The tests also offer no guidance on what types of professional development teachers need in order to build capacity for student achievement. To capture these subtleties and design effective professional development for teachers, we need to figure out what is going on in classrooms where kids are learning successfully. If we are serious about accountability, we need to teach teachers how to assess their own work and its impact on their students. Teachers are in the best position to collect and use this data to shape their practice and inform educational decision-making. Teachers also are able to powerfully demonstrate the impact of a curricular or instructional mandate on their students.
Teachers are in the best position to inform educational decision-making.
In these studies, the fellows are crafting compelling designs of what needs to happen if we are truly to support students so that they reach the standards. A middle school teacher in New York City's Community District 2, whose class has an Asian-American majority, provides one example. She also recognized that the parents of her students needed to be aware of the standards to give support to their children in achieving them. She was able to identify a cultural mismatch between the speaking and listening standard and how her students had been raised. Just put your mouth on the food.