Straight Talk About Classroom Teaching PDF Download

If asked about the hottest topic or most talked-about players in American public education today, pretty much everyone's answer--from parents to policymakers to pundits--would include the words "teachers" or "teaching." From both intuition and experience, individuals know that good teaching matters. This has been true for a very long time. Yet it is reasonable to wonder why the drumbeat about teaching quality seems especially loud these days. Maybe it's because the evidence base about the link between the quality of teaching and the achievement of students has gotten a lot stronger over the last fifteen years. It could also be because federal education policy under the previous and current presidents has tied both regulations and dollars to definitions of "highly qualified" teachers and, most recently, to measuring teachers' contributions to their students' learning. And a growing focus on college and career readiness, emphasized in the Common Core State Standards and by reformers as a measure of educational excellence, has underscored how critical teachers are in ensuring that all students have the skills to succeed in their postsecondary lives. The Annenberg Institute for School Reform has worked for nearly two decades with school districts, researchers, parents, and community members and comes to the teaching quality agenda with different perspectives in mind. This paper describes six strategies that both the Annenberg Institute's own experience and its survey of the field have shown to be powerful supports for the quality of instruction. For each strategy, this paper outlines the problem to be addressed; what needs to happen to address the problem; examples of organizations and sites that are implementing the strategy effectively; what readers can ask about and advocate for in their own school communities; and a short list of resources where readers can learn more.