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Inner Workings

What Teach For America learns from its corps members.
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Innovator

Ky Adderley’s (D.C. Region ’01) middle school kicks learning into high gear with a Brazilian martial arts theme.
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Building a Better Teacher

What corps members teach Teach For America

Inner WorkingsBrent Maddin (S. Louisiana ’99) is the kind of guy who has 12,000 songs in his i-Tunes library and plans to rate all of them on a five-star scale so that he can be sure he’s listening to only the best music to psych him up on his way to work.

When he was teaching biology, chemistry, and physics at Franklin Senior High School in rural Louisiana, Maddin’s classroom mantra, “Exceed the highest expectation,” wasn’t just for the kids. Adamant that his biology students experience real science, he didn’t settle for petri dishes and planaria. He got a local excavating company to dig a pond behind the school.

“So much of science for my students was totally decontextualized,” Maddin says. “It really was ‘Open up your books to page 56 and answer the questions at the end of the chapter.’ It was seniors never having measured anything, ever. Kids who had gone through two years of biology who’d never looked through a microscope.”

Maddin used the pond for multiple units, including biology and microscopy, evolution, and ecosystems. His students observed pond critters, predicted evolutionary advantages of specific organisms, and conducted water-quality analyses using Vernier water-quality probes. “If you talked to my students today about their experience,” he says, “I reckon they’d say, ‘I’ll never look at a drop of water the same way.’”

The kids were hooked, but Maddin wanted more time. Soon his students were packing the booths at the local McDonald’s for three-hour study sessions. To squeeze more minutes out of the school day, he had them do classwork on large whiteboards so that he could quickly assess their understanding as he walked the aisles. He checked homework by rolling a die each day and only collecting the work of those kids assigned to specific numbers. It freed him up to focus on more important things while still requiring all of his students to come prepared.

By Maddin’s third year teaching science at Franklin, the school’s torpid 62 percent pass rate on the state general science exam (LEAP) had jumped to 87 percent, with all of Maddin’s kids passing and the vast majority acing it. There was no question that Maddin was an extraordinary teacher. But was his success simply a product of his charisma and talent, or was there method to his magic? At a broad level, Teach For America had been exploring that question since the organization’s founding. For years, staff members had closely observed and interviewed standout corps members like Maddin to see what made them tick.

“A lot of teachers struggle, but Brent had found ways to excel in tough circumstances,” says Steven Farr, vice president for knowledge development and public engagement at Teach
For America. “We wanted to know what he was doing differently that we could share across the corps.”

Over the years, through dozens and dozens of investigations, common strategies and mind-sets of great teachers emerged—and with them, the organization’s belief that excellent
student achievement results are, in fact, replicable with the right training and support. The program team found that such teachers largely operated with the same basic principles
as other effective leaders: setting ambitious goals, investing others in their work, planning purposefully, executing effectively, working relentlessly, and constantly improving. These tenets form the foundation of the Teaching As Leadership framework, which has driven institute curriculum and corps member support since 2002. Derived from these principles is
the Teaching As Leadership rubric: 28 specific teacher leadership actions—from differentiating instruction to sustaining personal energy—defined at five levels of proficiency (prenovice to exemplary).

Michael MacArthur (S. Louisiana ’03), now managing director of program for the Greater Philadelphia-Camden region, was a program director when the Teaching As Leadership
framework was introduced to corps members. Before the rubric, “sometimes we’d be talking past each other because maybe we had a different definition of what we meant when we said differentiation or when we said student investment,” MacArthur says. “For the first time it gave us a common language to talk about teaching excellence. What that meant was stronger collaboration, because all of a sudden you didn’t spend a lot of time just trying to find words for what was going on in the classroom. You had the words.”

The data confirms the rubric’s correlation with student achievement. A recent review conducted by Farr’s team crossreferenced student-achievement data sets for more than 200 corps members against their performance on the rubric.“It turns out the better you do on the rubric, the more kids achieve,” Farr says.

Defining Success
Corps members and alumni who have served with Teach For America in recent years know the organization as intensely data-driven. But prior to 2002, the organization’s method
of evaluating its impact on student achievement was less well developed.

“How do you measure how much impact you’ve had on a child’s achievement and life prospects?” says Farr. “We believed that was a question worth pursuing.” However, finding a metric that could be tracked across so many districts, in every subject, at every grade level, and with so few student growth measures at the secondary level made for an intricate puzzle. “We always said that we’d look at impact on student achievement,” says Teach For America founder and CEO Wendy Kopp. “But as an imperfect proxy we were forced to rely on principal
satisfaction.”

Meanwhile, the debates, research, and refinements continued internally, resulting in the development of the organization’s current metrics. In 2002, Teach For America began tracking corps members’ progress toward “significant gains,” defined as students achieving 1.5 years of academic growth in a single school year or 80 percent content mastery.

(A third path to significant gains—closing at least 20 percent of the gap with students in well-served schools—was recently introduced.) A full year of academic growth, 70 percent content mastery, or closing 10 to 20 percent of the gap with well-served students is defined as “solid gains.”

“When we shifted to a more data-driven focus on student achievement, it brought a sense of urgency and alignment to our work that was a huge step forward,” Farr says. (The percentage of corps members achieving significant gains has gone up every year since Teach For America began keeping the data, with the exception of 2006, when the standards for assessments were recalibrated.)

While these definitions have brought more accountability to corps member classrooms, the gains measures have limitations.Students across the country take different assessments, which means there is variance in the quality and rigor of data. In addition, Teach For America’s current benchmarks aren’t tailored to reflect the individual context of each teacher’s classroom, such as how far behind students are or the typical rate of growth for students in a particular grade or subject.

The organization is considering how to address these shortcomings. “Right now, we’re making a lot of progress on improving our corps members’ access to rigorous assessments and on creating more tailored improvement targets that will be easy to aggregate nationally,” Farr says. “We are working toward a system that will be genuinely enlightening in ways that help
teachers help students.”

Climbing the Learning Curve
In addition to the organization’s work with corps members, Farr says Teach For America’s knowledge development has drawn at various points on research coming out of the National Board, the National Council on Teacher Quality, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The Teaching As Leadership rubric’s five-proficiency-level design is informed in part by researcher Robert Kegan’s studies of adult learning.

So, with the vast volumes of pedagogical research out there, why is Teach For America so focused on studying its corps members? “The single greatest resource for our organizational
learning has been our teachers in the field,” Farr explains. “We’ve got this massive community of teachers doing the hard work of figuring out what strategies are necessary for a teacher to truly change the academic trajectory of children in low-income communities. The sad truth is that there aren’t a lot of books out there that map out excellent teaching in our
challenging contexts, but collectively, our highly successful corps members and alumni have virtually written one.” (In 2010, Teach For America plans to publish a Teaching As Leadership textbook that will be given to incoming corps members.)

This year, Teach For America will launch two externally funded two-year studies to further refine the organization’s understanding of great teaching. Each will look at about 1,000 corps members, with many of those participating in both studies, says Ted Quinn, who is heading up the effort.

One study aims to uncover which actions on the Teaching As Leadership rubric are most vital to increasing student achievement and whether new actions need to be added. The study will also examine what levels of proficiency corps members need to reach on various actions in order to predict success with students. For example, achieving significant gains might require a teacher to execute a particular action at only “beginning proficiency” whereas another action must be executed at the advanced level.

For the second study, Teach For America will partner with business author Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. . .and Others Don’t) to look at pairs of corps
members in similar placements to see what factors—including habits, skills, mind-sets, and traits—lead some to make significant improvement in their results with their students.

“One thing that’s wonderful about Jim Collins’s approach,” Farr says, “is that it eliminates sacred cows. Everything is on the table for questioning.”

And, of course, corps members in Teach For America’s 29 regions will continue to play a key role in the rubric’s evolution. “Nothing helps challenge and improve and mature our rubric like people out there using it,” Farr says. “At every stage it gets used, we find new insights.”

Farr is reminded of a recent visit to the classroom of Mekia Love (Delta ’01) in Washington, D.C. “We spoke about her ongoing struggle to create lifelong readers in her classroom. Mekia, like many of our teachers, has a clear vision of the outcomes she wants for her students, and achievement scores are one important part of that, but she also uses more qualitative records of students’ behaviors and interests to map their genuine love of reading and knowledge—ideas that she hopes will serve them in the long term,” Farr says. “I think we all generally agree now on the power of having a clear ‘big goal’ for our students’ success, but we have lots to learn about how those goals are best shaped. Teachers like Mekia will help us investigate those questions.”