Teachers Who Learn, Kids Who Achieve
“From the beginning, when the U.S. Department of Education instituted its National Awards Program for Professional Development, the idea was not just to acknowledge successful schools but to really make it possible for people to learn from their example.
“There had been a number of previous efforts highlighting award-winning schools, but there hadn’t been a real research-based look at the schools. There hadn’t been an approach specifically to understand what the characteristics were that seemed to be making a difference.
“So Teachers Who Learn, Kids Who Achieve evolved out of what began as a research project. We contracted with the National Staff Development Council and Joellen Killion to manage the research study. The process—to observe in the schools, interview teachers and principals, and collect and analyze data—was quite involved.
“As we were getting all this information sorted through and organized, we discovered that there really are stages to making information useful. The research report was one stage—write down what you are seeing and what the data are telling you. Then there was another stage of digesting it all some more and figuring out how best to make what we were learning useful. The last stage was to write Teachers Who Learn, Kids Who Achieve.
“What people have told us about the book is that it really conveys in a concrete way the whole climate of what goes on in exemplary schools. What’s striking is not just what they do, but the whole spirit of these places. It’s not that any specific action is the magic, but that a lot of different things come together. And that’s what the book gets across, I think, what those things are and how it feels to be in those schools.”
Contact Information
Nikola Filby
nfilby@wested.org