ASCD: A Collective Call to Action

I was fortunate to attend ASCD's annual conference held March 21 through March 26 in Philadelphia. The conference was amazing and I highly recommend going to one if you can. Next year's annual conference will be held in Chicago, but they have several conferences throughout the year. The Summer Conference will be in St. Louis, MO in July. In my next several blog posts, I would like to share some of the things that I learned.

I began the conference with a two day preconference session on 101 Tools & Techniques to Improve Teacher Effectiveness. The one thing I love about ASCD is the research behind everything they do. The session was led by Drs. James Stronge & Leslie Grant who did a phenomenal job of tying research principles to ways to help teachers become effective. Research shows that ineffective teachers have a detrimental effect on students, so much so that two straight years of effective teachers cannot remediate the achievement loss caused by one year with a poor teacher. Research also shows that classroom management and a caring teacher are the two top teacher effectiveness variables for effective teachers.

During the session, the presenters kept our focus on the teacher rather than outside influences and provided tools and ideas to help teachers be the best they can be. Check out their books for more information. Both can be found at amazon.com.