New Paper: Transforming High School Teaching and Learning

Posted by on January 29, 2007

[posted from Public Education Network newsblast]

TRANSFORMING HIGH SCHOOL TEACHING AND LEARNING

Significant improvements in student learning require real change at the heart of instruction: the interaction of students and teachers around the content to be learned. A new paper by Judy Wurtzel for the Aspen Institute suggests a set of design specifications for strengthening this interaction of student, teacher and content and increasing student performance across a school district. These designs have six components. The first two focus on what the job of effective high school teaching looks like and on getting and keeping teachers who can do this job. They offer a new teacher “job description” that places accountability for results and the use and refinement of effective practices at the core of teaching and also suggest approaches for recruiting and retaining high school teachers who have the will and capacity to embrace this job description and increase student learning. The next four components describe an infrastructure for improving high school instruction that is consistent with this new job description, that provides the concrete supports needed to help new and veteran teachers know what and how to teach effectively, that enables teachers to elicit higher performance from their students, and that rests on a teacher-based system for continuously improving results.

http://www.aspeninstitute.org/site/c.huLWJeMRKpH/b.612035/k.EE02/Education_and_Society_Program.htm