Caleb Hatfield
Teacher, Mentor, Leader
Artifact 1: Collaborative Mondays
One Monday each month, every teacher in the AIS middle school meets for a 45-minute professional development meeting. These meetings are meant to take research backed teaching strategies, and inform our teachers of them. I have had the privilege to present multiple times at these meetings. Most recently, I gave a co-presentation on classroom management. Many of the strategies came from the book "Teach Like a Champion". Teachers were given practical and effective ways of best managing student behavior in their classrooms. By presenting about classroom management, we have set our expectations as a school what good classroom management looks like and made those expectations clear to our students as well.
Artifact 2: Teacher Evaluation
Teacher evaluation is an important element of any school leadership team. The formal evaluation process at AIS is transparent and clearly communicated with teachers. While teacher evaluation is often seen as a means to document what teachers are doing wrong or right, we use the data from our evaluations in order to give our teachers insights into what we see is effective in their classrooms, and what could be improved upon to make it more effective. The feedback is driven by research based practices for effective teaching and student learning. We as the leadership have even based many of our evaluation practices after research done in various books and articles on the topic. Namely, we have found great value in the book "Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation" by Kim Marshall.
In order to inform teachers how to effectively educate students, teachers must use data driven research that supports best practices. The implementation of current research ensures the teacher of using appropriate teaching strategies, and the student of learning highly valuable content.