Why the Teaching Strategies Blog?
I am in an urban area, approaching a run-down, ominous-looking school building. There are bars on the windows, the plaster is crumbling, and there’s asphalt everywhere I would expect to see grass. The wind rattles through vast expanses of broken chain-link fence. “Not a school where I would like to send my child” is my first thought.
My video crew and I locate the classroom where we’ll be filming. It’s in an old mobile trailer—another mark against this school, in my mind. How could we possibly find anything worth filming here? What if our contacts had been wrong and we were going to witness nothing more than a depressingly mediocre classroom experience?
And then we enter the classroom.
Two vibrant, passionate co-teachers are interacting with over forty fifth-graders, most of whom are English Language Learners, in a too-crowded classroom. After their teachers read them a story, the students get into groups to complete a series of activities that ask them to think about, and react to, the story’s main conflict. Because they are allowed to choose the activities—and because their teachers have built an engaging, interesting curriculum—the students remain occupied during the forty-five minutes that we interview and film their teachers. Not once did either teacher have to remind a student to remain on task. I can feel the love and respect these teachers and students have for each other. At the end of our session, I’m playing with the idea of re-locating here so that my son CAN go to this school.
The students’ good behavior could have been a result of having a film crew present, but I don’t think so. They were too engaged to even remember we were there. I think, instead, that I was witnessing the truth that John Hattie put forth in his ground-breaking synthesis Visible Learning: that “teachers are among the most powerful influences in learning” (238). In a recent ASCD Education Update, Executive Director Gene R. Carter agrees: “research shows that the highest performing education systems in the world rely on the high quality of their teachers.”
In other words, good teachers matter more—much more—than the more visible signposts of “successful” schools, such as pristine buildings, state-of-the-art classrooms, small class sizes, an affluent English-speaking student population, or generous funding. What teachers do in the classroom really does matter.
I’ve had similar experiences in many public school classrooms, which I have had the honor to visit as a writer and producer for the School Improvement Network. Throughout the U.S. and Canada, I’ve been privileged to watch exceptional teachers practice their craft.
One of my motivations for this blog, therefore, is to shine a spotlight on the many exceptional teachers in our school systems. Too often, media attention on educators is negative. With this blog, I hope to start reversing that trend. Good teachers rarely get a chance to demonstrate their expertise on a more public stage, and I want to acknowledge the amazing things that they do.
Another motivation behind this blog comes from research that says teachers crave interaction with other teachers. A study that summarized data from 1,350 public schools concluded that “approximately three quarters of [the] sample at all levels of schooling indicated that they would like to observe other teachers at work” (Goodlad, A Place Called School, 188, qtd in Effective Supervision: Supporting the Art and Science of Teaching by Robert Marzano, 7).
So, bookmark this blog and come visit us regularly. Join in the discussions. Take what you learn and apply it in the classroom--and then come back and tell us how it went.
