No part of this may be reproduced in any form — except for brief quotation (not to exceed 1,000 words) in a review or professional work — without prior written permission from NSDC or the authors. D ecades of standards-based school reform have helped identify what students need to know and be able to do. In the words of former IBM CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., these efforts were meant to " drive standards [and accountability] through the schoolhouse door. " But educators and policymakers are recognizing that it is time for Standards-Based Reform 2.0. We need to place a greater priority on strengthening the capacity of educators and building learning communities to deliver higher standards for every child. Enabling educational systems to achieve on a wide scale the kind of teaching that has a substantial impact on student learning requires much more intensive and effective professional learning than has traditionally been available. If we want all young people to possess the higher-order thinking skills they need to succeed in the 21st century, we need educators who possess higher-order teaching skills and deep content knowledge. There are many ways to improve the quality and performance of the nation's education workforce, and many are being tested. States and districts have restructured the staffs at thousands of failing schools. They are seeking to lure better talent into classrooms by recruiting career changers and liberal-arts graduates with rich content knowledge and a willingness to teach. They are revamping their personnel departments, launching new teacher academies, and working to exert greater control over who will teach and in which schools. But these efforts, essential as they are, influence only a small portion of educators. And no matter what states and districts do to bolster the education workforce, they will need to do more and better with the talent they have. This will require a more effective and systematic approach to supporting, developing, and mobilizing the more than three million educators who will teach in and lead our schools. Other fields, from medicine and management to the military, do a far better job of providing ongoing learning opportunities and support for their professionals. But as this report shows, in education, professional learning in its current state is poorly conceived and deeply flawed. Teachers lack time and opportunities to view each other's classrooms, learn from mentors, and work collaboratively. The support and training they receive is …

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Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad.

Moral leadership: Getting to the heart of school improvement

Leadership Capacity for Lasting School Improvement

Goodlad (John I.) - A Place called school : prospects for the future

Using video recordings of lessons and interviews with teachers, this article explores the way in which teachers enact Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices in their classrooms. Starting with the hypothesis that AfL is built on an underlying pedagogic principle that foregrounds the promotion of pupil autonomy, we analyse the ways in which teachers instantiate this principle in practice. A distinction is drawn between lessons that embody the ‘spirit’ of AfL and those that conform only to the ‘letter’. The nature and sequence of tasks and especially ‘high organization based on ideas’ appears crucial to the former. This adds a dimension to more familiar formulations of AFL practices. We also ask whether the teachers’ beliefs about learning contribute to the different ways in which they interpret the procedures of AfL. Interviews with teachers indicated that those whose lessons captured the spirit of AfL were more likely to take responsibility for success and failure in the promotion of pupil autonomy. Thus they had a sense of their own agency and sought to use it to overcome barriers to learning.

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How teachers engage with Assessment for Learning: lessons from the classroom

This study examines how mathematics and science teachers’ classroom assessment practices were affected by the National Board Certification process. Using a 3-year, longitudinal, comparison group design, evidence of changes in teachers’ classroom practice were measured on six dimensions of formative assessment. The National Board candidates began the study with lower mean scores than the comparison group on all six assessment dimensions; had higher mean scores on all dimensions by the second year, with statistically significant gains on four of the dimensions; and continued to demonstrate substantially higher scores in the third year. Pronounced changes were in the variety of assessments used and the way assessment information was used to support student learning. National Board candidates attributed changes in practice to the National Board standards and assessment tasks. Comparison group teachers who showed noticeable changes in practice described professional development experiences similar to those sup...

Improving Teachers’ Assessment Practices Through Professional Development: The Case of National Board Certification

The edTPA, a nationally available performance assessment for teacher candidates, has recently been developed and implemented in teacher education programs across the United States. Advocates make a...

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What Is the Underlying Conception of Teaching of the edTPA

Since the 1980s, case methods have gained traction in teacher education, with growing empirical evidence that demonstrates impact on prospective teachers' abilities to analyze an authentic situation critically, generate multiple theoretical and practical interpretations of it, and formulate plans of action for a particular situation. The construction and definition of what constitutes a case in teacher education varies widely, with multimedia representations of practice becoming more common. Some dominant theoretical frameworks about learning, reasoning, and reflection have guided research and pedagogical purposes of cases, but the degree to which research and practice are positioned within particular frameworks is inconsistent.

Case Methods in Teacher Education

As conversations about students who live in poverty begin to become more commonplace, we are seeing two things. First, on a positive note, teachers and administrators are awakening to the reality that not all students embody white, middle-class values, experiences, and cultural norms. This is leading schools and districts to seek professional development experiences for teachers to help them grapple with yet another form of diversity in their classrooms. There seems to be agreement on many fronts that teachers need better models, practices, and frameworks for teaching students from a multitude of backgrounds, especially if the students represent cultures and social classes that are different from the teacher's. Second, children from poverty are being identified and labeled with grossly overgeneralized, deficit-laden characteristics that put them at risk of being viewed as less capable, less cultured, and less worthy as learners. While we do not want to underplay the stresses on some children who live in poverty, we do want to advocate for a perspective that sees these children and their families as historied and cultural beings, full persons with dreams and aspirations of success, with abilities to use language with sophistication, and with intelligences that may be underappreciated in schools as institutions. If we want to help teachers develop awareness and pedagogies that are sensitive to children who live in poverty, we must first challenge the misinformation that is being disseminated and set a new course. This new direction should have three key features: 1) an emphasis on children's competency, 2) a focus on the teacher's cultural identity, and 3) a professional development model based in ongoing collaborative work among teachers. REJECTING STEREOTYPES OF THE POOR Ruby Payne (with her company, aha! Process Inc.) is perhaps the most visible educator providing materials and workshops about poverty for teachers and principals. Payne has been featured in high-profile news outlets, including the New York Times (Tough 2007) and Education Week (Keller 2006), and her materials are used in teacher education programs across the country (Osei-Kofi 2005). According to her web site, Payne and her certified trainers, consultants, and employees conduct 800 to 1,000 workshops and seminars a year in the U.S. and Canada; and the book with which she launched her business, A Framework for Understanding Poverty (2005; hereafter, Framework), now in its 4th edition, has sold over a million copies. Reviewers of Payne's Framework have noted the ways that she stereotypes people living in poverty (Gorski 2006; Ng and Rury 2006; Osei-Kofi 2005). In their recent, painstaking content analysis of Framework, Bomer et al. (2008) found that Payne's claims about the poor are unsubstantiated in her text and contradicted by mountains of research in education, anthropology, sociology, and related fields. They conclude that Payne's work is a classic example of "deficit thinking," where "students who struggle or fail in school do so because of their own internal deficits or deficiencies"(Discussion section, para. 1). To give you a sense of this stereotyping, we share the complete list of what Payne calls "behaviors related to poverty." According to Payne, poor children: * Laugh when disciplined as a "way to save face in matriarchal poverty"; * Argue loudly with the teacher; * Make angry responses; * Make inappropriate or vulgar comments; * Physically fight because they "do not have language or belief system to use conflict resolution"; * Always have their hands on someone else; * Cannot follow directions because "little procedural memory is used in poverty" and "sequence is not used or valued"; * Are extremely disorganized because "planning, scheduling, or prioritizing skills" are "not taught in poverty"; * Complete only part of a task because they have "no procedural self-talk" and "do not 'see' the whole task"; * Are disrespectful to the teacher because they "may not know any adults worthy of respect"; * Harm other students, verbally or physically; * Cheat or steal because of "weak support system, weak role models/emotional resources"; and * Talk incessantly because "poverty is very participatory" (pp. …

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Poverty and Payne: Supporting teachers to work with children of poverty

Research in reading teacher education and ongoing professional development for practicing 
teachers has continued to grow in quantity and sophistication since the turn of the 21st century 
when the last Handbook of Reading Research was published. Th e previous handbook chapter 
on this topic, “Teaching Teachers to Teach Reading: Paradigm Shift s, Persistent Problems, and 
Challenges” (Anders, Hoff man, & Duff y, 2000), presented a review of the literature organized 
around both historical and current perspectives on what we know about preparing teachers 
of reading and helping them to continue their learning. To accomplish the historical task the 
authors provided a “Review of Reviews,” that revealed “reading researchers have overwhelmingly devoted attention to the process of reading and to the learning of reading (p.723).” By contrast, Anders et al. suggested that attention should be focused on “how teachers learn and how 
that learning is enacted in their professional responsibilities” (p. 723). Duff y (2004) also argued 
that reading researchers need to think diff erently about what we teach teachers and how we prepare them; he also noted that we need to think diff erently about when they are prepared-particularly the time they need to learn to be eff ective teachers. Th e need for high quality research 
on reading teacher preparation and development has been heightened in today’s policy context, 
where the question of what constitutes teacher quality is hotly contested (Cochran-Smith, 2004; 
Levine, 2006; National Council on Teacher Quality or NCTQ, 2006) and public concerns about 
whether teachers are well-prepared sometimes leads to policies and legislative initiatives that 
ignore research fi ndings.

Mistilina Sato

Papers

Improving Teachers’ Assessment Practices Through Professional Development: The Case of National Board Certification

What Is the Underlying Conception of Teaching of the edTPA

Case Methods in Teacher Education

Poverty and Payne: Supporting teachers to work with children of poverty

Professional development and teacher education for reading instruction