be one of its core values. It was leery of creating a superstar system.
Samir calculated that becoming a PD would be an ideal opportunity to hone the skills he would need to lead a cluster of schools. Not only would he learn the inner workings of a big school district like LAUSD, he would gain experience as a manager as he helped select and then support fifty new TFA teachers. He would get to see what goodâand badâteaching looked like; what made a school function; what contributed to a schoolâs failure. He accepted Teach For Americaâs job offer and rejoined the fold in July 2005.
Samir was sent to Houston for one week of training. There he learned how to score teachers on the newly codified TAL rubric and was introduced to Co-Investigation, a new teacher-development program that was a direct result of TFAâs push to improve teacher effectiveness. A reflective problem-solving approach, Co-Investigation was the result of an exhaustive eighteen-month internal study that drew from the work of various adult-learning theorists, including David Kolb and Robert Kegan. TFA introduced the self-help model because it knew that PD intervention alone would not suffice to move CMs through the continuous cycle of learning and improvement necessary to make significant gains in the classroom. The teachers had to learn how to help themselves. Though the idea of reflective practitioner work was not foreign to the world of teacher education, TFAâs model was outcome-based, and heavily reliant on the use of data to assess progress.
Co-Investigation represented a paradigm shift in TFAâs care and support of its teachers. Until then, when PDs met with TFA recruits, it had been an anecdotally driven discussion: the PD asked how things were going, the CM reported on areas of struggle, and the PD came up with a grab bag of tips and resources. The PD inevitably brought something valuable to the table, but it wasnât always the most purposeful in terms of the ultimate objective.
Under the Co-Investigation model, freewheeling PD-CM chats gave way to highly structured and tightly focused meetings centered on reaching the goal of significant student gains. Before each meeting, the CM was required to submit student assessment scores and to fill out a reflective guide gauging how well the CM was addressing the four TAL habits of an excellent teacher. After a classroom observation, the PD and CM met to identify the âkeyâ teacher problem that was inhibiting student achievement. Then, together, they looked for potential causes, possible solutions, and future measures of success.
Like every other program on the TFA continuum, Co-Investigation was a work-in-progress. Throughout the 2005â2006 school year, the organization continued to refine and flesh out the new support model. In February 2006, it called all the PDs together once again and introduced Co-Investigation 2.0, a more nuanced version of the original. The second iteration probed more deeply into the cause of the key problem, determining whether it was due to knowledge, resources, or mind-set.
Applying the Co-Investigation model would be no easy task. Samir was responsible for supporting fifty corps members who were teaching every one of the secondary core subjectsâacross six school sites. During the waning days of the summer, he pored over curricula and state standards, trying to bone up in the subjects he was least familiar with. He studied the Teach For America summer institute curriculum, too, combing it for teaching strategies on everything from literacy to lesson planning. Among his flock were a gaggle of special ed teachers, many of them clustered at Locke. TFA had provided him with no particular insight into problems specific to special ed teachers. He didnât have a clue how best to support them.
As he headed to Locke for his first school visits, he was nervous. His experience as a teacher was limited to two years in a very small
Samir calculated that becoming a PD would be an ideal opportunity to hone the skills he would need to lead a cluster of schools. Not only would he learn the inner workings of a big school district like LAUSD, he would gain experience as a manager as he helped select and then support fifty new TFA teachers. He would get to see what goodâand badâteaching looked like; what made a school function; what contributed to a schoolâs failure. He accepted Teach For Americaâs job offer and rejoined the fold in July 2005.
Samir was sent to Houston for one week of training. There he learned how to score teachers on the newly codified TAL rubric and was introduced to Co-Investigation, a new teacher-development program that was a direct result of TFAâs push to improve teacher effectiveness. A reflective problem-solving approach, Co-Investigation was the result of an exhaustive eighteen-month internal study that drew from the work of various adult-learning theorists, including David Kolb and Robert Kegan. TFA introduced the self-help model because it knew that PD intervention alone would not suffice to move CMs through the continuous cycle of learning and improvement necessary to make significant gains in the classroom. The teachers had to learn how to help themselves. Though the idea of reflective practitioner work was not foreign to the world of teacher education, TFAâs model was outcome-based, and heavily reliant on the use of data to assess progress.
Co-Investigation represented a paradigm shift in TFAâs care and support of its teachers. Until then, when PDs met with TFA recruits, it had been an anecdotally driven discussion: the PD asked how things were going, the CM reported on areas of struggle, and the PD came up with a grab bag of tips and resources. The PD inevitably brought something valuable to the table, but it wasnât always the most purposeful in terms of the ultimate objective.
Under the Co-Investigation model, freewheeling PD-CM chats gave way to highly structured and tightly focused meetings centered on reaching the goal of significant student gains. Before each meeting, the CM was required to submit student assessment scores and to fill out a reflective guide gauging how well the CM was addressing the four TAL habits of an excellent teacher. After a classroom observation, the PD and CM met to identify the âkeyâ teacher problem that was inhibiting student achievement. Then, together, they looked for potential causes, possible solutions, and future measures of success.
Like every other program on the TFA continuum, Co-Investigation was a work-in-progress. Throughout the 2005â2006 school year, the organization continued to refine and flesh out the new support model. In February 2006, it called all the PDs together once again and introduced Co-Investigation 2.0, a more nuanced version of the original. The second iteration probed more deeply into the cause of the key problem, determining whether it was due to knowledge, resources, or mind-set.
Applying the Co-Investigation model would be no easy task. Samir was responsible for supporting fifty corps members who were teaching every one of the secondary core subjectsâacross six school sites. During the waning days of the summer, he pored over curricula and state standards, trying to bone up in the subjects he was least familiar with. He studied the Teach For America summer institute curriculum, too, combing it for teaching strategies on everything from literacy to lesson planning. Among his flock were a gaggle of special ed teachers, many of them clustered at Locke. TFA had provided him with no particular insight into problems specific to special ed teachers. He didnât have a clue how best to support them.
As he headed to Locke for his first school visits, he was nervous. His experience as a teacher was limited to two years in a very small
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