12.18.14Great Teaching: DIY Version
When I get asked to speak to audiences about teaching I try to make a couple of points:
1. The challenge is that we don’t have an achievement gap. We have achievement gaps: between children of privilege and the rest of our children, yes, but also between any school and the single best school; between our nation’s schools and the best in the world; between what our kids would benefit from most and what we are able to provide them. By its nature education requires us to always strive to be better. That’s the hard news, but that’s not a judgment on teachers so much as a statement of their importance. At what point would we, as parents, say: “Oh, yeah, that’s fine for my kids. Y’all can stop trying to get better now”?
2. We have an untapped solution: teachers themselves, who are, generally speaking, incredible problem solvers and entrepreneurs and under-acknowledged as such. There is probably no achievement gap that some teacher out there has not figured the way across. In some classroom somewhere this morning, she is at it again. We just need to find her and study her, That to me is the issue and the opportunity. We have to study our best and strive to replicate their best moves.
3. I took my best shot at doing that in Teach Like a Champion. The only thing i knew for sure when i wrote it was that I would get parts of “it” wrong. That’s why I wrote version 2.0 and why I’ll have to write a 3.0 someday, I am sure, but even so my right answers won’t be everybody’s. Of course I know there are people who take umbrage with my observations. What I would say to them is: Great. if you disagree with my findings you can still replicate the method at the core. Go and find a way to assess what great teaching is for your school or your city or your nation, make it as rigorous and objective as you can and then and then identify your best, study them and set out to replicate what they do.
And of course that’s good advice even if you don’t disagree with Teach Like a Champion. You still might want to define and replicate your own, aligned but unique vision of great teaching in your school.
That, I am excited to say, is exactly what Damian Benney, Deputy Headteacher at Penyrheol Comprehensive School in Swansea, Wales, did. He recently blogged about it and it’s a perfect road map for how to DIY (Do It Yourself) a vision of excellent teaching for your own school. Damian identifies and studies his best teachers; simplifies, aligns and tests his initial hypothesis, cross references his findings with what others have done in other schools, then starts to build culture around the findings. It’s brilliant stuff–a guide to DIY-ing great teaching in your local vernacular, and you can read about it here.
