The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach by Muhammad Anthony;Hollie Sharroky;

Author:Muhammad, Anthony;Hollie, Sharroky;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree

Aligning the Will With the Skill

Earlier in this book, we defined skill as an art or a craft. This definition is important because in this section of the book, we present teaching or instruction as both an art and a science. Barrie Bennett (2010) describes effective teaching as a dynamic mixture of expertise in a vast array of instructional strategies combined with a profound understanding of individual students in class and their needs at particular points in time. In essence, to be skilled instructionally requires artfulness. Lemov (2010) says that great art relies on the mastery and application of foundation skills, learned individually through diligent study. This is how we examine the skill of teaching in this section. Specifically, within the skill, there is an art to the teaching. They are not mutually exclusive, and to a certain extent they are one and the same. In fact, Piestrup (1973) asserts that responsive teaching is artful teaching.

In this book, we cannot cover all of the most effective instructional skills teachers need to gain better academic results. There is no shortage of research on what works instructionally and what the most effective teaching techniques are. For example, in his work, Robert Marzano (2009a) provides what he considers to be the forty-one most high-yield strategies for effective teaching. Other respected researchers, such as Grant Wiggins, David Berliner, and Carol Ann Tomlinson, to name a few, provide guidance on effective teaching (Marzano, 2010). Doug Lemov (2010) promotes forty-nine instructional techniques that put students on the path to college in his book Teach Like a Champion. The New America Foundation (2008) notes that many programs appear to work; for example, Wade Carpenter (2000) counted 361 “good ideas” that appeared during a ten-year period in education. We could go on for several pages listing the litany of books, articles, and reports on successful teaching techniques. These researchers and others do a notable job of updating the knowledge base regarding effective teaching and providing clear suggestions about how instruction can improve.

In our work with teachers and students throughout the United States, particularly in urban areas with populations of students who have typically been underserved, we have found that teachers do know about effective techniques—they have the tools. What many teachers lack is the understanding of how to use these strategies with their students, along with the knowledge that they can have success. In short, educators don't necessarily need just more effective techniques. Rather, they need to understand how to use those techniques skillfully and artfully. We propose that educators need to take the myriad of recommendations and prescriptions for effective teaching and use them responsively to benefit first students who are not having success and ultimately all students. The goal is that every teacher uses responsive instruction in the four critical areas we explore here. We provide sample activities to illustrate the strategies that we feel are critical within a responsive classroom. These activities are used at CLAS and have been shown to be effective there. Teachers

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