Teaching As Leadership

With nearly two decades of data on more than 17,000 teachers, Teach For America has released its internal findings showing what distinguishes its most highly effective teachers from the rest. The book, Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher's Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap, outlines six principles embodied by effective teachers and builds the evidence base for an issue that author Steven Farr says has been far too long shrugged off as an ineffable mystery - what makes a great teacher? TFA teachers and alumni will surely recall large portions of the "Teaching as Leadership" (TAL) framework from heart (or at least older iterations of it). My first encounter with TAL occurred during afternoon-long sessions at a coffee shop in 2005, between college graduation and moving to the East Coast to begin my teaching stint in Camden, New Jersey. I had just two weeks to ingest the formulas for extraordinary teaching before heading to Summer Institute (TFA's five-week boot camp). For me, TAL was memorable (you'll see what I mean if you flip through it for yourself) because of its sense of urgency about closing America's vexing achievement gaps, and because its anecdotes inspired hope that hard-working young people could achieve the seemingly impossible with their students. But the contents of TAL aren't just motivators. For TFA teachers, the six principles are guidelines for how to measure classroom success, signposts for knowing whether you're on track to replicating the extraordinary achievements of teachers who've gone before you. The framework's principles are wrap-around and multi-purpose - not only do they inform TFA's selection process, they serve as evaluation tools and guidance for TFA in developing its teachers from neophytes into educators capable of moving their students ahead by one, two, three, or more years of academic growth. To read the rest of this review, go to the Ohio Education Gadfly [...]

This is a very important book. The authors have analyzed two decades' worth of observations, questionnaires, and interviews generated by the Teach for America program and used it to determine what differentiates highly effective teachers from less effective ones. It turns out that highly effective teachers share six traits: They set big goals, invest students and their families in them, plan purposefully, execute effectively, continuously increase their effectiveness, and work relentlessly. The book explains what these traits mean, offers examples of their implementation, and recommends strategies that teachers can apply to their classes. I thought the the two chapters on effective execution were the most valuable parts of the book. That's because they reinforce other research (for example, Madeline Hunter's from the late 70s - late 80s and Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins' "Backward Design"). Those teachers who plan well, teach well, and assess well get the best results. It sounds obvious-- and in many ways, it is-- but it's not so easy to do in the real world of the classroom. This book demonstrates that it can be done. It also demonstrates that it must be done if we are to close the achievement gap, the low achievement by minority and poor kids, that bedevils the schools. There is no hope of solving the persistent social problems of poverty and ameliorating the effects of racism as long as that gap exists. Now, there are some important qualifications here. First, what the book says is specific to teachers working in poor and minority communities. That's because the point of Teach for America is to recruit and train teachers to work in those communities. It seems logical that the recommendations in the book could and would work to improve education in general, but the the analysis in the book does not prove that, and the authors make no such claims. Second, Teach for America teachers are not typical of teachers in general. The program is very highly selective (only 15% of the 35,000 or so applicants are accepted each year), and most of the applicants are top students from selective colleges. Could "regular" teachers do what the TFA teachers are doing? That research hasn't been done yet. Third, one of the traits the book examines is that highly effective teachers work relentlessly. The examples offered certainly support that; indeed, they are inspiring. However, can those teachers keep up the pace as the years roll on? A teaching career is a marathon, not a series of hundred-yard dashes, and so I wonder about the burn-out factor in the long run. This is a very important book about a critical subject. So much of what is written about reforming education is not based on what actual teachers are doing in actual classrooms with actual kids. This book is entirely based upon data gathered in that real world. The trick now is to find out whether the conclusions based on that specific data can be applied in the schools in general

I couldn't put the book down. The principles of this book should be taught in credential programs. Principals should ensure that teachers possess (or are willing to work toward) the ideas listed in this book. A wonderful book that will change your teaching practice in a positive and dramatic way.

I train teachers for a living, and Teaching as Leadership is a game-changer for our field. Farr takes the overwhelming process of becoming an effective teacher and breaks it into six strategic steps--set big goals, invest students and their families, plan purposefully, teach effectively, increase effectiveness, and work relentlessly--and offers an abundance of tactical resources (both in the text and in the INCREDIBLE online supplements) to help teachers take these steps in their own classrooms. The book is not only a clear what-to-do, but additionally, drawing heavily on both rigorous research and powerful anecdotes from great teachers (a potent combo), Farr makes a clear case for why great teachers take these steps and how they change kids' lives.

I found Teaching As Leadership to be a gripping read and, just as importantly, a profound contribution to the debate swirling over what is to be done about our nation's creaking educational infrastructure. This book's answer is both astonishingly simple and embarrassingly novel: focus on the students. As someone with experience teaching elementary, secondary, and university students, I found myself taking pleasure, again and again, as TAL turned my long-held assumptions about "good teaching" on their respective heads. Farr leads the reader with brisk care -- and plenty of data -- to the conclusion that so many of us have long known in our guts to be true: that good teachers are, in essence, no different from any other kind of good leader.