Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter by Tony Frontier

Author:Tony Frontier [Frontier, Tony; Mielke, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education
ISBN: 978-1-4166-2210-9
Publisher: ASCD
Published: 2016-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

How Collaboration Calibrates Affirmation and Dissonance

Teachers typically experience dissonance about their professional practice when students are struggling, or an evaluator points out a need for growth, or an instructional coach or mentor guides them down a path to make them aware of a need for change. Each of the pathways to dissonance presents a unique challenge. Negative feedback from students often results in frustration (What else can I try?), an evaluator's comment often results in defensiveness (How does she expect me to do that?), and the coach's suggestion often results in ambiguity (How am I supposed to do that?).

A different approach is to put ourselves in a position to access information about others' practice to let ourselves experience affrmation and dissonance. This can occur through observing and analyzing video of a teacher from another school (van Es, 2010), visiting other teachers' classrooms for instructional rounds (City, Elmore, Fiarman, & Teitel, 2009), or deep collaborative dialogue with colleagues about professional practice. The purpose of this collaboration is not evaluation. It is to gain insights into our own teaching and to further—and focus—our own professional practice. Protocols such as these are described in detail in the appendices of this book.

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