Improving Teacher Quality: A Guide for Education Leaders
Improving Teacher Quality: A Guide for Education Leaders addresses the specific roles education leaders have in ensuring that each classroom has the most effective teacher.
Each chapter is tailored to an individual audience and focuses on the key policies they can influence. Improving Teacher Quality includes vignettes, strategies, and realistic action steps to give readers a jumping off point to begin what can seem like an overwhelming endeavor. Every chapter ends with a checklist to facilitate next steps.
Improving Teacher Quality draws from the research-based Managing Educator Talent framework that identifies the eight critical elements influencing the likelihood that schools and classrooms are led by effective educators.
Chapter One, "Teachers and Leaders in Schools: The Conditions That Support Effective Teachers and Leaders," details the four fundamental strategies principals and administrators can adopt to:
- Create a positive, collaborative, team-oriented school culture.
- Engage families and the community.
- Ensure reasonable workloads.
- Ensure that schools are safe, clean, and well-equipped for effective teaching.
Chapter Two, "Getting the Right People on the Bus: How School Districts Manage Teacher Recruitment, Hiring, and Placement," is tailored to district administrators.
"Laine and team provide the most important guide available to help principals engage in the critical work of getting and supporting the best teachers possible. And they do so in a wonderfully comprehensive manner, with great insight, and with unparalleled attention to concrete, practice-based strategies."
—Joseph Murphy, Frank W. Mayborn Chair, Vanderbilt University
"Improving Teacher Quality articulates the integrated and interdependent links that comprise a high quality, effective human capital system that is the necessary backdrop for the kind of sustainable improvement efforts that will ultimately lead to improved teaching practice and, most importantly, student learning. This book gets it right."
—Ellen Moir, CEO, New Teacher Center
Chapter Three, "The Enduring Role of Unions: Teacher Performance Management," is aimed at union leaders and walks through the three questions driving teacher evaluation reform:
- What do you want to measure?
- How do you measure it?
- What will you do with this information?
Chapter Four, "The View From the Statehouse: Enabling Teachers, Building the Profession," is targeted to state policymakers.
Chapter Five, "Setting the Table: The Role of Institutions of Higher Education in Preparing Teachers for Success," discusses strategies for strengthening teacher preparation programs.
Improving Teacher Quality is published by Jossey-Bass and is available on Amazon.com.