Teaching Quality and California’s Future

State Capitol Building (photo by the author)

Today in Sacramento (beginning at 9:30 a.m.), Accomplished California Teachers (ACT) will co-present “Teaching Quality and California’s Future” – an event sponsored by the Stuart Foundation and organized by ACT, the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ), and Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy Equity (SCOPE).  We are excited to see months of planning culminating in what we hope will be an informative and useful event for our audience.

I’ll try to post short, timely updates on some of the highlights and takeaways of the day, with more of the materials available online soon, here, or at the ACT website.

You can keep apprised of the event and catch some ideas and links by using Twitter.  The main event hashtag will be #CAteaching.  Tweets from the event will come from the following accounts (that we know of):

@AcmpCA_Teachers 

@scope_stanford

@alicemercer

You might also want to follow event participants as indicated below in the event overview.

Event highlights will include:

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Torlakson will make an announcement and offer opening remarks.

The Bay Area New Millennium Initiative (a project of the Center for Teaching Quality) will present their work on early -career teachers looking at reforms to the profession that would help retain teachers and offer greater variety of roles and responsibilities for teacher leaders.

Anthony Cody (@anthonycody)and I will present ACT’s teacher evaluation report, and argue for a new way of thinking about teacher evaluation – as a robust, ongoing and growth-oriented process that improves all teachers, rather than a bureaucratic procedure focused on compliance and baseline quality control.

Julia E. Koppich and Daniel Humphrey will present their research on peer evaluation in two California school districts.  Their findings indicate that evaluation of teachers by teachers produces some important benefits in both the quality and quantity of the evaluative feedback, and even in the quality of the labor-management relationships between local teachers associations and district administrations.

John Fensterwald (@jfenster)will moderate some discussion and Q&A with the presenters above.  Then, our expert discussant panel will take the stage to react and respond to the presentations.  The participants in this panel are Shannan Brown (2011 CA Teacher of the Year and president of the San Juan Teachers Association), Richard Carranza (Deputy Superintendent, SFUSD), Assemblymember Felipe Fuentes (author of teacher evaluation legislation, AB-5 from last year), and Eric Heins (@ericheins, Vice-President of the California Teachers Association).

Linda Darling-Hammond (photo by the author)

Linda Darling-Hammond will wrap up the event with some final thoughts and reflections on the teaching profession in California.

with Diane Ravitch at the SOS March, July 2011, Washington, D.C.

And then, to cap off the day, several hours later many of the same cast will attend a speech by Diane Ravitch at the Sacramento Convention Center.  All in all, it promises to be a dynamic day for education policy discussion and advocacy in California’s capitol.  (Sorry there aren’t many links in this post – stay tuned for updates, though!)