2012 SCORE Prize Winners: Ensuring Excellent Teaching (excerpts) | Page 12

ENSURING EXCELLENT TEACHING Murdock and the assistant principals at the school strongly believe that having the right teaching force in the school is critical to success. This means recruiting highly effective staff and preparing new teachers to be immediately effective in their classrooms. The school also ensures that all teachers have access to high-quality professional learning opportunities, engage in professional learning communities, have curricular tools to help them advance their practice, and implement strong instructional strategies. teachers at Covington participate in a three-day orientation program to understand the school and its expectations, and then are assigned one content-based mentor (usually the department chair) within their subject area and one experienced teacher mentor who is located near the new teacher’s classroom. The first mentor helps the new teacher understand the most effective ways to deliver instruction within a particular field, sharing lesson plans and techniques for engaging students in the content. The second mentor provides more general support, such as helping the new teacher understand how to use technology, how to analyze data, and how to establish effective classroom management techniques. “Covington Promising Practice: Fostering Great Teaching” http://www.tnscore.org/scoreprize/ downloads/2012/Covington_High_School_ Promising_Practice.pdf Building a strong staff. Attracting and retaining effective teachers who are a good fit for the school’s culture is a key component of building a strong staff at Covington. “Prospective teachers need to care about our kids. So my questions are, ‘What kind of person are you? Do you really care about our community?’” Principal Murdock said. “We need to know they are going to care about our kids’ potential and success.” Covington has a combined strategy of looking within its own community to find effective teachers and vetting applicants with untraditional backgrounds to find the right mix of teachers with both strong content knowledge and a commitment to serving all students. Building and maintaining relationships with previous students has been a particularly effective strategy. Currently, more than two-thirds of the school’s teachers were raised in Tipton County, a fact that Murdock believes is a tremendous advantage for the school. For example, the school recruited a former student to teach at the school six months before his teacher training was completed. Since then, that teacher has helped drive the impressive gains in algebra for the school while also connecting with students on a personal level. “These teachers are a wonderful asset to the school and to each other,” Principal Murdock said. “You can tell they really care about their students by the way they treat them. They understand what their students are experiencing.” All new teachers are provided with strong support to develop effective instructional techniques. New 41 Pathways to the Prize Lessons from the 2012 SCORE Prize School Winners “Mentor Handbook” http://www.tnscore.org/scoreprize/ downloads/2012/Mentor_Handbook.pdf “Three Approaches to Attracting and Retaining ‘Irreplaceable’ Teachers” http://thescoresheet.org/2013/02/25/ three-approaches-to-attracting-and-retainingirreplaceable-teachers/ Supporting all teachers. Covington High School has implemented multiple strategies to ensure that all teachers receive the professional development they need to be successful. All teachers have access to PD360, an online system that features videos of teachers implementing effective practices in different content areas. Covington assigns some videos for all teachers to watch and then asks the teachers to complete reflections about the practice and to implement strategies from what they observed. The video is connected to the reinforcement and refinement portion of the state’s teacher evaluation system. Feedback is provided to each teacher by master teachers or department chairs within the school. Covington implemented professional learning communities (PLCs) in 2010. While all departments have their own PLCs, two additional groups were formed for schoolwide purposes: one focusing on English and another on assessment. The English PLC was formed to address students’ academic struggles in English II, writing, and the English test on the ACT. Led by Brandi Blackley, the school’s English instructional facilitator, the group developed and implemented plans for an English lab for all