2012-2013 Seminar Series
Teaching Teachers Roundtable: 
Preparing Teachers to Use High-Leverage Practices

Teacher education is often criticized for not preparing teachers adequately for classroom practice.  In response, a growing number of both higher education- and non-profit or district-based teacher preparation programs are implementing more practice-based approaches to teacher training.  These programs provide people who are learning to teach with multiple opportunities to study and practice specific tasks and activities of teaching, often in carefully designed classroom settings. Making teachers’ education more focused on practice will require many changes, from revised schedules to new methods for assessing the competence of novice teachers to new professional learning opportunities for those who are adopting this approach to teacher education.

The series will focus on methods of training new teachers in three specific teaching high-leverage practices: leading a whole class discussion, using data to inform instruction, and implementing organizational routines, procedures, and strategies to support a learning environment. This year’s series will feature a new roundtable format. Each seminar will include presentations from two or three teacher educators, each from a different program and all with expertise in practice-focused teacher education. Speakers will discuss how they prepare new teachers to use the high-leverage practice in question, share video examples or other materials from their own work, and analyze the affordances and drawbacks of their methods. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions about each approach and to discuss the similarities and differences across the methods that are shared in each roundtable.

Previously held seminars:

November 2012 Seminar: Leading a whole class discussion was held on November 14, 2012 and featured  Magdalene Lampert, Julie Sloan, and Jesse Solomon  from the Boston Teacher Residency and Lisa Barker from SUNY New Paltz.  Click here for archive video of seminar.

January 2013 Seminar:Using data to inform instruction was held on January 31, 2013 and featured Candice Bocala from the DataWise Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Jennifer Green from the Urban Teacher Center. Click here for archive video of seminar.