Five Phases of Professional Development

By: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory

The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory has developed a research-based professional
development framework that promotes ongoing professional development and encourages
individual reflection and group inquiry into teachers' practice. In practice, the five phases
overlap, repeat, and often occur simultaneously:

 Building a Knowledge Base.

The purpose of this phase is to acquire new knowledge and information and to build a
conceptual understanding of it. Activities in this phase might include goal setting,
assessing needs, participating in interactive workshops, and forming a study group.

 Observing Models and Examples.

The purpose of this phase is to study instructional examples in order to develop a

practical understanding of the research. In this phase, one might participate in activities
such as school and classroom visitations, peer observation, using instructional artifacts,
co-planning, and listening to or watching audio and video examples.

 Reflecting on Your Practice.

The purpose of this phase is to analyze your instructional practice on the basis of new
knowledge. Activities in this phase might include the use of journals or teacher-authored
cases for collegial discussion and reflection.

 Changing Your Practice.

The purpose of this phase is to translate your new knowledge into individual and
collaborative plans and actions for curricular and instructional change. Activities might
include action research, peer-coaching, support groups, and curriculum development.

 Gaining and Sharing Expertise.

The purpose of this phase is to continue to refine your instructional practice, learning
with and from colleagues while also sharing your practical wisdom with your peers.
Activities in this phase might include team planning, mentoring or partnering with a
colleague, and participating in a network.
SYNOPSIS
Avoiding a Rush to Judgment: Teacher
Evaluation and Teacher Quality
By: Thomas Toch, Robert Rothman

The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring and largely neglected problem in public
education, one with consequences that extend far beyond the current debate over performance
pay. Because teacher evaluations are at the center of the educational enterprise — the quality of
teaching in the nation's classrooms — they are a potentially powerful lever of teacher and school
improvement. But that potential is being squandered throughout public education, an enterprise
that spends $400 billion annually on salaries and benefits.

The task of building better evaluation systems is as difficult as it is important. Many hurdles
stand in the way of rating teachers fairly on the basis of their students' achievement, the solution
favored by many education experts today. And it's increasingly clear that it's not enough merely
to create moredefensible systems for rewarding or removing teachers. Teacher evaluations pay
much larger dividends when they also play a role in improving teaching.

This article explores the causes and consequences of the crisis in teacher evaluation. And it
examines a number of national, state, and local evaluation systems that point to a way out of the
evaluation morass. Together, they demonstrate that it's possible to evaluate teachers in much
more productive ways than most public schools do today.

Drive-bys

It's hard to expect people to make a task a priority when the system they are working in signals
that the task is unimportant. That's the case with teacher evaluation.

Public education defines teacher quality largely in terms of the credentials that teachers have
earned, rather than on the basis of the quality of the work they do in their classrooms or the
results their students achieve.

It's not surprising, then, that measuring how well teachers teach is a low priority in many states.
The nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) reports that, despite many calls for
performance pay coming from state capitals, only fourteen states require school systems to
evaluate their public school teachers at least once a year, while some are much more lax than
that. Tennessee, for example, requires evaluations of tenured teachers only twice a decade
(NCTQ 2007a).
An NCTQ analysis of the teacher contracts in the nation's fifty largest districts (which enroll 17
percent of the nation's students) suggest that not much teacher evaluation is enshrined in local
regulations, either. Teachers union contracts dictate the professional requirements for teachers in
most school districts. But the NCTQ study found that only two-thirds of them require teachers to
be evaluated at least once a year and a quarter of them require evaluations only every three years
(NCTQ 2007b).

The evaluations themselves are typically of little value — a single, fleeting classroom visit by a
principal or other building administrator untrained in evaluation wielding a checklist of
classroom conditions and teacher behaviors that often don't even focus directly on the quality of
teacher instruction. "It's typically a couple of dozen items on a list: 'Is presentably dressed,'
'Starts on time,' 'Room is safe,' 'The lesson occupies students,'" says Michigan State University
professor Mary Kennedy, author of Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform,
who has studied teacher evaluation extensively. "In most instances, it's nothing more than
marking 'satisfactory' or 'unsatisfactory.'"

It's easy for teachers to earn high marks under these capricious rating systems, often called
"drive-bys," regardless of whether their students learn. Raymond Pecheone, co-director of the
School Redesign Network at Stanford University and an expert on teacher evaluation, suggests
by way of example that a teacher might get a "satisfactory" check under "using visuals" by
hanging up a mobile of the planets in the Earth's solar system, even though students could walk
out of the class with no knowledge of the sun's role in the solar system or other key concepts.
These simplistic evaluation systems also fail to be remotely sensitive to the challenges of
teaching different subjects and different grade levels, adds Pecheone.

Unsurprisingly, the results of such evaluations are often dubious. Donald Medley of the
University of Virginia and Homer Coker of Georgia State University reported in a
comprehensive 1987 study, "The Accuracy of Principals' Judgments of Teacher Performance,"
that the research up to that point found the relationship between the average principal's ratings of
teacher performance and achievement by the teachers' students to be "near zero."

Principals fared better in a recent study by Brian Jacob of Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government and Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young University (2005) that compared teacher
ratings to student gains on standardized tests. Principals were able to identify with some
accuracy their best and worst teachers — the top 10 or so percent and the bottom 10 or so
percent — when asked to rate their teachers' ability to raise math and reading scores.

Principals use evaluations to help teachers improve their performance as rarely as they give
unsatisfactory ratings. They frequently don't even bother to discuss the results of their
evaluations with teachers.

But principals don't put even those minimal talents to use in most public school systems. A
recent study of the Chicago school system by the nonprofit New Teacher Project (2007), for
example, found that 87 percent of the city's 600 schools did not issue a single "unsatisfactory"
teacher rating between 2003 and 2006. Among that group of schools were sixty-nine that the city
declared to be failing educationally. Of all the teacher evaluations conducted during those years,
only 0.3 percent produced "unsatisfactory" ratings, while 93 percent of the city's 25,000 teachers
received top ratings of "excellent" or "superior."

And principals use evaluations to help teachers improve their performance as rarely as they give
unsatisfactory ratings. They frequently don't even bother to discuss the results of their
evaluations with teachers. "Principals are falling prey to fulfilling the letter of the law," says
Dick Flannery, director of professional development for the National Association of Secondary
School Principals, a principals' membership organization. "They are missing the opportunity to
use the process as a tool to improve instruction and student achievement."

New models

A small number of local, state, and national initiatives have sought a different solution to drive-
by evaluations — comprehensive evaluation systems that measure teachers' instruction in ways
that promote improvement in teaching.

The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) is a good example. Launched by the Milken Family
Foundation in 1999 and now operated by the nonprofit, California-based National Institute for
Excellence in Teaching, TAP is a comprehensive program to strengthen teaching through
intensive instructional evaluations, coaching, career ladders, and performance- based
compensation. It's now in 180 schools with 5,000 teachers and 60,000 students in five states and
the District of Columbia.

Standards for Teaching

TAP measures teaching against standards in three major categories — designing and planning
instruction, the learning environment, and instruction — and nineteen subgroups targeting things
like how well lessons are choreographed, the frequency and quality of classroom questions, and
ensuring that students are taught challenging skills like drawing conclusions.

Schools using TAP evaluate their teachers using a rubric that rates performance as
"unsatisfactory," "proficient," or "exemplary." Standards and rubrics such as TAP's "create a
common language about teaching" for educators, says Katie Gillespie, a fifth-grade teacher at
DC Preparatory Academy, a District of Columbia charter school in its third year of using TAP.
"That's crucial," says Gillespie.

Connecticut's Beginning Educator Support and Training Program (BEST), the nation's first —
and, until recently, only — statewide evaluation system, draws heavily on the state's teachers in
drafting standards.
The Connecticut Department of Education established BEST in 1989 to strengthen its teaching
force by supplying new teachers with mentors and training and then requiring them in their
second year to submit a portfolio chronicling a unit of instruction. The unit needs to involve at
least five hours worth of teaching, to capture how teachers develop students' understanding of a
topic over time, something "drive-by" evaluations can't and don't do.

State-trained scorers evaluate the portfolios from four perspectives — instructional design,
instructional implementation, assessment of learning, and teachers' ability to analyze teaching
and learning — using four standards: conditional, competent, proficient, and advanced. The state
established committees of top Connecticut teachers to draft the standards, which were circulated
to hundreds of teachers, administrators, and higher-education faculty members for comment.

The nonprofit National Board for Professional Teaching Standards also has sponsored a large-
scale system of teacher evaluations. It has conferred advanced certification in sixteen subjects on
some 63,000 teachers nationwide since its inception in 1987, using a two-part evaluation:
candidates submit a Connecticut-like portfolio and complete a series of half-hour online essays.

Teams of teachers from around the country draft standards in each certification area, and
hundreds of teachers, administrators, and state and federal officials comment before the
standards are finalized. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) manages the evaluation system
under a contract with the National Board.

Multiple Measures

While traditional evaluations tend to be one-dimensional, relying exclusively on a single

observation of a teacher in a classroom, the comprehensive models capture a much richer picture
of a teacher's performance.

Comprehensive models capture a much richer picture of a teacher's performance. The National
Board portfolios include lesson plans, instructional materials, student work, two twenty-minute
videos of the candidate working with students in classrooms, teachers' written reflections on the
two taped lessons, and evidence of work with parents and peers.

The National Board portfolios, for example, include lesson plans, instructional materials, student
work, two twenty-minute videos of the candidate working with students in classrooms, teachers'
written reflections on the two taped lessons, and evidence of work with parents and peers. That's
on top of the six online exercises that National Board candidates take at one of 400 evaluation
centers around the country to demonstrate expertise in the subjects they teach.

In total, National Board candidates spend between 200 and 400 hours demonstrating their
proficiency in five areas: commitment to students' learning, knowledge of subject and of how to
teach it, monitoring of student learning, ability to think systematically and strategically about
instruction, and professional growth.
An advantage of portfolios is that, unlike standardized-test scores, they can be used to evaluate
teachers in nearly every discipline. National Board certification is open to some 95 percent of
elementary and secondary teachers.

Teamwork

Another way to counter the limited, subjective nature of many conventional evaluations is to
subject teachers to multiple evaluations by multiple evaluators.

In schools using TAP, teachers are evaluated at least three times a year against TAP's teaching
standards by teams of "master" and "mentor" teachers that TAP trains to use the organization's
evaluation rubrics (master teachers are more senior and do less teaching than mentors). Schools
combine the scores from the different evaluations and evaluators into an annual performance
rating.

TAP evaluators must demonstrate an ability to rate teachers at TAP's three performance levels
before TAP lets them do "live" teacher evaluations. Then TAP requires schools using the
program to enter every evaluation into a TAP-run online Performance Appraisal Management
System that produces charts and graphs of evaluation results, which are used to compare a
school's evaluation scores to TAP evaluation trends nationally. And every year TAP ships
videotaped lessons to evaluators that they must score accurately using TAP's performance levels
as a prerequisite for continuing as TAP evaluators.

In Connecticut, every BEST portfolio is scored using the program's standards by three state-
trained teacher-evaluators who teach the same subject as the candidate. Failing portfolios are
rescored by a fourth evaluator. As in the TAP program, scorers must complete nearly a week's
worth of training and demonstrate an ability to score portfolios accurately before participating in
the program.

Not surprisingly, using evaluators with backgrounds in candidates' subject and grade levels, as
TAP and BEST do, strengthens the quality of evaluations. "Good instruction doesn't look the
same in chemistry as in elementary reading," says Mike Gass, executive director of secondary
education in Eagle County, Colorado, where the district's fifteen schools use TAP.

Under traditional evaluations — done as they are by principals or assistant principals — it's
rarely possible to use evaluators with backgrounds in the candidate's teaching area, especially at
the middle and high school levels, where teachers typically teach only one subject. Many
evaluations, as a result, focus on how teachers teach, at the expense of what they teach.
Evaluators, writes Michigan State's Kennedy, "are rarely asked to evaluate the accuracy,
importance, coherence, or relevance of the content that is actually taught or the clarity with
which it is taught" (Kennedy 2007).
Subject-area and grade-level specialists, scoring rubrics, evaluator training, and recertification
requirements like TAP's increase the "inter-rater reliability" of evaluations. They produce ratings
that are more consistent from evaluator to evaluator and that teachers are more likely to trust.

Places to Grow

Unlike traditional teacher evaluations, these systems are part of programs to improve teacher
performance, not merely weed out bad apples. They are drive-in rather than drive-by evaluations.
At a time when research is increasingly pointing to working conditions as being more important
than higher pay in keeping good teachers in the classroom, the teachers in the comprehensive
evaluations programs say that the combination of extensive evaluations and coaching that they
receive helps make their working conditions more professional, and thus more attractive.

At DC Preparatory Academy, which serves 275 middle school students in northeastern

Washington, D.C., using evaluations to strengthen teaching is part of the fabric of the school.
The school opened in 2003 and brought on TAP in 2005. And in the TAP model, a key role of
evaluations by master and mentor teachers is identifying the teachers' weaknesses that mentors
will work on with teachers during the six weeks between evaluations.

"I felt I was a really good teacher before I got here," says Gillespie, in her second year at DC
Prep after spending four years teaching in nearby Fairfax County, Virginia. "I got really high
marks on my evaluations [in Fairfax]. But holy moly, I've learned under TAP that I've got a lot
of places to grow." Some studies have suggested that teachers' performance plateaus after several
years in the classroom. But few teachers in public education get the sort of sophisticated
coaching that Gillespie receives under TAP; if more did, perhaps studies would reveal that their
performance continued to improve.

"It makes a difference when people are constantly there to help you," adds Gillespie's colleague,
seventh-grade English teacher Geoff Pecover. "The expectations are high. My principal last year
in DCPS [the District of Columbia Public Schools, where Pecover taught for three years] showed
up to evaluate my class with the evaluation form already filled out, and the post-conference was
a waste of time. You didn't feel like you were learning anything."

To further strengthen the relationship between evaluation and instruction, TAP requires schools
to have weekly, hour-long "cluster" meetings where master/mentor teachers work with teams of
teachers of a particular subject or grade level.

Cost factors — time and money

Not surprisingly, comprehensive classroom evaluation systems are more time-consuming and
more expensive than once-a-year principal evaluations or evaluations based only on student test
scores.
In schools with complex models like TAP's, the administrative challenges of training and
retraining evaluators, conducting classroom visits, and tying the evaluation system to teacher
professional development activities are daunting. "We didn't realize how demanding it was," says
Natalie Butler, DC Prep's principal. "You just have to make the investment."

TAP and other comprehensive evaluation models also are a lot more demanding on teachers
under evaluation. The upward of 400 hours some candidates for National Board certification
spend in that process suggests as much, and the demands are even greater on teachers facing
multiple evaluations and follow-up work under programs like TAP. "The typical teacher
evaluation process puts teachers in a passive role," says Catherine Fiske Natale, a Connecticut
official with the state's BEST program. "This is different." But it is not unprecedented, at least by
international standards. Researchers Shujie Liu of the University of Southern Mississippi and
Charles Teddlie of Louisiana State University (2005) report in a study of Chinese teacher
evaluation practices that Chinese teachers are expected to observe the classes of other teachers as
many as fifteen times a semester and write a 1,500-word essay every semester on some aspect of
their teaching experience.

At $1,000 per teacher, it would cost $3 billion a year to evaluate the nation's three million
teachers using a Connecticut — or National Board — like portfolio or TAP's multiple
evaluations — multiple evaluators model. By way of contrast, public education's price tag has
surpassed $500 billion a year, including some $14 billion (about $240 per student) for teachers to
take "professional development" courses and workshops that teachers themselves say don't
improve their teaching in many instances.

Yet many school systems have been reluctant to use these resources on comprehensive
evaluation systems such as TAP's. "It is really difficult to get them to use Title II monies," says
Kristan Van Hook, TAP's senior vice president for public policy and development, referring to
the section of NCLB that funnels some $3 billion in teacherimprovement grants to the nation's
school systems. "They are very reluctant to change how they spend that money. It's tied up in
things like salaries for reading tutors and class-size reduction."

Sending a message

Comprehensive evaluations — with standards and scoring rubrics and multiple classroom
observations by multiple evaluators and a role for student work and teacher reflections — are
valuable regardless of the degree to which they predict student achievement, and regardless of
whether they're used to weed out a few bad teachers or a lot of them. They contribute much more
to the improvement of teaching than today's drive-by evaluations or test scores alone. And they
contribute to a much more professional atmosphere in schools.

Comprehensive evaluations are valuable regardless of the degree to which they predict student
achievement. They contribute much more to the improvement of teaching than today's drive-by
evaluations.
As a result, they make public school teaching more attractive to the sort of talent that the
occupation has struggled to recruit and retain. Capable people want to work in environments
where they sense they matter, and using evaluation systems as engines of professional
improvement signals that teaching is such an enterprise. Comprehensive evaluation systems send
a message that teachers are professionals doing important work.

But superficial principal drivebys will continue to pervade public education — and teacher
evaluation's potential as a lever of teacher and school improvement will continue to be
squandered — if school systems and teachers unions lack incentives to do things differently.

Ultimately, the single salary schedule may be the most stubborn barrier to better teacher
evaluations. As Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality and
memberdesignate of the Maryland State Board of Education, says: "If there are no consequences
for rating a teacher at the top, the middle, or the bottom, if everyone is getting paid the same,
then why would a principal spend a lot of time doing a careful evaluation? I wouldn't bother."
Many teachers unions, of course, argue that the failure of principals to take evaluations seriously
requires a single salary schedule.

There's no simple solution to this Catch-22. But TAP, for one, has addressed it head-on by
combining comprehensive evaluations that teachers trust with performance pay. The program's
comprehensive classroom evaluations legitimize performance pay in teachers' minds, and its
performance pay component gives teachers and administrators alike a compelling reason to take
evaluations seriously. Pay and evaluations become mutually reinforcing, rather than mutually
exclusive.
SYNOPSIS
Teacher-Student Interactions: The Key to
Quality Classrooms
By: University of Virginia Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning

Every day, teachers make countless real-time decisions and facilitate dozens of interactions
between themselves and their students. Although they share this commonality, educators all over
the country often talk about these decisions and interactions in different ways. The Classroom
Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), developed at the University of Virginia’s Center for
Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, helps educators view classrooms through a common
lens and discuss them using a common language, providing support for improving the quality of
teacher-student interactions and, ultimately, student learning.

How is the CLASS organized?

The CLASS describes ten dimensions of teaching that are linked to student achievement and
social development. Each of the ten dimensions falls into one of three broad categories:
emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support.

Emotional support refers to the ways teachers help children develop warm, supportive
relationships, experience enjoyment and excitement about learning, feel comfortable in the
classroom, and experience appropriate levels of autonomy or independence. This includes:

 Positive climate — the enjoyment and emotional connection that teachers have with students,
as well as the nature of peer interactions;
 Negative climate — the level of expressed negativity such as anger, hostility or aggression
exhibited by teachers and/or students in the classroom;
 Teacher sensitivity — teachers’ responsiveness to students’ academic and emotional needs; and
 Regard for student perspectives — the degree to which teachers’ interactions with students
and classroom activities place an emphasis on students’ interests, motivations, and points of
view.

Classroom organization refers to the ways teachers help children develop skills to regulate their
own behavior, get the most learning out of each school day, and maintain interest in learning
activities. This includes:

 Behavior management — how well teachers monitor, prevent, and redirect misbehavior;
 Productivity — how well the classroom runs with respect to routines, how well students
understand the routine, and the degree to which teachers provide activities and directions so
that maximum time can be spent in learning activities; and
 Instructional learning formats — how teachers engage students in activities and facilitate
activities so that learning opportunities are maximized.
Instructional support refers to the ways in which teachers effectively support students'
cognitive development and language growth. This includes:

 Concept development — how teachers use instructional discussions and activities to promote
students’ higher-order thinking skills and cognition in contrast to a focus on rote instruction;
 Quality of feedback — how teachers expand participation and learning through feedback to
students; and
 Language modeling — the extent to which teachers stimulate, facilitate, and encourage
students’ language use.
SYNOPSIS
The Recruitment, Retention, and
Development of Quality Teachers in Hard-to-
Staff Schools
By: Alex Torrez, William Allan Kritsonis

Introduction

As a national sense of urgency builds towards greater student preparedness and achievement in
public schools, the need for the recruitment and retention of quality teachers has reached a
fevered pitch. Urban, suburban, and even rural districts are marketing themselves to prospective
teachers in the hopes of luring promising educators into their districts and keeping them there.

Yet as effective as teacher recruitment efforts may be in individual districts, the teacher turnover
statistic remains alarmingly high. Nationwide, annual teacher attrition (turnover) costs have risen
to a staggering 7 billion dollars (NEA, 2007). Even more troubling are the statistics or numbers
of teachers leaving hard-to-staff schools; recent numbers indicate that an average of 50% of
teachers transfer, resign, or retire from high-risk schools within the first five years of
employment (NEA, 2007). It is a sobering reality that teacher turnover is greatest in the most
academically challenged environments.

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to make recommendations for three critical questions regarding
teacher recruitment, retention, and development in hard-to-staff schools:

1. How do hard-to-staff schools aggressively recruit teachers for their campuses?

2. What steps should principals take to develop new teachers once they become apart of their
faculty?
3. What activities should principals engage in to secure a teacher's long-term commitment to the
school?

Throughout this article, the term hard-to-staff applies to schools with the following
characteristics:

 Large percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged students

 Difficult teaching environment
 Undesirable school location
 Low academic achievement of student population (Allen, 1999)

The term 'teachers' will refer to teachers new to any given hard-to-staff campus,regardless of
their previous professional experience.
Teacher recruitment: before the first days of school

Principals in hard-to-staff schools can take a proactive approach to staffing by implementing the
following techniques:

University Partnerships

Whenever possible, principals in hard-to-staff schools should solicit the cooperation of local
colleges and universities to engage in early on-campus recruitment of prospective teachers.
Many college graduates remain undecided on their career path as late as graduation day; a
proactive approach to recruitment may sway a potential employee.

Pre-service Preparation

In partnering with local colleges and universities, hard-to-staff schools must make the case to the
universities to expose pre-service teachers to not only the high-performing, exemplary schools,
but to low socioeconomic schools as well. Too often, college graduates become disenchanted
with the public school system when their first teaching assignment bears no resemblance to their
student teaching experience. New teachers needa more accurate depiction of hard-to-staff
schools, so they will know the challenges that await them (and be willing to face them anyway).

Job Shadowing

When a principal's recruitment efforts net potential employees, he or she should move quickly to
immerse the new teacher in the life of the campus. Principals in hard-to-staff schools should
create job shadowing or apprenticeship opportunities for new employees even before they sign
their contracts. The sooner the employee becomes involved, the faster he or she will develop a
sense of commitment to the campus.

Early Contract Signing

It is no longer reasonable to expect new teachers to grasp all the inner workings of a campus
during the two weeks just prior to the start of school. Rather, new teacher contracts should begin
as early as the first of June to ensure that time is allotted for pertinent trainings, job acclimation,
and preparation. An earlier start would mean fewer overwhelmed teachers on the first days of
school.

Celebrations

New teachers should always be given a great amount of fanfare upon their arrival to a campus.
Celebrations that allow new faculty members to meet returning teachers should be initiated at the
beginning of the school year and continued on a frequently recurring basis.
The first days of school

You've got the teachers…now what will you do with them?

Invest

While most new teachers are given mentors upon their arrival, the mentor is almost always
another teacher with a full course load and additional duties (since most teacher leaders tend to
be involved in a plethora of activities). This arrangement leaves little time for true collaboration,
and often leaves a new teacher to fend for his or herself.

To depart from such scenarios, hard-to-staff schools must either allocate (or be subsidized by the
school district) funds to hire a full-time teacher mentor. The teacher mentor would be primarily
responsible for professional development, cognitive coaching, and coordination of mentor-
mentee partnerships.

The use of retired teachers as one-to-one mentors will provide new teachers with the assistance
they need and the personalization that conventional mentorship does not afford. Retired teachers
would serve as mentors in the classroom, acting in a coaching and co-teaching capacity.
Feedback would be instant, giving the new teacher a support system for growth and
development. In addition, new teachers should initially have a reduced course load for
preparation and observation of best practices in peer classrooms. Principals must find monies to
support this critical initiative rather than overburdening existing staff, as the importance of
developing new teachers cannot be overstated.

Professional Development

The importance of relevant professional development and training opportunities to the survival
of the new teacher cannot be negated. Training must be early, engaging, regularly repeated, and
monitored for implementation. Critical topics for professional development in a hard-to-staff
school would include:

 Understanding the culture of poverty (and its implications on teaching and learning)
 Discipline management (hard-to-staff campuses should develop a school-wide model for
implementation)
 Inclusion strategies for special populations (Special Education and English Language Learners)
 Curriculum Implementation
 Assessment and Data Analysis
 Examining Student Work
 Motivation and Creating Opportunities for Student Success
 Documentation
 Campus policies and procedures
Weekly Debriefing

The campus principal must take a hands-on approach to teacher mentoring. Too often, the
responsibility of acclimating new teachers (to the campus) falls to the assistant principal, creating
a disconnect between the principal and his newest/most impressionable employees. The principal
must set aside time regularly (weekly is ideal) to debrief and interact with new teachers. Time
with new teachers is far too critical for a principal to delegate, and should remain a priority on a
principal's agenda for the entire academic year.

Test Preparation

On average, 34% of teachers enter the profession without the benefit of full certification (NEA,
2007). While many test preparation programs exist to prepare teachers for state examinations,
many of the programs can be costly, and in some cases, only moderately successful. Hard-to-
staff campuses would create a win-win situation by compensating campus based teacher leaders
to tutor new teachers for certification exams; new teachers could gain relevant information at no
additional cost, and schools would increase their number of certified teachers and the teacher's
commitment to the school.

Beyond the first day: how to keep quality teachers

Money

Hard-to-staff campuses should establish an incentive pay structure that rewards new teachers
with a graduated sum of money for each year that they elect to return to the campus. Retention
pay would extend up to five years, as research indicates that most teachers permanently commit
to the profession after four to five years.

Insist on Involvement

Teachers must sponsor or co-sponsor at least one student-centered activity or participate in at

least one campus based committee their first year. Also, new teachers should be strongly
encouraged to attend student-centered events, such as football games and school dances. Teacher
presence at student-centered events communicates to students and parents that teachers are
genuinely interested and supportive of student pursuits outside of the classroom. This in turn
creates a more positive rapport between teachers and students in the classroom, as students are
more likely to see the teachers as an individual who cares about their well-being.

Opportunities for growth

Teachers should seek opportunities for relevant professional development and growth outside of
the campus, and principals should allocate monies for their pursuits. As a goal, principals should
encourage teachers to gain additional endorsements to increase their certification, and when
possible, pay for teachers to take the classes needed to attain additional licensures.
SYNOPSIS
21st Century Literacies
By: National Council of Teachers of English

A changing world for literacy teachers

Global economies, new technologies, and exponential growth in information are transforming
our society. Today's employees engage with a technology-driven, diverse, and quickly changing
"flat world."1 English/language arts teachers need to prepare students for this world with problem
solving, collaboration, and analysis — as well as skills with word processing, hypertext, LCDs,
Webcams, podcasts, smartboards, and social networking software — central to individual and
community success.2 New literacies are already becoming part of the educational landscape, as
the following "fast facts" suggest:

 In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and
11th graders to compose on computers; 4th graders will compose at the keyboard in 2019.
 Thirty-three states have adopted National Educational Technology Standards for K-12 students.
 Approximately 50 percent of four-year colleges and 30 percent of community colleges use
electronic course management tools.
 The United States ranks 15th worldwide in the percentage of households subscribed to a
broadband Internet service.
 Over 80 percent of kindergarteners use computers, and over 50 percent of children under age 9
use the Internet.3
 At least 61 virtual colleges/universities (VCUs) currently educate students in the U.S.
 In 2006, 158.6 billion text messages were sent in the U. S.
 Over 106 million individuals are registered on MySpace.
 There are at least 91 million Google searches per day.
 The European Institute for E-Learning aims to enhance Europe's position in the knowledge
economy by achieving the goal "e-Portfolio for all" by 2010.

As new technologies shape literacies, they bring opportunities for teachers at all levels to foster
reading and writing in more diverse and participatory contexts. Sites like literature's Voice of the
Shuttle, online fanfiction, and the Internet Public Library for children expand both the range of
available texts and the social dimension of literacy. Research on electronic reading workshops
shows that they contribute to the emergence of new literacies.4

Research also shows that digital technology enhances writing and interaction in several ways. K-
12 students who write with computers produce compositions of greater length and higher quality
and are more engaged with and motivated toward writing than their peers.5 College students who
keep e-portfolios have a higher rate of academic achievement and a higher overall retention rate
than their peers. They also demonstrate greater capacity for metacognition, reflection, and
audience awareness.6 Both typical and atypical students who receive online response to writing
revise better than those participating in traditional collaboration.
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