Predicting Ambitious Instruction at CPS
(Github Project Repo) What predicts where you will see 'good' teaching? It's easy to imagine that this question has a simple answer - wherever you have good teachers, you see good teaching. All we have to do is identify good teachers and get rid of bad ones, and education will be fixed! Teachers will cringe at this type of thinking, because we see our own effectiveness fluctuate constantly, from year to year, from day to day, based on a huge number of contextual factors - some within our control, some without, some predictable, some not. I personally experienced a huge change in my teaching effectiveness a little over a year ago, when I changed schools. At my previous school, I had found it relatively easy to use 'best teaching practices' - pushing my students to take on more of the cognitive load, to explain themselves in detail throughout class, and to persist through struggle and failure as we engaged in difficult projects. At the new school, I encountere...