June 2010 Issue Focus: Teacher Effectiveness

Each month, the Rethink Learning Now campaign is featuring a new issue in K-12 education and providing specific things people can READ, WATCH, LISTEN TO, and DO in order to raise awareness, share their voice, and make a difference. For June, the topic is teacher effectiveness. To learn more, read the following Op-Ed, where a diverse group of educators share their perspectives on teacher effectiveness.

Read this op-ed that shares three teachers' perspectives on what it means to be an effective teacher.

"Education policymakers, researchers, funders, and pundits are currently focusing a great deal of attention on defining and measuring teaching effectiveness. They hope to discover the magic formula that will unlock every student’s potential to learn, and render them creative, critical thinkers prepared for the university and the workplace. Often, they point to research that shows that many of the factors that are traditionally rewarded by compensation and tenure systems for teachers – such as holding advanced degrees, or having extreme longevity in the profession –correlate less with teaching effectiveness."

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Watch this video from Edutopia.com to learn more about how to prepare effective teachers.

Listen In this commentary, aired on Washington, DC's local NPR station, Center for Inspired Teaching's executive director Aleta Margolis weighs in on the significance of how the No Child Left Behind law defines teacher quality. In the current law this definition is mostly about credentials and degrees, but there is a push for the new law to look deeper into what makes a teacher truly effective and how these qualities can play a role in our national understanding of what makes a teacher great. Listen to it here.

Do these things at the local, state and federal levels to make your voice heard:

Local

RLN has put together a "Local Teaching Effectiveness Measures Rubric." View the rubric here.

State

Write to your State Legislator and ask them to develop a meaningful and comprehensive definition of “teacher effectiveness” as they consider making improvements to teacher evaluation and credentialing systems. Recommended language is here.

Federal

Write your Senator or Representative and ask them to develop a meaningful and comprehensive definition of “teacher effectiveness” as part of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Recommended language is here.

What if teachers were considered as valuable as athletes?

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In the National Football League (NFL), it's simple: during the league's annual draft of the best available college players, the best teams pick last, and the worst teams pick first.

Why do we tolerate the fact that the opposite is true in our public school system -- especially when everyone agrees that a highly effective teacher is the single biggest factor in whether a child does well in school?

We can do better.

Clearly, we need to think about how to recruit, retain, and support a profession of highly effective classroom teachers. But before we can decide how to do that well, we need to describe, together, the characteristics of a highly effective teacher, so we all know what to look for in future policy proposals.

Who was your most effective teacher, and what was it about that person that made him or her so effective in helping you learn?

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