Comments on: Oakland teachers, shaping school reforms http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/2011/02/22/oakland-teachers-shaping-school-reforms/ Katy Murphy's blog on Oakland schools Thu, 20 Jun 2013 07:52:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Jacob http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/2011/02/22/oakland-teachers-shaping-school-reforms/comment-page-1/#comment-34960 Jacob Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:39:11 +0000 http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/?p=11772#comment-34960 Same ol , same old. How many schools have these theorists led? Were they successful? Defined by what?

Pathetic!

]]> By: livegreen http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/2011/02/22/oakland-teachers-shaping-school-reforms/comment-page-1/#comment-34953 livegreen Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/?p=11772#comment-34953 Why is the OEA weighing in on the Gang Injunctions?

I think it’s great that teachers can offer suggestions on the budget. I only hope OUSD will really listen to them. But the Gang Injunctions aren’t the OEA’s area of expertise and don’t affect them in any way (including getting gangs out of flatland schools where they’re present).

]]> By: Anthony Cody http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/2011/02/22/oakland-teachers-shaping-school-reforms/comment-page-1/#comment-34941 Anthony Cody Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:27:03 +0000 http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/?p=11772#comment-34941 I have been participating in the Effective Teacher Task Force. We started our work by agreeing to use the California Standards for the Teaching Profession as our basic model fro what an effective teacher ought to be. I am most interested in seeing how we can re-frame teacher professional growth. In the past, Oakland has tended to bring in programs and consultants as the primary means of improving instruction. But we have some fantastic teachers working in our schools, and many of them have pursued effective models of professional growth. We have more than fifty teachers who have achieved National Board certification, the most rigorous certification a teacher can get. We have teachers who have conducted Lesson Study, working with Dr. Catherine Lewis at Mills College. Others are doing teacher action research with the Mills Scholars group, or on their own. These forms of professional growth have certain core characteristics. Teachers doing these things are collaborating to look at student work, they are reflecting and thinking together about improving their instruction, they are taking risks – not simply following a script. And they all assume that the teacher is an active agent in her own growth.

For years we have heard complaints that Oakland spends too much money on outside consultants. The best answer to this criticism is to shift our focus to the best experts we have on our students – the teachers already working in our schools. This is not to say we are where we ought to be – there is still a lot of work to be done. Teachers need support and time to engage in this work, and the processes I mentioned are some of the ways we can do this. This challenge we face is a creative and open-ended process. I hope the Teacher Effectiveness Task Force is the beginning of a new approach to teacher professional growth in Oakland.

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