Four Year Teacher Training Curriculum for Administrators

The link below is to a new resource for administrators. It's the first two years of a planned four year curriculum for teacher training using the Four Foundations of Great Teaching  booklet. 

Four Year Teacher Training Curriculum for Administrators (Year 1 and Year 2 included as of 1/15/2021)

From the introduction:

For classical, Christian schools the mission is always central. School culture and the formation of graduates who love God and love their neighbors should be the consistent focus of what our schools are doing. Along with these important goals, schools have a curriculum of academic skills, tools, and subject content that teachers are responsible to pass on to their students. It is classroom teachers who deliver the mission, both the spiritual and the academic curriculum. This guide is meant to assist administrators as they work with teachers to grow very effective faculties, by focusing on key habits that all great teachers have.

Those habits are:

·         plan unit and daily lesson learning targets before planning activities

·         write clear, student-learning-focused learning targets

·         share the learning targets with students

·         plan frequent formative assessments to check for understanding during lessons

·         be sure that formative assessments are involuntary and all-inclusive

·         give frequent feedback to students that is specific and descriptive

·         plan activities that require full involvement of all students

·         use models of strong and weak work frequently

·         make sure that students talk more than the teacher does

·         be clear about expectations for transitions and other routines

 

This guide includes lesson plans for thirty sessions, assuming 30-45 minutes each. The plan below spreads this out over a cycle of four years, but of course they could be done more quickly, or more slowly, depending on the needs of the group. While the concepts build on each other, it is not necessary for all of the lessons to be done in order for future lessons to be valuable. Administrators may find it useful to add their own topics and materials, as well, to fit their particular school situation. This may be especially true with the lessons on classroom culture and management, as each school will have its own emphases and procedures to focus on.

These lessons were developed in actual teacher training in an ACCS school, with teachers K-12. The topics are universal to good teaching regardless of grade level, and teachers will readily adapt them to their individual situations during the lessons and discussions.

The lessons are designed to be highly engaging, with a minimum of presentation from an administrator. This is meant to ensure that teachers actively participate in the learning, and to also model the kind of engaged teaching process that should be the norm in teachers’ classrooms. Administrators rightly expect teachers to have their students actively engaged in their learning—teacher training should model this.

These thirty lessons are only a beginning, of course. Excellence in teaching is a never-ending but deeply satisfying pursuit, for individual teachers and for schools. And since excellent teachers are the key to excellent schools, it is one we must continually attend to.