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The study measured teachers against the criteria in Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Effective Teaching rubric, which is used in New York as a tool for observing teachers. Teachers scored better at classroom management than they did on measures of higher-order instructional challenges, such as asking productive questions.

A historic look inside the nation’s classrooms, including some in New York City, painted a bleak picture, according to a report released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation today.

The second installment of the foundation’s ambitious Measures of Effective Teaching study, the report focuses on the picture of teaching yielded by five different classroom observation tools. It also scrutinizes those tools themselves, concluding that they are valuable as a way to help teachers improve but only useful as evaluation tools when combined with measures of student learning known as value-added scores.

The conclusion is a strong endorsement of the Obama administration’s approach to improving teaching by implementing new evaluations of teachers that draw on both observations and value-added measures. New York State took this approach to overhauling its evaluation system when it applied for federal Race to the Top funding.

Among the group of five observation tools the foundation studied is the rubric now being piloted in New York City classrooms as part of stalled efforts to implement the changes to teacher evaluation, Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Effective Teaching.

Through all five lenses, instruction looked mediocre in an overwhelming majority of more than 1,000 classrooms studied, the report concludes. There were some bright spots. Many teachers were scored relatively well for the aspect of teaching known as “classroom management” — keeping students well-behaved, making sure they are engaged.

But teachers often fell short when it came to other elements of teaching, such as facilitating discussions, speaking precisely about concepts, and carefully modeling skills that students need to master. These higher-order skill sets, the report notes, are crucial in order for students to meet the raised standards outlined in the Common Core. (more…)

Joseph Almeida, a sixth grade math teacher at KIPP Infinity, taught a lesson to adults at Rockefeller Center.

Among the mix of pages, chancellors, and mayors at NBC’s “Education Nation” outdoor museum at Rockefeller Center this week were a cadre of teachers from around the country who taught live “lessons” to the general public.

The exercise was remarkable for its lack of actual students. The lessons occurred inside one of several mini-tents on the plaza, starting at irregular hours, and the only officially invited guests were teachers, not children.

But the one teacher whose lesson I saw — Joseph Almeida, who teaches sixth grade math at KIPP Academy in the Bronx — did not let that deter him. He tailored his lesson, about place value, to the collection of adult tourists and passersby who gathered around him.

The principal training nonprofit New Leaders for New Schools gathered Almeida and the other roughly 50 teachers who taught public lessons through what New Leaders founder Jon Schnur described as a rigorous process. After recruiting nominations of teachers from around the country, New Leaders reviewed information ranging from the teachers’ students’ performance results to videotapes of their teaching. (more…)

The BetterLesson profile for sixth-grade Roxbury Prep Charter School teacher and BetterLesson celebrity Jason Armstrong

The most popular member of a new social network is neither Lady Gaga nor Ashton Kutcher, though Kutcher is a fan of the website.

The distinction goes to Jason Armstrong, a sixth-grade teacher in Roxbury, Mass., who has more than 6,500 total views and more than 1,100 downloads on a new website for teachers called BetterLesson.

BetterLesson’s circle of about 7,000 teachers are downloading Armstrong’s math lessons, grouped into six units: whole numbers, decimals, fractions, percents, geometry, and a year-ender called extensions and review. They can also download his quizzes and tests and become his “colleague” (the equivalent of a Facebook friend).

Armstrong’s former colleague and roommate, Alex Grodd, created the site — which Kutcher recently promoted in a Tweet, a stroke of generosity devised by a BetterLesson staffer. Grodd first came up with the idea for the site when he joined Teach for America in 2004.

Assigned to teach third grade science during his summer institute training at a Houston elementary school, Grodd went online to hunt for ideas. Surely one of the other hundreds of third grade science teachers in the world had come up with a smart way to explain his assigned topic, the solar system. Why should he have to reinvent the pedagogical wheel? The last remotely relevant class he’d taken was Harvard’s notoriously science-light “Natural Disasters.”

Hours of Googling later, Grodd came up with nothing. “This was 2004, it wasn’t, like, 1994,” Grodd told me today. “The Internet had been around for a while.”

BetterLesson is not the first attempt to solve the problem of teacher isolation, but it’s already catching on more quickly than many efforts. Those 7,000 users are up from just 200 in June 2009, when the site launched to a small group, and Grodd won backing from NewSchools Venture Fund, the philanthropically financed new-idea incubator. (more…)

Since I’m basically a filmmaker now, I have to support my own. A two-man team of smart young filmmakers is looking for teachers to tell their stories.

They write:

What kind of story?  Stories like that big time success that deep down you’ve been burning to brag about.   Or, just as importantly, a failure – big or small – that you’ve had a chance to get your head around a little and understand what might prevent it in the future.  Or finally, unexpected ways you learned how to be a better teacher.

I’ve already talked to them for the film, which will be titled “Teacher, Teacher,” and found them sharp and knowledgeable of the issues.

Here’s the full info on how you can get involved: (more…)

A new effort to improve public elementary and secondary education in New York State is coming not from the government, but its state university.

State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, who has been in office for less than a year, unveiled the university’s plans to create an approximation of the “community schools” that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan champions. These schools offer not only classes, but also health care, after-school programs and services for parents all in the same building. The model of connecting schools to social services may ring a bell to New York City residents familiar with the work of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Zimpher said.

But rather than uniting many services under one roof or through one over-arching organization, as the Harlem project does, SUNY plans to help disparate community and government groups coordinate their efforts and judge their outcomes. For example, programs for toddlers would work with elementary schools to make sure their programs prepares the children for school.

“This is about using the community resources that already exist, but connecting them in a way that maximizes their impact,” said Johanna Duncan-Poitier, the SUNY deputy chancellor charged with identifying where the program will launch. (more…)

New York City has launched an experimental model of teacher training that pairs inexperienced newcomers to the city’s schools with seasoned pros.

Developed by Hunter College, New Visions for Public Schools, and the Department of Education, the Urban Teacher Residency program aims to give new teachers the skills they’ll need to manage classrooms full of high-needs students. It also coaches them along as they do. Residents spend four days a week in their classrooms and the fifth at the Hunter College School of Education, taking courses intended to make education theory practical.

Danielle Ruggiero, a mentor teacher, said she showed up at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens, six years ago, armed with a degree that taught her much about the theory of education but glossed over many of the practical concerns she faced on her first day.

“When I first started teaching, I was thrown into a class of 38 kids who were all behind in their reading skills and I was this 22-year-old,” she said. “You’ve got to get on-the-ball really quickly.” (more…)

The charter school teacher who goes by Mildly Melancholy first got our attention here when she was unceremoniously fired, in the middle of the school year, after struggling for months with what sounds like precious little support from administrators and fellow staff. Since then, she’s inspired a great debate in the comments section here about what it means to be a teacher, how to measure teacher quality, and whether urban teachers are asked to do too much.

And now, she’s emerged from a period of quiet on the subject of herself to respond to this raging debate. The long response she’s posted is worth a read, especially her disclosure that she’s the third teacher in the grade she taught to be dismissed from this particular school. (Maybe she’s not the one to blame here.)

Here are some other highlights from the robust conversation Mildly Melancholy started. (more…)

Marrakesh - olives, by goofball12.

From average to perimeter to speed, students at a school in Morocco practice mathematics in the context of the school’s small olive grove. This 15-minute documentary — too large a file to embed here — shows the ways one Moroccan math teacher integrates math and real-life experience for his students.

“I need to know how many olives you think we’ll get from one tree,” the teacher asks his students, and they go to work making predictions in small groups. Later, they help harvest the olives, observe how they are processed, and even help sell them at market. Along the way, they put a variety of math skills to use.

The video left me with many questions about how this ongoing project fits into the school’s overall math curriculum, and how typical this style of teaching is for Moroccan schools (here’s an overview of education in Morocco). I also wonder what equivalent projects teachers in New York City are doing or would like to do, and how they would square with the current standards and curriculum. Math teachers, any thoughts?

Photo by wendelling

Four days into the new school year, I thought I’d check in with the city’s teacher-bloggers, who give us a unique look at everyday life in schools.

Alicia, a midwesterner new to the city, but not new to teaching, experienced a little culture shock — uniforms, unpronounceable names, mice?! — and reflected on another teacher’s advice not to be too nice:

I am torn and a little sad at the thought that these students cannot handle me being me as a teacher. They’ve had strict disciplinarians in the past, and it’s probably the best way to ensure for a successful school year. It’s just a bit more intense than I had hoped or planned. When would I have ever imagined that being called “nice” would backfire on me?! Hopefully in the next few months I can be nice again, but for now, I’m all business, and I’m going to start making sure that a few particular boys are aware of this… Starting at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow.

Jose Vilson also feels like his teaching self is a “persona,” but finds that kids react well to his “incredible swagger” and strict expectations for order and productivity. “If I thoroughly believe in that persona, then that’s exactly what I’m going to get … and sometimes to a fault,” he says. (more…)