Last week USC and the Rossier School of Education presented a special back-to-school webinar featuring guest speaker Steven Farr of Teach For America.
As Chief Knowledge Officer, Farr leads Teach for America in discerning what distinguishes teachers whose students in low-income communities achieve high levels of academic growth. A graduate of the University of Texas’s Plan II Honors program and Yale Law School, Farr joined the Teach for America staff in 2001 as vice president of training and support. Prior to that, he taught high school English and English as a second language as part of the 1993 Teach For America corps in the Rio Grande Valley. He has also authored a number of Teach For America’s training texts and a published instructional book for teachers, Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap.
During the webinar, Farr drew on research conducted by Teach For America and identified the following six criteria that helped separate good teachers and great ones.
1. Setting Goals
Although many teachers shoot for the respectable goal of getting their students to “learn as much as possible,” research conducted by Teach For America indicates that the teachers whose students progress most are those who set ambitious, but concrete goals. At the school year’s start, these teachers gauge where their students currently are, where they should be by summer and how their progress can be measured. Establishing such goals increases focus, creates urgency and has been demonstrated to improve children’s academic growth.
2. Investing in Students and Their Families
Investing in children means not only trying to educate them, but trying to change their mindsets. These investments can manifest in different forms, but one hurdle teachers must often overcome is their students’ mistaken belief that children are divided into smart ones and dumb ones, and that hard work is not part of the equation. Treating motivational theory as important as classroom management or instructional strategies goes a long way in addressing this issue. Practical techniques are diverse, ranging from introducing role models to continuous messaging about hard work, but the most important factor is creating transparency of progress and success.
3. Planning Backwards
After selecting a long-term goal, a method of discerning whether or not students have met it needs to be established and then teachers must focus on ensuring that the assessment will be passed. Sometimes teachers get bogged down with the here and now: “What are the kids going to enjoy?” “What activities are we going to do today?” Much more fruitful is planning with an objective in mind and engaging students in a way that leads them towards that objective.
4. Effective Execution
All too often the criteria by which to judge the effectiveness of a teaching plan is by how smoothly it goes, or how well the situation first envisioned matches up to the reality of implementation. But Farr revealed that Teach For America’s best teachers instead judged their effectiveness by how readily they could adjust their plans to cope with the inevitable discrepancies that pop up between their imagined situation and the actuality of the classroom. Simultaneously engaging and delivering to students while assessing how much they are actually learning and trying to maximize that amount is an arduous, intricate process, but a proven method of increasing academic growth.
5. Constant Change
An interesting, almost counter-intuitive particular that Farr brought up during the webinar is that the amount of time teachers spend learning new instructional techniques and classroom management plans doesn’t really translate to student progress. Rather, how willing teachers are to change their instructional and management systems is much more related to improved pupil performance. This idea of constant change is tied into effective execution, specifically coping with the unforeseen weak spots, and being ready and willing to switch them out for techniques that may be more successful. Constantly trying to maximize learning means being able to accurately measure students’ understanding, dropping ineffective routines and submitting fresh material until something works as well as possible.
6. Working Relentlessly
“Working relentlessly” sounds like a trite piece of advice, something useless along the lines of “Just work harder and everything will work!” But the essence of this last bit of Karr’s advice wasn’t so banal. He explained that teachers may sometimes unnecessarily constrict themselves to their perceived limits and become unwilling to go beyond those boundaries. They acknowledge that they are not their students’ parents or social workers or nurses, but fail to make an essential commitment to their students: to accept responsibility for whether their pupils fail or succeed. With that conviction comes the understanding that teachers have the power to make success possible.
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If you’re interested in accessing a copy of the webinar, please email Alexa Scordato at alexa.scordato(at)usc.edu. Also, visit TeachingasLeadership.org, a website by Teach For America that features an extensive library of videos demonstrating some of the techniques described above, along with instructional documents and other teaching tools.
