EdTechTrek

I love this excerpt that I ran across in Darren Draper’s blog, Drape’s Takes. It comes from Carl Glickman’s book, Leadership for learning: How to Help Teachers Succeed. I re-post it here in case you missed it.

An article published in ASCD’s Educational Leadership also resonated with me. It is titled, Closing the Teacher Quality Gap and it looks at how often the weakest teachers are often paired with the weakest or most needy students and that teacher quality has everything to do with student achievement… not surprising.

We talk so much about how technology can empower teachers and students and transform learning. But we need to talk more about teacher quality in this conversation as well. Seeking improvement needs to be an active process that requires an attitude of growth and professionalism – oftentimes lacking. It doesn’t happen on its own. That’s what I like so much about the Carl Glickman excerpt. I have worked with some teachers who have approached setting mandated learning goals with resentment and would simply go through the motions of putting down goals that were easy to achieve and relatively benign. Others took them seriously and set meaningful, relevant goals.If you are going to teach, you’d better be prepared to give 100 percent… perhaps 110 percent. There is no room for less when over the course of your career you have the privilege to teach hundreds, perhaps thousands of other people’s children and contribute to their future. After all, they are not blueberries.