Читать книгу The Data Coach's Guide to Improving Learning for All Students - Katherine E. Stiles - Страница 54

Teaching is a three-part act—planning, doing, and reflecting. Unfortunately, school schedules often reflect the assumption that if teachers are not in the classroom in front of students, they are not doing their job. The school day typically has provided time for teaching, but not for the equally important functions of planning and reflecting. Stigler and Hiebert (1999) create an image of a teacher’s day that is not unlike a college professor’s, with time for teaching and research, collaborative planning and reflecting with colleagues, and “office hours” with individual students. Although this vision may not become a reality in schools in the near future, changing the school schedule somewhat to create time for teacher collaboration is a requirement for collaborative inquiry. A growing body of research linking teacher collaboration with student achievement (Darling-Hammond, 2004; Little, 1990; Louis, Kruse, & Marks, 1996; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001) makes this conclusion inescapable and urgent: Time for teacher collaboration is not a luxury—it is a necessity for schools that want to improve.

How much time? Along with other school improvement experts, we recommend a minimum of 45 minutes per week of uninterrupted, protected time for collaboration. Many schools participating in the Using Data Project were able to carve out weekly or even daily time for teachers to work together by creative use of specialists, block scheduling, or reallocation of teacher contract time. Others convened the Data Team quarterly for a full release-day of analyzing common benchmark assessment results, along with two- to three-day data retreats in the summer. The growing number of schools across the country that now schedule time for teacher collaboration during the school day prove that finding time is a solvable problem when the will is present to do so.