Based on the belief that teachers ultimately are responsible for their own professional development, this book explores the concept of reflective teaching and provides practical advice on how to examine critically one's own teaching practices.

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

In Pursuing Greatness, five leading thinkers, consultants, and writers on teaching and learning have organized two dozen of the most common teacher problems of practice into six pathways and provided self-reflection guidance and tools to solve them. You'll gain research-based insights into why each strategy works, tips for how to apply it, and an opportunity to reflect on how it affects your own teaching and learning.

More than 45 tools and activities that make it easier for professional development leaders to show teachers and administrators how to successfully implement and maintain differentiated instruction.

The most effective leader behaves more like a coach Authors Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth have spent a decade researching the activities, behaviors, and performance of leaders. After studying more than 100,000 coaching interactions in the workplace, primarily of sales teams, they have been able to determine how coaching affects team outcomes and growth. The authors share three critical performance drivers, along with the four high-growth activities that coaches must execute to build a team that is motivated to achieve at the highest levels. Through both hard data and rich stories, Eckstrom and Wirth demonstrate how leaders can measure and improve their coaching to lead their teams to better results. The Coaching Effect will help leaders at all levels understand the necessity of challenging people out of their comfort zone to create a high-growth organization. Leaders will learn how they can develop trust relationships, drive accountability and leverage growth experiences to propel their team members to the highest levels of success.

Teachers play a critical role in the success of their students, both academically and in regard to long term outcomes such as higher education participation and economic attainment. Expectations for teachers are increasing due to changing learning standards and a rapidly diversifying student population. At the same time, there are perceptions that the teaching workforce may be shifting toward a younger and less experienced demographic. These actual and perceived changes raise important questions about the ways teacher education may need to evolve in order to ensure that educators are able to meet the needs of students and provide them with classroom experiences that will put them on the path to future success. Changing Expectations for the K-12 Teacher Workforce: Policies, Preservice Education, Professional Development, and the Workplace explores the impact of the changing landscape of K-12 education and the potential for expansion of effective models, programs, and practices for teacher education. This report explores factors that contribute to understanding the current teacher workforce, changing expectations for teaching and learning, trends and developments in the teacher labor market, preservice teacher education, and opportunities for learning in the workplace and in-service professional development.

Short description.

Challenges arise when teachers seek to enact socially just instruction while navigating social, classroom, and school dynamics. This research-based, field-tested text offers an accessible process for successfully negotiating these dynamics to identify consequential inroads for making positive educational change. With a focus on ELA instruction, but applicable to other content areas, Lillge’s clear framework offers a language for naming, and practical tools for navigating, those spaces where different frameworks for teaching and learning challenge teachers’ ability to act on their commitments to teach for justice. Throughout the book, readers meet teachers who show how they reframed challenges and identified opportunities to work with others within inequitable systems to enact more just and equitable teaching. These case studies in teachers’ own words allow readers to analyze how context and classroom culture influence teachers’ negotiation processes. Serving as more than thought-provoking exemplars of what to do, the case studies and spotlighted "application moments" also invite readers to reflect on their own negotiations in the fieldwork, classrooms, and professional learning communities where they teach and learn. Comprehensive and illuminating, this book is a vital resource for pre-service teachers, teacher educators, and novice teachers.

The recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) presents new opportunities and greater flexibility in efforts to personalize learning for all children. The Handbook on Personalized Learning for States, Districts, and Schools provides insight and guidance on maximizing that new flexibility. Produced by the Center on Innovations in Learning (CIL), one of seven national content centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education, this volume suggests how teachers can enhance personalized learning by cultivating relationships with students and their families to better understand a child’s learning and motivation. Personalized learning also encourages the development of students’ metacognitive, social, and emotional competencies, thereby fostering students’ self?direction in their own education, one aimed at mastery of knowledge and skills and readiness for career and college. Chapters address topics across the landscape of personalized learning, including co?designing instruction and learning pathways with students; variation in the time, place, and pace of learning, including flipped and blended classrooms; and using technology to manage and analyze the learning process. The Handbook’s chapters include Action Principles to guide states, districts, and schools in personalizing learning.

This open access book presents a comparative study on how large-scale professional development programs for teachers are designed and implemented. Around the world, governments and educators are recognizing the need to educate students in a broad range of higher order cognitive skills and socio-emotional competencies, and providing effective opportunities for teachers to develop the expertise needed to teach these skills is a crucial aspect of effective implementation of curricula which include those goals. This study examines how large-scale efforts to empower teachers for deeper instruction have been designed, how they have been implemented, and their outcomes. To do so, it investigates six programs from England, Colombia, Mexico, India, and the United States. Though all six are intended to broaden and deepen students’ curricular aspirations, each takes this expansion of curricular goals in a different direction. The ambitious education reforms studied here explicitly focus on building teachers’ capacity to teach on a broader set of goals. Through a discerning analysis of program documents, evaluations, and interviews with senior leaders and participants in the programs, the book identifies the various theories of action used in these programs, examines how they were implemented, and discusses what they achieved. As such, it offers an indispensable resource for education leaders interested in designing and implementing professional development programs for teachers that are aligned with ambitious instructional goals.