Customer Reviews

Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher's Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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 come from a family with a teacher who has won many accolades and we all have teachers we remember fondly and also not as fondly so it is with that perspective that I read this book, as did my family member who is a teacher. Teaching as Leadership offers great anecdotes from teachers who have made a difference in the lives of disadvantaged students but none of them really speak about whether this came at their own personal cost or how their laser focus impacted their families (did they have children of their own when they came home?). Chapters one and two try to build inspiration and ask you to set high standards and involve the families in the process. Both are important ideas that can be executed to differing levels of success depending upon your community. If family members in the community work two and three jobs to stay afloat, all speak a different language than the language of instruction, and/or are in the midst of social crises, than they are understandably limited in how much more they can give to their child's education without support services from the government. That being said, the last chapter asks teachers to work relentlessly... Many teachers work as they they are the CEOs of large corporations putting in 60 to 80 hour weeks that go unnoticed because so much of their work is taken home with them. The burn-out factor is a huge problem and chapter six asks teachers to, "Assume personal responsibility for dramatic student learning...and overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles." How many people could last 25 years in a job that demands that of them every day? Is the shift to making teachers as responsible for the students as parents realistic and sustainable? The family member that was a teacher found the book to have many good suggestions for impacting student achievement and was able to create useful checklists for classroom use. This member also liked the idea of teaching as leadership so it is recommended but with the advice to think about not only what can be achieved but what can be sustained.

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.

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
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Most everyone agrees that education is important to any society, but what cannot be agreed upon is the means to achieve an end; the most effective way to teach so that children emerge better informed and better suited for the ever- changing world in which we live. This book, Teaching as Leadership, claims to have the answers and it formulates its methodology based on the experience of teachers over a twenty-year span. The book strives to make teachers more effective, more successful, and more efficient through its articulated means for teaching and student involvement. It spells everything out, in chronological step- by- step order, covering everything from setting goals to execution to continuous improvement.

Teaching as Leadership does have some good advice to offer and I like the way it lays out its plan of action. It offers anecdotes and a helpful conclusion/summary at the end of each chapter that wraps up the key points. This is all fine and good, and the author's intentions are certainly positive and noteworthy. However, this book isn't quite the eye- opening read I was hoping for and the main reason is that most of the contents of this book cover strategies and material that teachers have heard and been trained on for decades. In addition to that, the book gets very monotonous after a while. You can easily predict what each section of each chapter is going to cover before you get there. If the author wanted to drive these points home through repetition, I would say he succeeded.

On the positive side, this book does more than simply lay out a plan of action through words and anecdotes. There are also some helpful appendices and other reference material throughout each chapter. Many concerned educators might want to turn immediately to Appendix A, which offers a rubric to follow for the different key points covered in the book's six chapters. Like the conclusion of each chapter, this rubric can easily substitute for reading the entire book because it tells you the important information you need to know, in a table format. A concerned educator can turn to this section and utilize the table to guide them through the process.

Teaching as Leadership includes advice that could apply to anyone at any level of teaching. However, readers will quickly realize that this book is primarily aimed at those who teach teens and children. I have many years of teaching experience, but my teaching has been limited to adults. Thus, I found the advice contained within this book a little less useful than I otherwise would. Like I said, the general advice still applies, but the way it is presented in this book makes it clear that the advice is directed at those in high school or earlier. This was a bit of a disappointment, because I was hoping for something directed at college- level teaching, at least to an extent.

Education is an important component of a functioning and thriving society and Teaching as Leadership aims to make teachers more effective and more successful. The book is a little dry, monotonous, and repetitive, but it still has some useful points to make and its bottom- line goal is commendable.

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.

You have to admire the "Teach for America" program. Bringing some of the best and brightest from college into some of our most challenging schools is a daunting task. They work with students our society has deemed as hopeless or unwanted, and often, achieve some amazing results out of these kids. "Teaching as Leadership" is a book documenting their philosophy, and practical steps on how to implement it, which sometimes comes across as incomplete.

The author Steven Farr addresses six key components of the teachers that have found the most success in their teaching assignments: Setting Big Goals, Invest Students and their Families, Plan Purposefully, Execute Effectively, Continuously Increase Effectiveness, and Work Relentlessly. Together, they form the core belief of effectiveness in any classroom. Each chapter is structured in a similar way. Case studies of teachers or professionals that exemplify the trait, definitions and implications, and a "Ms. Lora" story that narrates the ideas. Each chapter is filled with side bars, graphs, charts and additional information that compliments the main text; it can sometimes be distracting but they generally illuminate concepts well.

Most of the traits dwell on the teaching aspect of the job, and we know that teacher quality and skill in instruction makes a difference in the classroom more than anything else. It would be a very empowering idea if all the teachers in our country could adopt these components and utilize them effectively. The book also addresses up front issues of the achievement gap in consideration of the students race and socioeconomic factors, and does so, like most everything in the book, in a succinct way.

In fact, it's the almost succinctness that makes the book lose a star for me. One trait, "Invest Students" talks about the need to build positive relationships with students and their families. However, the few pages that address that concept are just that, too few. We know that the most effective teacher in the world isn't going to get very far with their students if they don't build a safe learning community and have that "kid connection". It lead me to think that this book could have been broken into six different books, and explained in detail more fully.

Nonetheless, the book is a great primer for teachers wanting to reflect on their progress in their teaching developments and skill. We can only hope that we continue to focus on our most needy schools, for our most needy kids, in order to give them a leg up to reach that illusive American dream that is frequently promised but rarely seen in their neighborhoods.

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.

The key premise of "Teaching As Leadership" is that teaching is not an art but a discipline. Good teachers must, like doctors or engineers, systematically develop a set of skills that will enable them to be effective in the classroom. Does this seem obvious? It isn't, really. It seems to me that too much emphasis is still put on the kind of teacher who ends up in an inspirational movie----someone with a magnetic personality, someone who practically lives in the classroom to achieve what are seemingly miraculous results. Steven Farr, the author of "Teaching As Leadership" takes the opposite tack. As he puts it, "Effective teaching is the hard work of setting big goals, investing students in working hard, planning purposefully, executing effectively, improving over time, and relentlessly pursuing our students' success." Yes! Good teachers ARE made, not born. And Farr goes on to say that if you want to work hard, you can be a better teacher than you ever thought you could, with greater rewards for your students than you might have imagined---and all from some simple changes in thinking and approach.

Well, nothing in education is ever that easy, and many teachers might rightly distrust yet another program that purports to work miracles. "Teaching As Leadership" is, however, packed full of workable ideas, illustrative anecdotes, and sage advice, whether you are a novice or an experienced teacher. Although Farr's book is largely a distillation of the experiences of teachers in the Teach for America program, its insights are as valuable for teachers of students in affluent communities as they are for teachers in the schools described in the book, where most of the students are poor. The chapter on backward planning (Chapter 3, "Planning Purposefully") is especially valuable, even for a veteran teacher.

Unfortunately, this is not a perfect book. It is repetitious. Its tone (good advice fattened up with too many examples) is more pep talk than book. It is twice as long as it needs to be. It bears an unfortunate resemblance to dreary methods textbooks in dreary education courses. What a teacher really needs is a concise little book (Mao had the right idea, here) containing all of the good stuff from the 200+ pages of "Teaching As Leadership." It should slip into a pocket or into a drawer, under the rubber bands, dried up markers, eraser-less pencils, and that nice note from the departed principal. That way, the wise and inspirational parts of "Teaching As Leadership," like the parts about vision (page 19) or avoiding mediocrity (p. 174), could be right there, to lift you up from those days when nothing seems to be going right and to set you on your way, with renewed confidence.
M. Feldman

Teachers become teachers in order to make a difference in the world through improving the lives of their students. This book is the perfect "how-to" manual for those individuals. Motivational, inspiring, and (most importantly), technically instructive, showing teachers (new or old) the best ways to help their students make substantial academic improvement and learn as much as possible. This book seems primarily targeted at teachers of middle and high schools, but has a lot of great tips for anyone in any sort of teaching capacity. The author presents lots of case studies, examples of effective teaching tools, and provides a framework that teachers can use to track their own progress, as well as that of their students. This would make an excellent gift for any new teacher!