A laser-beam focus on improving instruction to improve learning Saying "teaching matters most" is easy, and seems obvious. Making it the top priority for school leaders and staff is not so easy—in fact, it′s messy. If we want to change how students write, compute, and think, then teachers must change how they teach. They must transform the old "assign-and-assess" model into engaging, compassionate, coherent, and rigorous instruction. The authors show school leaders how to make this happen amidst myriad distractions, initiatives, and interruptions. Unlike other books that stop at evaluating teachers and instruction, this work demonstrates how to grow schools′ instructional capacities with a three-step process that involves: Envisioning what good teaching looks like Measuring the quality of current instruction against this standard Working relentlessly to move the quality of instruction closer and closer to the ideal The authors provide helpful guidance on issues such as hiring, induction, professional development, mentoring, and teacher evaluation. Each chapter offers specific action steps toward building the blueprint for improvement. Also included are frameworks for completing instructional audits in schools, and probes, instruments, and protocols for measuring and tracking the quality of instruction. Leaders will find excellent guidance for spearheading and sustaining a focused and aligned effort to improve the quality of teaching to impact all learners.

Why Teaching Matters is an introductory guide to core elements of teaching, getting to the heart of what teaching is, and why it matters. Paul Farber and Dini Metro-Roland introduce the following 8 elements which encompass the many issues, themes and social complexities of teaching: - Conveying Care - Enacting Authority - Cultivating Virtue - Interpreting Subject matter - Rendering Judgment - Articulating Purpose - Establishing a Sense of Place - Engaging Presence The focus on the elements of practice frames discussion of teaching as an essential human activity and highlights the kinds of significant issues that teachers face, including technology, social inequality, and the management and evaluation of their work. As a philosophical guide, it introduces and draws upon a range of thinkers, including Nel Noddings, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Danielle Allen, and James Baldwin whose work informs a deeper understanding of teaching. The theoretical discussions are grounded with examples and anecdotes from the classroom so that theory is always connected with practice, and questions for further inquiry appear at the end of each chapter. Intended for students of education and for new and experienced teachers alike, as well as anyone interested in the impact of teaching, Why Teaching Matters explores the inherent complexity and challenges of teaching, offering a comprehensive account of the many ways in which teaching matters.

Recharge your batteries and rekindle your excitement about teaching! This new, updated edition of the best-selling book, Teaching Matters: Motivating and Inspiring Yourself, offers practical advice on working with colleagues for inspiration, using social media to connect to other professionals, and adding fresh new appeal to your lessons. The practical ideas and inspirational examples in this book will help you keep your passion for education alive and thriving in your classroom. Get use-now tips on everything from creating a positive atmosphere in the classroom to dealing with difficult peers. This is truly a must-have motivational resource for all educators!

This provocative book asks a simple question: since we know that middle class schools tend to work best, why not give every child in America the opportunity to attend a public school in which the majority of students come from middle class households? Economically integrated schools, the author argues, will do far more to promote achievement and equal opportunity than vouchers, standards, class size reduction, or any of the other leading education proposals on the left and right that seek to make "separate but equal" schools work. Building on two recent education trends—the decline in racial desegregation as a legal tool and the movement toward greater public school choice—All Together Now provides a blueprint for creating schools that educate children from various backgrounds under one roof. Concurring with the concerns of voucher proponents about the unfairness of trapping poor kids in failing schools, the book provides a practical, viable, and legally sound plan for promoting economic and racial integration among public schools.

This book presents a series of cultural situations that could occur within the first one-hundred days of a school year: responding to entrenched vocabularies and behaviors, addressing professional and instructional bad habits, enacting alternative teaching scripts, leveraging a policy blindside, redefining the goals and practices of teams, and implementing outside-the-box programs. Each cultural situation offers a new school leader the opportunity to redefine the goals, values, and practices of an entrenched school culture—the Central High way. Administrators reading the title of this book may view one hundred days as an arbitrary number picked out of administrative thin air. I argue that disrupting and replacing organizational and instructional routines is a race against time. Every school day that goes by without some sign of creative destruction is one more day that comfortable organizational and instructional routines live on in main offices and classrooms. The idea for this book originated from a question I asked a former student of mine who had just signed a contract to become the principal of a high school. We were discussing the complexities of changing a school culture when I asked the following question: “What would you do on the first day in your new office to change your school’s culture?” The response to that question described a series managerial routines that all new administrators have learned to perform as they move from the classroom to the main office: organize the office, meet staff, tour the building, write a newsletter, examine data, and visit community venues. Nothing in this conversation described strategies for redefining the beliefs and values of an entrenched school culture. With this conversation in mind, I made it a point in my formal and informal contacts with school administrators to always ask the question: “What would you do in the first day in your new office to change your school’s culture?” The most common responses involved reviewing district documents, touring facilities, meeting staff, listening to stakeholders and managing systems. In each conversation, school leaders populated their responses with the current jargon of school reform: learning communities, data mining, standards-based curriculum, differentiated learning, common core standards, formative assessment, race to the top, continuous improvement, etc. While these responses encompass reasonable behaviors on the first day in the main office, not one of these actions possesses the capacity to connect educational values expressed in school mission statements—why are we here—to daily organizational and instructional routines. Each activity gives the appearance of leading, but produces no connections between beliefs, values, and practices. Although none of these responses would make or break a school culture, they do represent a pattern of thinking and behaving that holds out little possibility of fundamentally changing a school’s culture.

This book presents a coherent collection of research studies on teacher knowledge and its relation to instruction and learning in middle-grades mathematics. The authors provide comprehensive literature reviews on specific components of mathematics knowledge for teaching that have been found to be important for effective instruction. Based on the analysis of video data collected over a six-year project, the chapters present new and accessible research on the learning of fractions, early concepts of algebra, and basic statistics and probability. The three sections of the book contain chapters that address research on the development of mathematics knowledge for teaching at the undergraduate level, instructional practices of middle-grades teachers, and the implications of teacher knowledge of mathematics for student learning. The chapters are written by members of a research team led by the Editor that has been working for the past six years to develop practical and useful theories and findings on variables that affect teaching and learning of middle grades mathematics. Mathematics knowledge for teaching is a topic of great current interest. This book is a valuable resource for mathematics education researchers, graduate students, and teacher educators. In addition, professional developers and school district supervisor and curriculum leaders will find the concrete examples of effective teaching strategies useful for teacher workshops.