Let’s Talk
A monthly column for parents and educators.
Sharing Teaching Knowledge
Summary: According to Linda Darling-Hammond, to continue improving, teachers must learn from each other's practice, collaborate, plan lessons together, and assess their, as well as their students, progress.
“Nationally known researcher Linda Darling-Hammond will tell you it’s a ‘no-brainer’ that the single most important determinant of what students learn is what their teachers know,” writes Northwest Education editor Rhonda Barton in the fall 2005 issue of the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory’s magazine.
“A big flaw of one of our images of teaching for most of this last century is that single, isolated teachers may go through a teacher education program, learn everything they need to know in the one experience, and they’d be ‘baked and done,’” the Stanford University education professor told Barton. “That’s not an image that imagines teachers could learn from each other’s practice, that there could be many, many ways to teach something, and that there’s a need for advice and counsel when you’re confronting the different learning needs of students.”
Darling-Hammond, a prolific author who served as executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, sees that image changing among both beginning and veteran teachers, according to Barton.
Many teacher education programs have undergone reform in the past 15 years, said Darling-Hammond, with teachers preparing and working together in groups.
“I know of a number of schools that have introduced peer coaching models where teachers have the opportunity to go into each other’s classrooms and see what their colleagues are doing,” Darling-Hammond said.
On finding time to collaborate, the expert pointed to European and Asian countries where “the school is designed to allow for teacher collaboration and teachers will typically have at least 10 hours—sometimes as many as 20 hours a week—to plan lessons together, to observe each other teaching, to work on assessment. It’s partly that we need to design schools to allow for that, and [schools that are] restructuring in the U.S. have done that. There are a lot of schools that have redesigned their schedule, their staffing, the way they organize adults together, and adults and children together to allow that time to be built in—not added on, not purchased with additional dollars. Typically that can be done for very close to the same per-pupil expenditures as the models we have now.”
For her students, Darling-Hammond said she hopes they have the disposition and knowledge to teach well, and continually improve their teaching practice. (Find the full article at www.nwrel.org/nwedu/11-01/darling/.)
This column by Karen Lytle Blaha is provided as a public service by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a nonprofit institution working with schools and communities in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.
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