This article reports on the design of a teacher education activity that involves the documentary film, "Escuela," which was produced by Hannah Weyer. We describe this instructional design, highlighting how documentary film can be used strategically to create opportunities for teacher candidates to approximate the work of culturally…

This article aims to present examples of trainer talk that scaffold trainee teachers' understanding of teaching in a post-observation feedback session. Previous research into scaffolding in a teacher training context describes scaffolding at a technique or strategy level, without describing how, in linguistic terms, the trainer can support and…

The experiences in the school districts highlighted in this article clarify a set of broad goals that all professional learning communities can use to assess their effectiveness: (1) Culture; (2) Knowledge; (3) Practice; and (4) Achievement. These schools and districts have an ongoing commitment to all four goals. All of them have instituted…

This article describes a 6-year, districtwide staff-development project that was implemented in an attempt to change teacher attitudes and practices as they relate to English learners (ELs). The specific goals of the project were (a) to help the district's teachers develop the knowledge base, pedagogical skills, and professional attitudes required…

It's true that even modest improvements in teacher effectiveness can lead to impressive gains in student achievement. But what hasn't been clear is what exactly district leaders should do to encourage and support teachers in practicing the art and science of great teaching ... until now. Like in his landmark book "The Art and Science of Teaching",…

This book is based on the author's 20-plus years of consulting with school districts and other educational organizations in designing, piloting, and training educators in the use of teacher-performance evaluation systems. Its primary purpose is to help both teachers and their evaluators collect more comprehensive and accurate assessment data for…

Analysis of our own experiences teaching in preservice teacher education programs leads us to a range of insights, issues, and questions associated with the potential of seeing teaching as a discipline. We begin with the reality that teaching and teacher education appear to students as easy activities, while those who actually do them see them as…

The purpose of this article is to identify the perceptual skills of expert teachers and offer suggestions for teachers to learn to see like an expert. Being able to perceptively read the critical cues in a learning environment allows teachers to recognize present problems, anticipate potential problems, link immediate problems with previously…

Teacher quality is widely recognized as influencing student achievement and success in school. In this article, we consider various approaches to the assessment of teacher quality, including process-product observational measures, evaluation checklists, professional standards, large-scale surveys, and commercially available observation systems. We…

Drawing inspiration from Shulman's (1986) construct of pedagogical content knowledge, we propose that leadership content knowledge is a missing paradigm in the analysis of school and district leadership. After defining leadership content knowledge as that knowledge of academic subjects that is used by administrators when they function as…