Ensuring Teacher Effectiveness

Thanks to its partnership with publisher Eye on Education, EducationWorld is pleased to present this tip from High-Impact Leadership for High-Impact Schools: The Actions That Matter Most by Pamela S. Salazar.

In this piece, Salazar provides school leaders with five key questions they should ask themselves to ensure that they are effectively supporting their teachers, and constantly increasing the quality of teaching in their schools.

Teachers in every classroom must be competent, caring, and qualified. Individual teachers have a profound influence on student learning, and the strategies they use to guide classroom practice should maximize the possibility of enhancing student achievement. In high-impact schools, the teacher's work focuses on enabling students to understand the expected learning standards and to achieve what is laid out in them. The high-impact leader's responsibility is to enable teachers to be successful in accomplishing that. In order to help teachers succeed through supervision practices and reflective dialogue, high-impact leaders should ask themselves:

1. Do supervision practices support teacher growth and development?
2. Are teachers challenged to examine assumptions about their work and rethink how it can be performed?
3. Do teachers use instruction that engages and motivates students?
4. Have we created a climate of experimentation — an environment where teachers are willing to task risks, to try new things?
5. Do we have supports in place for new and struggling teachers?

High-impact leaders continually look at the way they structure, observe, and improve individual teaching. They develop processes to provide what every student deserves: teachers in every classroom who are the greatest learners of their own practice and who offer and intellectual challenging, relevant education.

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