Classroom observations can be a key strategy for improved teaching and learning, provided that they are conducted in a manner that gives teachers constructive and immediately applicable feedback as well as a chance to engage in a substantive conversation about their work with students and colleagues.
We have interacted with thousands of school leaders and educators since COVID-19 essentially closed every school in the nation. In call after call, webinar after webinar, and video meeting after video meeting, these educators have expressed a growing belief that the start of the 2020-2021 school year will be anything but normal. Most anticipate there will be some form of remote learning involved even if students are able to physically attend school.
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What will school look like in the fall? Will it be in-person, virtual, or some combination of the two? Teachers, students, and families are asking the same questions across the nation.
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Twenty years ago, it was the first few hours after disaster struck that largely determined whether an organization would emerge from a crisis with its reputation intact.
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The Marshall Memo is a weekly digest of the best ideas and research from a wide range of publications. Every Sunday, I sit down and read through the journals and magazines that came in that week (I subscribe to more than 60).
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This week I was asked by an educator, “What does collaboration look like?” It’s a profound question, because the answer is much deeper than educators and administrators sitting around a table and being pleasant to one another. Collaboration is hard work and often requires a level of vulnerability that does not come easily to many faculty members.
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Coaching is an increasingly common method used by educational systems to improve performance. Instructional coaching, leadership coaching, and executive coaching consume extraordinary amounts of time and resources, but there is wide variation in the results they achieve. Indeed, there is wide variation in the definition of what the coaching relationship is all about. Here are five guidelines to maximize the return on your investment of time and resources in coaching.
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Education systems invest enormous amounts of time and money in professional learning. The results range from transformative (“This profoundly changes the way I teach and lead”) to wasteful (“Another irrelevant workshop”).
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