The Power of Teacher Teams
With Cases, Analyses, and Strategies for Success
- Vivian Troen - Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA
- Katherine C. Boles
Foreword by Richard F. Elmore, Includes a companion DVD with video case studies and CD-ROM with reproducibles and supplemental cases
How to successfully improve teaching and learning with teacher teams
While most educators believe working in teams is valuable, not all team efforts lead to instructional improvement. Through richly detailed case studies, The Power of Teacher Teams demonstrates how schools can transform their teams into more effective learning communities that foster teacher leadership. The benefits of successful teacher teams include:
- Improved performance for both teachers and students
- Meaningful professional development
- Group adoption of a new curriculum
- Shared insights into student work
- Better classroom management
- Support for new teachers
- New roles for teacher leaders
- Opportunities for mentor support
School leaders will find guidelines, methods, and concrete steps for building and sustaining effective teacher teams. Also included are one DVD with video case studies and one CD with reproducibles. The most important reason for building teacher teams is to enhance student learning through improved instruction—and that story is at the heart of this book.
"Troen and Boles give us a concrete image of how collective educational practice can be focused on the instructional core of schooling. Their portrait of teacher teams is an important contribution to our understanding of how teaching is learned and will be useful for both practice and analysis."
"The authors identify the real-life challenges of teaming and collaboration that teachers and principals face each and every day. They provide cases that describe the everyday experiences of working in teams, and then present tools that professionals will find extremely useful in aligning their efforts around improving student learning."
"As a director of professional development, I feel this book is crucial to building the capacity of teachers, teacher leaders, team facilitators, and principals."
"In light of recent research indicating that very few teacher teams are actually effective, this book seeks to reverse the trend. By developing a framework for effective teacher teams that includes five criteria—leadership, task focus, collaborative climate, structure and process, and personal accountability—Troen and Boles provide school leaders with the tools needed to navigate this relatively new terrain and to make effective teacher teams a reality."