of students is a moral imperative that must not be ignored, even though such a broad, whole-child view of education places added responsibilities on teachers, schools, policymakers, and the larger community."

School Working Conditions Toolkit
Many schools struggle to address critical teacher working conditions. Teachers report feeling isolated in their classrooms, needing more basic materials to do their jobs, feeling inundated with work, lacking input into the design and organization of schools, and facing minimal prospects for career advancement and professional growth. Such conditions are closely related to difficulties in recruiting and retaining teachers, but are oftentimes overlooked as school reform strategies. This resource-laden website developed by the Southeast Center for Teaching Quality (with support from BellSouth) is a major "find" for anyone interested in strategies to address persistent problems in schools that block teacher effectiveness and student achievement. The topics include time, leadership, empowerment, professional development and facilities. The resources are organized around five key recommendations based on the Center's extensive research. And you'll find separate resources for teachers, principals, district offices, policymakers and community leaders.

Professional Learning Community Resources
This frequently updated page at the Teacher Leaders Network website highlights many of the best web resources available about Professional Learning Communities.

Creating A Culture Of Teacher Inquiry
Why does teacher collaboration take root in some schools and not in others? Robert Garmston, co-author of the influential book on effective collaboration, "The Adaptive School," reflects on the factors that "differentiate schools that create a culture of inquiry" in this column from the Journal of Staff Development. Assuming that faculties have been well-trained in HOW to collaborate, Garmston finds that schools are most likely to work together productively if they have leaders who are public learners themselves and who locate and arrange time and space for teacher collaboration. A third key factor: The frequency and caliber of self-reflection that occurs after the professional development is done. "Any group that is too busy to reflect is too busy to improve," says Garmston, who offers several ideas about improving the process of self-examination. (Spring 2005)

Addressing Teacher Concerns about Change
The ideas in this issue of NSDC's "Tools for Schools" (February/March 2003) about guiding the school change process can help faculties work through familiar change issues that often become barriers—represented in questions like: "Why should I do this? How long is it going to take me to work through this? I know my kids and I don't think this will work." Includes a "how-to" guide to applying the research-based Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM), plus the "Seven Stages of Concern" often expressed by teachers and a parallel set of ideas about effective ways to address these concerns. There's also a list of "10 Things to Do About Resistance" and a "Scheduled Maintenance" plan to make sure you follow up on innovations. (625k PDF file) Join NSDC and receive all their great resources: http://snipurl.com/joinNSDC.

Reach Them To Teach Them in High School
"Two observations from teachers of adolescents are so prevalent these days that they sound like theme music," write Carol Ann Tomlinson and Kristina Doubet. "The more recurrent refrain says that there's no time for covering anything in high school classes other than curriculum or standards: There's no time for discussion, for student interests, for products beyond mandatory quizzes and tests, or for activities." The second refrain, they say, "has to do with the impracticality--if not impossibility--of really knowing one's students in a high school setting." In this article from Educational Leadership (April 2005), Tomlinson and Doubet profile four high school teachers who challenge these two pervasive beliefs, teachers who "connect with their students and who persevere in making learning a process that engages the minds and imaginations of the adolescents they teach."

A Coach, Not a Supervisor
The job of instructional coach is new to many schools, and most teachers who find themselves in these groundbreaking positions can relate to the questions often heard by coaching expert Cathy Toll: "How can I convince teachers that I'm not working with them as a supervisor?" "How often should I report to the principal and how much should I tell her?" and the blunt statement, "If I tell the principal, the teachers won't trust me." Toll offers several examples of how she might handle such situations -- and shares other tips about the coach/teacher relationship. (120k PDF file)

Uniting Special and General Education
This issue of WestEd's R&D Alert (2004) makes the case that "When Special Education and General Education Unite, Everyone Benefits." The cover story examines the debate over NCLB's ultimate impact on special education and whether the federal mandate could become "a much-needed catalyst for improving the education of students with special needs." A second article explores a promising alternative for identifying students with learning disabilities -- strategies that might make special education eligibility unnecessary for some students.

Literacy Coaching in High School
The Annenberg Institute has published a new report featuring portraits of six high school literacy coaches working across content areas. "Coaches in the High School Classroom" sheds light on the processes, choices, and challenges posed by the promising role of the instructional coach. Our source notes that "it is an excellent starting point for staff discussions about the potential and the challenges of coaching, particularly for current and future coaches and coach coordinators." You can download this report and other Annenberg coaching resources at this webpage.

Schools Moving Up
The Schools Moving Up website is a WestEd initiative developed specifically to support low-performing schools as they work to raise achievement of all students. But we'll let you in on a secret -- this is a terrific site for ANY school where teacher and school leaders are looking for bright ideas, research-based practices, conversation-starters for study groups, data-driven reform strategies, and more. If you take advantage of free membership, you'll gain some extra privileges and receive email updates.

The Engaged Classroom
Researcher Sam Intrator spent 130 days shadowing students in a diverse California high school because he believed that "the truest and most accurate way I can learn about the way teaching and learning happen in high schools is to experience what adolescents experience throughout a school day." Intrator shares what he learned in this article, selected by the editors of Educational Leadership as one of the best of 2004-05. Among his findings: While many students were suffering from extreme passivity in class, teachers who were "relentlessly attuned to the attention-scape of their classroom" offered an effective "anti-boredom pedagogy."

Curious About School Culture?
The Small Schools Project has compiled a useful collection of research, articles and other materials about school culture. The compilation includes discussions of the meaning of organizational culture and explores the challenge of building school culture. You'll also find tools for assessing existing culture and developing group norms. (1mg PDF file)

Sharing Teacher Expertise
Have you wondered whether sending teachers to national conferences is the best way to invest precious professional development dollars? What about creating your own teacher conference, drawing on the depth of teacher expertise within your own school and district? That's what the Starkville (MS) Schools decided to do, says this story in NSDC's Tools for Schools (April/May 2005), which includes lots of "how-to" information. Starkville found the process not only saves money, it builds teacher leadership, deepens relationships among teachers, and encourages collaborative, job-embedded professional growth experiences that improve teaching and learning. Members of NSDC receive this and other useful publications as part of their annual membership package.

Professional Development & Student Achievement
With the wide variety of professional development options available, which methods have the most impact on student learning? AERA's "Research Points" (Summer 2005) summarizes studies of "learning opportunities for teachers that are explicitly aimed at increasing student achievement." (100k PDF file)

Professional Learning Communities Writ Large
Education researcher Michael Fullan acknowledges there is an increasingly clear picture of the nature and importance of schools that function as professional learning communities, but he contends such schools will remain "rare and transitory" if the larger system of education is not examined and improved. He offers the concept of "tri-level" development that underscores the critical importance of school district leadership in PLC development. (272k PDF File)

Student Mentoring Toolkit
Mentor, a website dedicated to "expanding the world of quality mentoring," has released a comprehensive tool kit that offers step-by-step instructions to implement key four components of effective student mentoring programs. Organizations can download the tool kit for free.