Now bearing the imprimatur of 46 states and the District of Columbia, the Common Core State Standards represent a major step forward for schools and the students they must prepare to graduate from high school ready for college and careers. Yet a fundamental contradiction underlies the progress: While we are promoting radical change in creating a coherent national framework for what students should know and the way they learn, we have not yet committed to offering teachers the deep learning they will need to transform the way they work. Continue reading…

We’re teachers who believe that teacher evaluation, including the use of reliable test data, can be good for students and for teachers. Yes, yes, we know we’re not supposed to exist. But we do, and there are a lot more of us. Continue reading…

James Encinas, co-author of the opinion piece “How to Grade a Teacher” published in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, is a Fellow in the ART of TEACHING at Westminster Elementary.

In the sunlit library at Jorge Prieto Elementary on Chicago’s’ northwest side, an experiment is under way. A provisional classroom has been set up. A white board sits at the front of the room, and 20 eighth-graders are seated at library tables. Math teacher Michael Hock is giving a lesson about the distributive property. Scattered throughout the room are some 30 other teachers. They aren’t wearing lab coats—but they might as well be. They clutch clipboards and carefully monitor kids’ reactions to the teacher’s explanations, peering over students’ shoulders as they write answers. Continue reading…

Every year for the past five, we at the Cotsen Foundation for the ART of TEACHING take a step back from the work we do in support of developing gifted teachers and artful teaching in order to assess the perception of the ART of TEACHING program among current fellows.

Similarly, over the last three years, we have reached out to our alumni, asking them to reflect on the effectiveness of their teaching prior to participating in the ART of TEACHING and at the present moment.

Year after year, our survey results pertaining to both fellows and alumni have been consistently positive, demonstrating to us that the impact of our program is strong, valuable, immediate, and enduring.

We are pleased to say that the results of our 2011 survey are no exception. This year, our fellows revealed they are committed to continuing the work on their own even after their two-year fellowship comes to an end, and expressed their strong belief in the program’s impact in the following areas:

• The ART of TEACHING program improves their ability to instruct
• Fellows are more able to inspire their students
• The ART of TEACHING program increases their passion for teaching
• By expanding their repertoire of teaching methods, as a result of the program, fellows can significantly affect students’ achievement level
• Fellows’ expectations for students’ learning have been increasing

Alumni respondents were equally pleased with the program, even after years have passed since their participation. Many felt their effectiveness as teachers after the ART of TEACHING program surpassed their effectiveness prior to it, noting a sustained increase in:

• The artfulness or excellence of their teaching
• Their knowledge of subject content
• Their students’ mastery of appropriate content and skills
• Their collaboration with and learning from colleagues

We are grateful to our fellows and alumni for taking part in our surveys and for their dedication to the ART of TEACHING. For a detailed look at past and present survey results, we invite you to view our Participant Surveys here.

Teachers talk about how the Cotsen Foundation for the ART of TEACHING Annual Conference provides them opportunities to learn from experts, connect with colleagues, and get ideas on how to improve their teaching.

Judy Johnson, Executive Director of the Cotsen Foundation for the ART of TEACHING, opens the Annual Conference with remarks on the history of the ART of TEACHING and her hopes for the future.

Deborah Ball, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan, talks about what makes the approach of the Cotsen Foundation for the ART of TEACHING unique, and the role she sees for Cotsen teachers in building a “professional community of teachers that is so badly needed in this country.”

Deborah Ball, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan, delivers her keynote address, “Great teachers are not born. They’re TAUGHT” at the 6^th Annual the ART of TEACHING Conference. Dr. Ball argues that teaching is technical, which means “that it requires a lot of specialized knowledge, that it takes practice, that you can get better at it by really working carefully at small parts of it.” She challenges teachers to help build a public understanding of teaching as a highly skilled profession, to help articulate what it takes to get to high quality teaching, and to contribute to a common agreement about what teachers should be able to do before entering a classroom. The slides accompanying Dr. Ball’s speech can be found here.

Last year, the Cotsen Foundation for the ART of TEACHING had the distinct pleasure of working with 133 fellows, 24 mentors, and 30 schools, as well as 256 alumni who participated in foundation-sponsored activities. Together, these teachers affected more than 11,000 students over the course of the 2010–2011 academic year.

While these figures measure some aspects of our accomplishments, the work we do at the Cotsen Foundation for the ART of TEACHING is much more than a tally of our numbers, just as artful teaching is much more than a sum of its parts.

With this in mind, we are pleased to bring you Inside the ART of TEACHING. This new publication will aim to not only capture the sum of our latest events and activities, but more importantly, the spirit of our program, at the heart of which is a community of people who have come together with the goal of developing gifted teachers and artful teaching.