July/August 2004
School-Based Coaching
A revolution in professional development-or just the latest fad?
By Alexander Russo
"They call it coaching, but it is teaching. You do not just tell them it is so. You show them the reasons why it is so."
-Vince Lombardi
After years of disappointing results from conventional professional development efforts, and under ever-increasing accountability pressures, many districts are now hiring coaches to improve their schools. These coaches don't use locker-room pep talks to motivate their teams, but they do strive to improve morale and achievement-and raise scores-by showing teachers how and why certain strategies will make a difference for their students.
The professional development strategy known as school-based coaching generally involves experts in a particular subject area or set of teaching strategies working closely with small groups of teachers to improve classroom practice and, ultimately, student achievement.
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Teacher Research
Fluency Tests Help Identify Struggling Readers Early
By Cliff Kramer, Reading Specialist
Park Elementary School, Cross Plains, Wisconsin
The Context
Visit virtually any first-grade classroom in early September and you will see a roomful of eager young children who appear scholarly and ready to learn. After watching these children work in the classroom for only a few minutes, however, a visitor can't help noticing the vast differences in reading ability among these new
first-graders.
Seated at one table, three children are looking at (but only one is actually reading) the book Where's Spot? In one corner of the room, a child is reading every item on this week's hot lunch menu aloud, while another child knows only the word "milk."
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Insights
Rethinking High School and Beyond
A European-style proposal for strengthening the transition to work or higher education
By Marc S. Tucker
High school is the Waterloo of the current round of school reform. There are many signs that the standards and accountability movement is having a substantial effect on the performance of elementary schools, even those that have a history of poor performance. And there are grounds for hope that real progress will be made in the middle schools. But high schools are another matter. Virtually everyone familiar with this landscape believes that our high schools are the most deeply troubled and most difficult institutions to change.
In any cohort of ninth graders, only 25 percent will go on to earn some sort of postsecondary degree. More and more, a young person who leaves high school unable to earn at least a two-year college degree faces a life of constant economic struggle. This can only be considered a growing national disaster.
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