Educational Leadership:How Teachers Learn Abstract

publications

February 2009 | Volume 66 | Number 5

How Teachers Learn

All Teachers Can Learn

Marge Scherer

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From Surviving to Thriving

Sonia Nieto

Teachers' attitudes, beliefs, values, and dispositions have a powerful influence on why teachers teach and why they remain in the profession in spite of difficult conditions that test their resolve. Conditions at the school and district levels and attitudes and actions on the part of teachers themselves are also crucial. School districts should provide meaningful and engaging programs that respect the intelligence and good will of teachers and help them grow in terms of knowledge, awareness, and practice. Districts should also partner with universities to offer teachers advanced degrees and certifications, and they should promote collaborative learning in their schools. For their part, teachers need to engage in three crucial actions: They need to learn about themselves more deeply, learn about the students they teach, and develop teacher allies.

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The Lessons Are in the Leading

Gordon A. Donaldson Jr.

Many educators find themselves practicing leadership—forming relationships that bring others together to work on important school problems and tasks—before they learn leadership in more formal ways. This article explores how these ad hoc leaders can develop their leadership skills through a process called performance learning. As practiced in the University of Maine's graduate program in educational leadership, this process involves forming small learning teams that support each member in identifying leadership dilemmas he or she is facing, coming up with strategies to address these problems, practicing the new strategies, applying them, and reflecting on the results.

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Moving Beyond Talk

Debra Smith, Bruce Wilson and Dick Corbett

It's easy for professional learning communities to become stalled at the stage of collegial discussions about improving teaching practice. The authors explore what spurs communities to progress beyond talk to collective action that brings change. Smith, Wilson, and Corbett participated in the creation of teacher learning communities in urban school districts in New Jersey as part of a five-year project that included facilitator trainings by the National School Reform Faculty. Through observations and interviews with participating teachers, they identified six conditions that led to deeper learning and successful collaboration in these learning communities: a pre-existing supportive culture, time to meet, satisfying processes, voluntary participation, support from principals, and a cadre of trained facilitators.

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The Principal's Role in Supporting Learning Communities

Shirley M. Hord and Stephanie A. Hirsh

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How Nations Invest in Teachers

Ruth Chung Wei, Alethea Andree and Linda Darling-Hammond

Nations that score high on international measures such as PISA and TIMSS—including Finland, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Australia—invest heavily in developing teachers' expertise. The authors of this article undertook a study of professional development opportunities in several of these high-achieving nations, and identified a number of common features: time for professional learning and collaboration built into teachers' work hours; ongoing professional development activities embedded in teachers' contexts; extensive opportunities for both formal and information inservice development; supportive induction programs for new teachers; and teacher involvement in decisions about curriculum and instruction.

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Learning with Blogs and Wikis

Bill Ferriter

Digital tools, such as blogs and wikis, now make it easy for educators to embrace continual learning. Thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs in which they reflect on instruction, challenge assumptions, question policies, offer advice, design solutions, and learn together. All this collective knowledge is readily available for free. Feed readers, also known as aggregators, can automatically check nearly any Web site for new content dozens of times each day, limiting the amount of time spent browsing and customizing learning experiences. Those new to the technology should start by using a feed reader as a learning tool for a few weeks and encourage peers to come on board. Those confident in their writing ability can easily start their own blog using such services as Typepad and Edublogs. And those who want to transition to writing blogs can start by writing wikis using such services as Wikispaces and Wet Paint.

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Embarking on Action Research

Catherine M. Brighton

Using a hypothetical case of a 6th-grade middle school math teacher confronting student disengagement, Catherine Brighton walks readers through seven steps in the process of teacher action research. "Janice" worries that many of her female, minority background, and English language learner students, in particular, are beginning to show hesitancy in offering ideas in class, avoid risk-taking in challenging work, withhold homework, and tune out lessons. She gathers a team of concerned math teacher colleagues and embarks on a course of action research, defined as a systematic research project undertaken by a practicing educator that focuses on addressing issues or problems relevant to that educator and that includes actions to explore the issues and solve the problems. Brighton details how a teacher in Janice's situation might proceed through seven action research steps identified by Kurt Lewin: identify a focus; develop a plan of action; collect data; organize the data; analyze data and draw conclusions; disseminate findings; and develop a new plan of action.

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Teacher Learning: What Matters?

Linda Darling-Hammond and Nikole Richardson

In the last two decades, research has defined a new paradigm for professional development—one that rejects the ineffective one-day workshop model of the past in favor of powerful opportunities for teacher learning. This article reviews the research on the essential content, context, and design of high-quality professional development. According to the authors, research supports the effectiveness of teacher learning that addresses teachers' content knowledge; helps teachers understand how students learn specific content; provides opportunities for active, hands-on learning; enables teachers to acquire new knowledge, apply it to practice, and reflect on the results; is part of a reform effort that links curriculum, assessment, and standards; is collaborative and collegial, and is intensive and sustained over time. Professional learning communities provide a structure that meets these conditions.

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Supporting Teacher Learning Teams

Steve Chappuis, Jan Chappuis and Rick Stiggins

The learning-team model of professional development has gained in popularity as schools seek to match the intent of providing deeper, ongoing, teacher-directed learning with the most suitable mode of professional development. In contrast to the workshop approach, the teacher learning-team model emphasizes ongoing, job-embedded, collaborative learning. Several conditions can enhance the success of teaching learning teams. These include creating a cultural shift in the school, clarifying the process for all stakeholders, addressing the skills needed for self-directed learning, getting the right facilitators, supporting the facilitators, and ensuring the active support of school leaders.

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High-Leverage Strategies for Principal Leadership

Richard DuFour and Robert J. Marzano

The traditional teacher supervision and evaluation process, in which principals conduct frequent walk-throughs and engage in lengthy observations in teachers' classrooms, has proven to be a low-leverage strategy for improving schools, particularly in terms of the time it requires of principals. Principals can be far more effective as learning leaders by working with teams of teachers as they develop their capacity to function as members of high-performing teams that focus on evidence of student learning. One approach to engaging collaborative teams of teachers in an intensive focus on student learning is calling on team members to create common rubrics or scales for scoring common assessments.

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Come to the Fair!

Sheila Danaher, John Price and Paula Kluth

The teachers at John J. Audubon School, a K-8 school in Chicago, had been bringing in experts and attending workshops on differentiation. They were learning, but they weren't learning from one another. That changed when the school held its first differentiation fair, an event at which teachers displayed their ideas for reaching learners with a variety of needs. The successful three-day event became a weeklong celebration in its second year, and plans are underway for the third event.

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Unraveling Reliability

W. James Popham

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How Book Groups Bring Change

Thomas R. Hoerr

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Model Teachers

Douglas B. Reeves

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The Continuum of Teacher Learning

Tracy Huebner

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Themes for Educational Leadership 2009–2010

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ASCD's Global Vision for the Whole Child

Gene R. Carter

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ASCD Community in Action

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Journal Staff

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Learning from Student Work

Gabrielle Nidus and Maya Sadder

Literacy coaches Gabrielle Nidus and Maya Sadder noticed that teachers sometimes want ideas for improving their instruction, but they fail to look closely at student work to determine what strategies will be most effective. To avoid a randomized approach to instructional improvement, they developed a formative coaching cycle that involves looking at student work, identifying student needs on the base of their work, and selecting and applying strategies based on these needs. Teacher and coach then reflect on how well the strategy work and make adjustments as needed. This coaching style has also helped Nidus and Sadder plan more effective professional development sessions and made teachers more open to learning from their colleagues.

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Fostering Reflection

Lana M. Danielson

Teachers must be skilled in reflection, Danielson asserts, to effectively make the many simple and complex decisions that permeate teaching. Teachers can make some decisions almost automatically to keep a class functioning; more complex choices require deeper levels of reflection and data gathering. Expert teachers adjust their thinking to accommodate the level of reflection a situation calls for so they can make good decisions efficiently. Danielson discusses four modes of thinking proposed by Grimmett: technological, situational, deliberate, and dialectical. These modes progress from low-level reflection (useful for routine decisions) to the higher level of reflection needed for complex dilemmas. Drawing on the journal entries of teachers she has worked with over the years, Danielson presents examples of teachers using each mode of thinking, both appropriately and inappropriately. She gives suggestions for helping teachers refine their reflection skills.

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How Teachers Lead Teachers

Jason Margolis

How can teachers successfully lead the learning of their colleagues? Author Jason Margolis describes his study of teacher leaders who participated in a professional development project that required them to present what they had learned to other teachers. By observing the presentations and interviewing the teacher leaders, Margolis identified seven leadership strategies that were particularly effective: for example, using humor, describing new approaches as easy and adaptable, building on teachers' existing work, presenting oneself as a continual learner, and using samples of student work.

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A Gathering That Grows Leaders

Kathleen Anderson Steeves and Sandra Nagy Sinclair

Steeves (a professor of education at George Washington University) and Sinclair (curriculum developer for Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia) describe a gathering of new teachers in the Washington, D. C., area that extends new teacher support beyond mentoring or school-specific induction programs. Steeves invites all graduates of her Teacher Leadership in Education course (a course that introduces preservice teachers to the broader education system and helps them explore their role within that system) to meet at her home twice a semester for dinner and discussion. The group focuses on a key question that Steeves presents, such as "If you could talk to the local business community, what would you ask them to do to support our schools?" Group members share ideas and discuss actions they could take as a group or as individuals to bring positive change within their schools and community. This gathering encourages new teachers to keep abreast of education policy developments and to become leaders on their local education scene. The authors provide suggestions for starting a similar group.

Naomi Thiers

Naomi Thiers