Realizing that many teachers at her middle school struggled with classroom management--especially rather at sea with how to reach and motivate students of color--the author formed a teacher working group open to any colleague wanting to learn how to better reach the school's kids of color. This group reflected and learned together about working…

In 2013, a team of experts funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wrapped up a three year, $45 million project to identify Measures of Effective Teaching (MET)--an effort to determine whether it's possible to put numbers on something as complex as teaching. After reviewing 20,000 classroom videos, crunching data from thousands of student…

In no other area of education is the gulf between teachers and administrators wider than in the area of student discipline. When new teachers cite lack of administrative support as their reason for leaving the profession, what they usually mean is lack of administrative support in handling student misbehavior. When administrators complain to one…

Research suggests ways administrators and staff developers can help teachers with the important task of organizing and managing classrooms. (Author)

Important classroom management tasks occur during the first several weeks of the year, when the teacher establishes expectations about behavior and teaches the students the classroom procedures. (Author)

One of the most popular--but flawed--perspectives on the problem of ensuring teacher quality has to do with the control and accountability of the teaching force. According to this view, the obvious antidote to the ills of the education system is to increase the centralized control of schools and hold teachers more accountable. Proponents of this…

To upgrade inservice training, teachers take the lead in creating and offering the kind of training their colleagues need. At the national level, the American Federation of Teachers runs an Education Research and Dissemination Program, featuring research-based practices in areas like math instruction or classroom-management skills. In New York…

Provides six research-based domains of teacher effectiveness: Prerequisites of effective teachers, teacher as a person, classroom management and organization, organizing for instruction, implementing instruction, and monitoring students progress and potential. Describes how six domains can guide teacher-selection process. (PKP)

Describes a comprehensive staff development program for secondary teachers incorporating workshop sessions, peer observation, post-observation conferences, and classroom experimentation. Discusses the selection of classroom management, instructional activity sequencing, and teacher expectations as training topics and comments on training process…

A professor of educational psychology describes the goals of research in progress on the personal characteristics of expert teachers, compares classroom management techniques of expert teachers with those of beginning and student teachers, and criticizes existing teacher evaluation systems for their lack of uniform standards and experienced…

Linguistic coaching is a comprehensive approach to effective communication that helps teachers cope with stress, establish teaching-role authority, and improve their overall outlook and performance. The three principles of linguistic coaching are identifying the performance needing improvement, establishing interpretations behind the performance,…

Intensive Assistance is presented as a routine to be used in helping marginal teachers improve. It is a systems team approach and provides a vehicle for developing human resources. (MD)

School staff can lead, teach, and learn better by defining what has value within their educational organizations. Value-added work is effort leading directly to learning. Waste work is improperly completed effort not tied to learning. Necessary work consists of tasks that keep the school running, but do not directly affect learning. Meetings waste…

Clinical supervision focuses on helping teachers improve their performance through the analysis of observed events in the classroom and postobservation critiques. (Author/MLF)

This literature review concludes that, although time spent is not so consistently related to achievement as it may seem, studies of time use in schools provide important information that can serve as a base for school improvement. (MJL)