Top Performers Offer U.S. Much More Effective Models of Teacher PD
An excerpt:

Lily Eskelsen García, the President of the National Education Association, told me later that she listened to the opening presentations with growing excitement.  Eskelsen García started out teaching in a one-room school, later becoming a sixth-grade teacher.  She said that she would have given a lot to get the same kind of intense, sustained assistance at the beginning of her career that the Shanghai teachers get, and the idea of being able to have a real chance at a long-lasting career in teaching, with responsibility increasing with increasing expertise, was no less appealing to her. She agreed with my comment that, although the career ladder idea as developed in Singapore and Shanghai is a form of merit pay, it is very different from the kind of merit pay systems we have seen in the United States.  The systems in both Shanghai and Singapore both take into account, for example, the views of a teacher’s performance from other teachers in a kind of 360-degree view of that performance from both mentors and mentees.  The idea of using teams of teachers led by teachers to improve the effectiveness of instruction, relying on a disciplined system of continuous improvement, would, she said, be welcomed by the NEA, as would a system in which compensation would be tied in part to increasing responsibility for teachers as they climb the ladder.  

Read the full blog here.

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