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Data provides a blueprint for what our students know, what our students need, and what our students bring to the classroom. Data allows teachers to provide instruction that ensures their students are learning necessary skills, and it allows school leaders to better understand and support the teachers in their community. How can we support educators at all levels in understanding and applying data in ways that enhance student success?

Teaching Today

Using Data in Service of Student Learning

We're kicking off a six-part series exploring our core principles — communities of practice, contextualized practice, critical reflection, cultivating strengths, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy, and cycles of inquiry — which inform, define, and shape our K-12 coaching practices. 

In this first episode of the series, we unpack communities of practice — a collaborative approach to discourse and decision-making that cultivates relationships, honors individual perspectives, and encourages working together toward a common goal.

Principles of Practice: Communities of Practice

In part five of our series exploring core coaching principles, we're looking at cycles of inquiry — a powerful component of transforming and improving professional practice. As educators, we must maintain a commitment to the inquiry process — identifying challenges, posing questions, implementing interventions, and monitoring for improvements. It is this quest for understanding that helps us evolve and meet the changing needs of our students and school communities.

Principles of Practice: Cycles of Inquiry

In the final episode of our series exploring core coaching principles, we're focusing on culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy — a crucial practice that explores the cultural implications and power dynamics present in education, and requires mindfulness and vulnerability from educators as they work to unpack and undo inequities in their school communities.

Principles of Practice: Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogy

There is a natural — and often overlooked — link between leadership development and adult learning. Effective leaders recognize that adults are practical, hands-on learners who come equipped with prior knowledge and many years of experience — and adjust their leadership and professional development accordingly. This week, The Aspen Institute's Cheryl Green returns for a conversation around how leaders can better connect with the adult learners in their school communities.

Leadership & Adult Learning

When teachers work together in teams, they coach each other, learn from one another, and increase their expertise. This team dynamic — in which everyone plays a role and is valued — provides educators with a safe space to refine their practices and in turn, improve teaching and learning. But how do schools structure and support these teams? How do they measure and achieve success? Experienced team leader Courtney Brown joins us this week to discuss the joys and challenges of teams.

Teachers Leading Teachers

Our team is back together this week to shed some light on data — a topic that often inspires fear and resistance. And for good reason — without the tools to make data meaningful for instruction, it can feel like a purely evaluative measure that restricts and reduces all the work you do as an educator. How can we make the most of the data we have? Listen in as we talk through the obstacles and opportunities we’re witnessing when it comes to data collection and analysis in schools.

Making Data Meaningful

Curriculum refers to an interactive system of instruction and learning with specific goals, contents, strategies, measurement, and resources. Many schools receive a pre-packaged curriculum from their district or state. The challenge may come with implementation and trying to make the curriculum your own. In this episode, we are joined by Courtney Brown and Bina Clifford who offer strategies to adapt, adjust, and adopt pre-packaged curriculum.

Pre-Packaged Curriculum (Adapting, Adjusting, Adopting)

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to assessment for learning is the degree to which we’re able to gather information that accurately reflects what our students know and can do in the moment. It takes practice and careful planning to design meaningful assessments, and use the information in the moment to adjust instruction. This week, we’re talking with two members of our coaching team, Dr. Cristina Compton and Lauren Midgette, about promising practices for assessment for learning.

Assessment for Learning

Teachers have a lot of power to determine what and how they’re developing grading systems that reflect students’ knowledge, skills, and progress — but the process is complicated, and can sometimes cause harm. In this episode, we’re talking with Ashlynn Wittchow about systems of grading, and assessing the benefits and drawbacks of different models.

Approaches to Grading

Given its complexity, conversations about grading for equity often dwell in highly theoretical spaces. Although these spaces can be conducive to nuanced discussion surrounding equity, they can also become distanced from practices used in real classrooms.

To achieve more equitable grading practices, theory and practice must come together — how can we implement culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy in our schools and with our students? 

We’re talking with Michael Fram — Principal of New York City’s Repertory High School — about how they’re bringing grading for equity to life.

Grading for Equity

Designing projects for an individual class can be a daunting experience, but what about for a whole district, and in the wake of the pandemic?

At the height of exhaustion, many school and leaders within the Scarsdale Public Schools district were looking for ways to reignite a passion for learning in students and teachers. But how could teachers collaborate across disciplines, across grade levels, and across schools to develop curriculum that re-engaged their students?

Three school and district leaders from Scarsdale join us in this episode to examine their project-based learning district initiative — SPARK — and its impact on students and their larger community.

Sparking a Passion for Project-Based Learning

What is the best way to teach children to read? This question has plagued teachers, administrators, and literacy specialists for decades in the K-12 space. This question is often a highly controversial one, as literacy issues can become caught up in politics — both within the field of education and depending which expert or company or program one is aligned with. 

This week, we're talking to Dr. Cristina Compton, a former elementary school educator and the Director of Program Development at the Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET), and Kelsey Hammond, a former middle school English Language Arts’ educator and professional development coach, about the science of reading.

The Science of Reading

Let’s be real: teacher appreciation week should be EVERY week. In this special episode, we want to honor and to celebrate the challenging work that teachers do every day to educate and to inspire their students. We’ve brought our CPET colleagues together to share stories about the teachers who have had a profound impact on us as individuals.

Teacher Appreciation

Books have the power to introduce us to new places, cultures, and perspectives. But right now students across the country are facing empty bookshelves in their classrooms and school libraries, as books that fairly address issues of race, gender, and culture in age-appropriate ways are at risk of being banned from classroom and library shelves by state or local officials.

This week, we're joined by Dr. Heather Harding, Executive Director of Campaign for a Shared Future (https://www.campaignsharedfuture.org/), to discuss what we can do in our local communities to ensure that all children have the opportunity to access inclusive content.

Censorship in Schools

As school districts respond to the concerns about a literacy crisis in the U.S., many are rolling out big initiatives to increase reading performance. This often comes with big changes to curriculum, expectations for educators, and a lot of pressure to implement concepts they may not understand. 

In this episode, we’re continuing our conversation about the Science of Reading with Dr. Cristina Compton and Kelsey Hammond as we explore the implications of new policies being enacted across New York City public schools.

Listen to Part 1 of our conversation here: https://soundcloud.com/user-556918646/the-science-of-reading

The Science of Reading | Part 2

In a time when students are inundated with media and technology all around them, it can be difficult for teachers to engage students in reading a book that takes place almost 80 years ago.

Teachers are often looking for the best approaches to spark students’ interest and their understanding of the importance of storytelling about world events and the human experience. In this episode, we’re talking with our colleague Courtney Brown and Mike Epperson, an ELA teacher at AECI-2 charter school in the Bronx, about the innovative annotation strategy he's been using to help students connect to texts in his 10th grade classroom.

Literacy Strategies for Student Engagement

Our classrooms are made up of students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In some cases, our students are learning a new language in addition to discipline-specific content. 

Multi-language learners require intentional support to improve their fluency both reading and writing. What do those strategies look like in teachers’ planning and instruction, especially when teachers do not speak their students’ home language? 

We are talking to Marcia Garcia Underwood, founder and CEO of M Ideas Consulting Services, and Lauren Midgette, a professional development coach at CPET. Both of our guests today will be sharing their most effective strategies to support multi-language learners based on their years of classroom and coaching experience.

Support for Multi-Language Learners

Since its release, ChatGPT has provoked discussion within the arena of the classroom and beyond. ChatGPT is a revolutionary AI language model in many respects, capable of advanced and human-sounding prose. As a result, many teachers and administrators expressed concern when the AI-bot was first released, with many schools banning access to ChatGPT on their school or district internet. 

Today we are talking to Dr. Cristina Compton, an elementary education and project-based learning specialist at CPET; Chelsey Barber, a current PhD student at Teachers College whose research interests include the effects of 21st technology on learning & teaching; and Kelsey Hammond, a professional development and literacy coach at CPET, about all things ChatGPT.

Let’s Talk About ChatGPT: AI as a Tool for Learning

Project-based learning can be an overwhelming approach to teaching and curriculum design, and transforming practice requires time, which is one of the most difficult resources for teachers to come by.

In this spotlight episode, we're talking with Dr. Cristina Compton, about one of her signature courses, The Power of Project-Based Learning, and how she offers effective and practical strategies for bringing this work into your classroom.

From the Center: The Power of Project-Based Learning

Happy New Year! It’s September, and we're celebrating the start of a new school year — a time for reflecting, goal setting, and anticipating our new students. With the return to school, we teachers often return to the advice and wisdom passed down to us about how best to start the school year:

"Don’t smile until Christmas."
"Never let them see you sweat!"
"Fake it ‘til you make it."

Sometimes these words of advice feel mythic, especially to newer teachers. But, this so-called wisdom, for the most part, comes from a time when the culture valued a teacher-centered and dominant force in the classroom. 

Today, we're talking with our team about all things back-to-school, including debunking some of these teaching myths about how teachers should begin the year now that we are in the 21st century.

Welcome Back to School

Establishing and forging meaningful relationships with students at the start of the school year can be challenging — students often have diverse backgrounds, needs, and personalities, and they need to feel a sense of trust in order to be vulnerable about their learning needs, their personal opinions, and their challenges.
 
In this episode, we’re talking with Kelsey Hammond, a former ELA teacher and Lead Professional Development Coach, and Victoria Fernandez, a former Math/Special Education teacher and Lead Professional Development Coach about the importance of building relationships that foster a positive learning environment.

Classroom Connections

Adopting and adapting a new curriculum is a complex and multi-faceted process. It can pose a significant challenge as it involves navigating various competing needs, such as state standards, standardized exams, district and school-specific goals, and the diverse needs of students. The question arises: which of these priorities takes precedence? How do you do it all? Today we are Courtney Brown, Senior PD Advisor, NTN@TC Initiative Leader, and Secondary Ed. Specialist and, someone who has worked closely with  a variety of schools to support curriculum, and ELA and ENL specialist, Lauren Midgette, who has been involved in various curricular projects with CPET.

Adopting & Adapting Curriculum

Station teaching can transform traditional classrooms into dynamic learning environments — the key is to familiarize yourself with the promising practices and potential pitfalls of this approach. In this episode, we're talking with co-teaching specialists Dr. Laura Rigolosi and Jacqui Stolzer about how educators can make station teaching work in their classrooms.

Station Teaching

Engagement is a lever for achievement — when students are highly engaged, they are more likely to learn and persevere through challenges. How can educators effectively measure and assess student engagement in the classroom?

We're joined by Nona Ullman and Melissa Payette of LessonLoop — an organization that guides better instruction and transforms learner engagement — to talk about the innovative practice of using student feedback to measure engagement and increase joyful learning. 

Supporting Student Voice and Engagement

Educators have an important job: getting students — the next group of leaders — ready for the future. Our guests this week — Lisa Dughi, CEO of NAF, a national education non-profit that works to prepare students for a life of upward mobility and success; and Collette Smith, Founder of Believe N You, which works with schools in underserved communities to encourage students and inspire positive change — bring their personal and professional experience as changemakers to the pod to discuss how we can best support tomorrow's leaders.

Empowering Tomorrow's Leaders

Questions come naturally to young children: Why is the sky blue? Where do butterflies go in winter? As they grow older, students need invitations to cultivate curiosity and teachers who are able to teach the skill of questioning.

The Question Formulation Technique builds this lifelong learning skill, teaching students how to ask their own questions. In this episode, we’re joined by Dan Rothstein, Luz Santana, and Sarah Westbrook from The Right Question Institute to discuss how the QFT works and what we can do to cultivate curiosity through questioning.

Cultivating Curiosity Through Questioning

Math teachers are pulled in several directions as they plan and implement their lessons — how do they divide their precious, limited teaching time between teaching discrete and necessary skills, empowering students to use math in the real world today and in their future, and preparing students for “the test?"

In this episode, we’re talking with Bob Janes, Supervisor of Secondary Mathematics at East Hartford Public Schools, about what math literacy looks like and how he coaches teachers to infuse literacy in their classrooms. He also recommends tools and practices for teachers to find their balance in this challenging and exciting world of math literacy.

Math Literacy

Arriving in an entirely new place after fleeing dangerous or unstable circumstances in their home countries, newcomers and asylum-seeking students are navigating a complex set of obstacles. From dealing with past trauma to acculturation struggles, gaps in formal education, taking on family responsibilities, and simply meeting basic needs like food and shelter, the demands can seem overwhelming. 

Our guest, Gicel Adon, has made it her mission to create an environment where these incredible young people can thrive. As Principal of the International School for Liberal Arts, she is committed to collaborating with her team to equip students with the tools and support system they need to succeed academically, socially, and emotionally. In this episode, Principal Adon shares practical guidance based on her experience serving this vibrant student population.

Empowering Newcomers & Asylum Seekers

Teachers confront students' emotional responses to reading on a daily basis, particularly as more complex texts are introduced.

We're unpacking the idea of a "complex text", reflecting on why reading can elicit such emotional responses, and focusing on how teachers can support readers of all ages.

Special guest:
Dr. Laura Rigolosi, Curriculum & Literacy Specialist

The Secret to Scaffolding Complex Texts

Research increasingly shows that the academic performance of students of color often suffers due to differences between curriculum and culture. Culturally responsive and sustaining curriculum is a critical element in reversing this trend.

How do we integrate culturally relevant material into traditional curriculum? How can we provide students with a curriculum that recognizes and celebrates their identities, lived experiences, and cultures?

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Special guest:
Dr. Marcelle Mentor | Teachers College, Columbia University

Culturally Responsive Curriculum

Charlotte Danielson's Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching (commonly known as The Danielson Framework) has become the most widely used teacher evaluation tool in the United States. But is the framework being used in the way it was intended?

We're joined by Charlotte Danielson as we unpack the framework, explore its origins, and examine how it's being used today. 

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Special guest: 
Charlotte Danielson  |  Author of Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching

Teacher Evaluation: Unpacking the Danielson Framework

In education, one of our greatest shortcomings is ignoring widely available research that confirms optimal learning experiences can be achieved by implementing multi-sensory activities, pursuing meaningful tasks, and exploring a variety of skills using real-world applications. 

Instead of traditional learning that focuses on reciting and reiterating content, our students would be better served by learning opportunities that tap into their full capacity. How can teachers identify and create authentic curriculum that supports this type of learning?

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Special guest:
Dr. Jacqueline Simmons  |  Vice Chair, Department of Curriculum & Teaching; Teachers College, Columbia University

Designing Authentic Curriculum

Teaching Today is brought to you by The Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) at Teachers College, Columbia University.

In conversation with teachers, researchers, and school leaders, we’re dedicated to breaking down the problems, policies, and promising practices that define teaching. Uniting theory and practice, CPET promotes rigorous and relevant scholarship, and is committed to making excellent education accessible worldwide.

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