TNTP has spent the last two years trying to answer the question, “Do we know how to help teachers get better?” Their new report,The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development, shares what they found.
The Mirage examines how three large public school districts and one charter school network support teachers’ professional growth-and how their support affects teachers’ performance. It is based on surveys of more than 10,000 teachers and 500 school leaders, and interviews with more than 100 district office staff members.
TNTP wanted to identify what distinguishes teachers who improve from those who don’t, in the hope of creating a blueprint for helping far more teachers succeed in the classroom. Instead, what they found challenged all our assumptions about teacher development and how to achieve it at scale.
Here are some highlights:
- School systems are making a massive and laudable investment in teacher improvement-far larger than most people realize. The districts studied spend an average of $18,000 per teacher, per year on development efforts. Teachers themselves devote nearly 10 percent of the school year to their development.
- Yet most teachers do not appear to improve substantially from year to year. Only three out of 10 teachers in the districts studied improved substantially over several years, even though many have not yet mastered critical instructional skills.
- TNTP found no evidence that any particular approach to or amount of professional development consistently helps teachers improve. They found teachers who improved in 95 percent of the schools studied. But even after an exhaustive search, they were unable to find any common threads that separate these teachers from those who don’t improve.
- School systems are failing to help teachers understand how to improve-or even that they have room to improve at all. The vast majority of teachers in the districts studied received high marks on their evaluations, even with districts’ multiple-measure evaluation systems. Perhaps not surprisingly, less than half of the teachers we surveyed agreed they had weaknesses in their instruction.
- The answer is not to give up on teacher development. Rather, the authors believe it’s time for a new conversation about teacher improvement-one that asks fundamentally different questions about what great teaching means and how to achieve it.
To read more visit: http://tntp.org/publications/view/evaluation-and-development/the-mirage-confronting-the-truth-about-our-quest-for-teacher-development
