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Many CMs have already passed their first days, and I’ve been reading some posts and cringing a bit when I read about how new teachers spend a lot of time right away with their ‘setting big goals’ / ‘investment’ speech. You can set big goals and you can work on getting your students ‘invested’ but you shouldn’t do it with a big speech. Here’s an analogy explaining why:
Imagine that you are forced to go to a comedy club. You’ve been to that club before and you didn’t think the comics were very funny, and you’re not very optimistic this time,…
When I say that TFA has no sense of humor, I’m not talking about the thousands of staffers, CMs, and alums. Individually, most of the CMs and CMAs I’ve met do try to keep a sense of perspective that allows them to laugh at some of their own mistakes. When it comes to the organization…
read more »Common Teacher Mistake #7 — Overconfidence. This is one that particularly applies to new TFA teachers. I was a victim of this myself, back in the day, and the fact that it’s still a prominent issue makes me worry that TFA contributes to building that overconfidence. You know the famous Western movie cliche “It’s quiet…
read more »Published by the same publisher, and just two months after, the TFA ‘Teaching As Leadership’ book, I was curious to see if this book could live up to its hype. I’m only a few pages in, but my first impression is that this is an excellent book. What I like about this book is that…
read more »Now that I’ve finished the entire book, including all the appendices, I’d like to make some conclusions and final reflections for any new teachers reading the book and especially for new TFA CMs. I think that one of the central themes of the book is that effective teachers know how to be efficient with the…
read more »I’ve just finished chapter 6, the final principle ‘Work Relentlessly.’ While I like most of the content of this chapter, I’ve got a few minor ‘improvements.’ TFA is still in the middle of a slow evolution of its philosophy of teacher training and teacher effectiveness. Sometimes it seems that they’re not quite sure if they…
read more »Just finished chapter 5, ‘Continuously Increase Effectiveness,’ which I liked. It’s a very short 20 page chapter, which is very realistic. All teachers make mistakes. New teachers make a lot of them, but even experienced teachers do. Mistakes come from taking risks, and just like students learn from mistakes, so can teachers. When things don’t…
read more »Chapter 4, ‘Execute Effectively’, is another very good chapter. Here is where readers learn that being an excellent teacher requires a lot of hard detail work. There’s the constant assessing of students during a lesson and then a lot of grading afterwards. I think a CM reading this will finally get a sense of what…
read more »Chapter 3 of Teaching as leadership is, surprisingly, quite good. Reading it made me even more frustrated about what happened in the first two chapters. It seems like chapter 3 is based on a completely different premise than the first two chapters. Chapters one and two seem to say, “Here are some practices we’ve found…
read more »Chapter 2 begins with some first hand accounts by highly effective teachers describing what they do to ‘invest’ their students. Some of the practices of the hero teachers are kind of risky. For example, Kwame Griffith writes on page 54: I build strong relationships with my students, and they called my home nightly to talk…
read more »By a somewhat frustrated 1991 alum
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