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When it comes to improving instruction to help students meet high standards, schools have to rethink what they do — from curriculum alignment and instructional strategies to the tools and supports provided to educators. In the push to meet AYP targets, however, what sometimes gets left behind are lessons from research and practice that indicate the most effective ways for schools to help students master new concepts and absorb rich content, or to organize expert advisors, such as coaches, to support teachers.
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In this issue of The Educator's Companion, our Learning from the Best feature identifies challenges in secondary-school literacy instruction, and solutions that can help students draw meaning from complex texts and bolster reading comprehension. Many current classroom approaches break down because they presume that if students can read the words, they can understand the text. But too often, this is not the case, especially if the content covers a new topic or a complex concept. The article notes that struggling readers need to learn how to do what cognitive research shows competent readers do when they encounter an unfamiliar and complex text — make sense of the text word-by-word, line-by-line, and page-by-page, "piling up" meaning as they move through the text and incorporate their own knowledge.
Also in this issue, we focus on how schools within the AC network are using school-based coaching to strengthen professional development for teachers. The rise in coaching is as much a phenomenon in education as it is in business and other fields. Content is extremely important. However, the skills required to be a good coach go beyond pure mastery of content. Ideally, instructional coaches provide support and feedback, encourage a deeper understanding of classroom practices, promote the modification of instruction to meet students' individual needs, and facilitate the practice of new methods. They must know how to model effective practices, build teams, and offer feedback in a way that strengthens the person whose work they are critiquing.
In the conversation piece, we hear from William Schmidt, who directed the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and is an expert on how mathematics instruction is taught around the world. Schmidt discusses what needs to happen in mathematics curricula and instruction — and in the tools and supports available to educators — for the United States to achieve the results of the top-performing nations. He argues that high-achieving countries have mathematics curricula and supporting instructional materials that focus on key concepts and are sequenced, yielding a coherence U.S. curricula by and large lack.
By sharing lessons from R&D and on-the ground experience, we hope to better inform policy and practice across the America's Choice network and the education field in general, and help both keep pace with fast-moving developments nationwide.
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