These eight Discussion Starters are designed for teacher teams who are working through creating or improving a teacher-powered school. Offering lessons learned and tips from the innovators of existing teacher-powered schools, these starters are interactive resources featuring sets of discussion questions for teacher teams to take up as a group.
Teaching is the number one in-school factor affecting student outcomes. And a central part of the strategy for improving teaching involves better teacher preparation. With this report, we present our own contribution to that effort: we highlight essential elements and best practices for a new, different, and we believe better, teacher preparation program.
For three decades now, the course of action has been to accept the system as it stands and to push its schools and teachers to deliver ‘better performance’. Perhaps not surprisingly, that effort to get an inert system to do-better has not proved an outstanding success. The theory of action should instead be to turn public education into a self-improving system.
Much of the discussion about 'what's working' suggests that students learn because the school is district, charter, parochial or whatever. This is bizarre. Clearly, students learn from what goes on in the school; from its curriculum, pedagogy, materials and teachers. This report begins to sketch a taxonomy that gets at these more meaningful school properties.
A description of areas of autonomy, assembled while consulting literature and visiting schools during the writing of the book Trusting Teachers with School Success. And, examples of how schools have used those autonomies.
A big district like Minneapolis has dozens of schools, and all of them could be innovating. That is, in fact, the strategic plan. But the big brain — the central office — gets in the way. How might the state usefully intervene? A Sunday Commentary for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
In November, 2014 the U.S. Department of Education proposed a set of priorities, requirements, and criteria for the federal charter grants to state education agencies. Here is the response of three senior E|E associates, to that proposal.
All known teacher-powered (i.e. teacher-led) schools, both in list form and plotted as pins on a map. A resource of the Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative.
