Collaboration, not conflict, in education
After years of bitter disagreements from all sides in the education arena, a new approach is evolving. This one calls for harmony among the many voices trying to improve things for children. And though it's impossible to paper over real differences, there is a set of common goals that's resonating for groups as diverse as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Teach for America (TFA).
With over 50 partner organizations (including Teaching Matters, which works to develop and retain great teachers in urban school districts), the new coalition, known as TeachStrong, offers a nine-point prescription. The platform focuses on teacher selection and preparation, ongoing teacher support with new ways of structuring teachers' environments and teacher career growth opportunities. Each component recognizes the need to modernize and elevate the teaching profession in order to best serve students who are at risk of leaving K-12 education unprepared to meet college or adult demands.
Harnessing Teacher Talent for Leadership: The Feds Invest in Spreading the Idea
It's a lesson plan teachers have long clamored to see implemented, and the feds have now gotten behind peer-to-peer support and teacher leadership in a big way.
Hundreds of teacher-leaders have gathered at three regional summits organized under the banner of "Teach to Lead," a one-year-old initiative of the U.S. Department of Education and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Nearly 70 organizations, including Teaching Matters, have declared their support for the initiative, which was created to raise to a national level the movement to retain good teachers by involving them as equal partners in education reform.
While some states and individual districts have taken up the torch, Teach to Lead and the organizations supporting it represent growing momentum to remedy an alarming disunity: education reform without the input of educators.
Even Nothing Can Be Something
There are often revelatory moments in the data inquiry process, where your analysis will lead to great insight and discovery in a way that challenges your assumptions and changes the way you think about teaching and learning in your school. There are other times when the data shows exactly what you werePen pointing to detail of bar graph showing flat results expecting, confirming your predictions and giving you valuable evidence in making your case to others. Many times, however, the data doesn’t show anything at all.
This can be somewhat dispiriting to an enthusiastic data team, but it doesn’t need to be. Sometimes the data may show nothing, but that’s still valuable information that puts you ahead of where you were before you looked.
