Teachers at Their Best

The Case for a New School Model and a New Teacher Concept

By (author) Rich Waters

Publication date:

03 April 2018

Length of book:

230 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475842647

The purpose of this book is to change the conversation about teacher induction, preparation, and development and how we create effective teachers. Our national discussion about how to create effective teachers needs to move away from how higher education can do a better job preparing our teachers and move toward how our local schools can do a better job inducting, preparing, and developing our teachers over a full career. There are two interconnected and irrefutable reasons for this. First, school culture supersedes all rational strategies for teacher development, and, second, teachers learn to teach in the schools where they work, not in higher education or any of the alternative routes which the ineffectiveness of higher education teacher preparation have caused to emerge. With the affirmation of these postulates, this book clarifies that teachers are at their best when they are working together in collaborative cultures where teacher thinking and decision-making lead schools in continuous improvement and change. Elaborating on the importance of these best conditions for optimal teacher development, this book will insist that it is the entirety of a school culture that produces effective teachers, and schools with authentic learning communities produce the cultures that produce effective teachers.

Preface
Introduction
Part One: Connecting the Old and the New in Teacher Learning
Chapter One: Not Higher Education, A New School Model
Chapter Two: The Emergence of Teacher as Learner-Collaborator-Leaders
Chapter Three: An Intentionally Developmental Organization
Chapter Four: School Culture, Human Development, and Teacher Development
Chapter Five: The Primacy of Culture and the Promise of Professional Learning Communities
Part Two: The Promise of Professional Development Schools
Chapter Six: Professional Development Schools Interrupted
Chapter Seven: Professional Development Schools Foreshadow a New School Model
Chapter Eight: The Path to a New School Model: Teacher Development through School Development
Part Three: Community and Authenticity
Chapter Nine: Community and Authenticity Drive Learning
Chapter Ten: Authenticating Student and Teacher Development by Examining Learning Engagement
References
About the Author

Dr. Waters is becoming a prolific writer on teacher preparation and teacher learning. His thought provoking works will force one to think differently about how new teachers are trained and how established teachers continue to learn about their craft. In his latest work, Teachers at Their Best, Dr. Waters continues his discourse on how teacher learning is best when situated in collaborative cultures and not as a result of side show ‘professional development’ or courses taken on the campuses of higher education.
By providing important recent research on the power of cultural learning on teacher development, Dr. Waters hits another homerun!