Three Key Women and Their Affect on Teacher Effectiveness

Yesterday was the first day of the Mentoring and Induction Institute at the Park Place Conference Center in Cedar Falls. It was an amazing day and one highlighted for me by three women and their perspective on teacher effectiveness.

Linda Darling Hammond began the conference through a live web-based presentation. She was able to make this environment work and to personalize her message to our event within a national lens. She offered these ten points as to what effective teachers do:
1) offer authentic learning experiences
2) provide intellectually ambitious tasks
3) use of a variety of strategies
4) assess learning to adapt and change and inform instruction
5) create scaffolding supports and sequences
6) provide standards and models on high quality work and offer feedback and opportunities for self analysis
7) develop collaborative classrooms
8) build links to families and communities
9) know students well
10) use each other as collaborative partners (teaching is a team sport!)

Then I was able to interact briefly at two times with Mildred Middleton, a generous educator of nearly 98 years (her birthday is 7/4)! She became UNI emeritus status through teaching as an adjunct and still passionately engages in education today.

Her message is given through a golden key (a treasure to keep forever) . . . it is a teacher's job to know when to "lock" and "unlock" the mind. Wow! Her thoughts brought tears to my eyes as the emotions of seeing both my grandmothers in her . . .  Later in the day she sat at the grand piano and played as many of us gathered to sing along.

Sarah Brown Wessling closed the night with her thoughts and perspectives of Teaching Spaces. She is the 2010 National Teacher of the Year and she has had a variety of opportunities to travel and reflect about teaching around the country and the world. Some points from her amazing sharing:

• We must meet learners where they are
• Our learners are worth being listened to
• We need to be the lead learner in our classroom
• In Iowa we GROW teachers (like corn)
• Intellectual Risk Taking as a teacher disposition
• We must nurture what we love
• Give permission to fail 
• We are architects, and architects are philosophers first
• Her secret is about deliberateness
• An extra set of eyes can open our world
• Make the implicit explicit through parallel experiences
• Stacking means filling compartments, layering creates beauty
• Humility is at the center of great teaching
• Voice is earned. Be present!
• We all have a lens . . . use it to help learners grow~

Thank you, ladies, my soul resonates with your thoughts and actions. You are true role models and leaders in our profession.