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Q&A on program design

To help ensure corps members attain high levels of success with their students, Teach For America has built a team that focuses solely on developing strategies and tools to support corps members in their ongoing professional development.

Andrew Mandel (Rio Grande Valley Corps '00), vice president of interactive learning and engagement, shares his thoughts on how his team approaches and supports teacher development. Andrew served as vice president of design for our Teacher Support and Development team from 2005 to 2008.

1. What is your team's philosophy on how to ensure teachers are leading their students to significant academic gains?
   Based on our examination of highly successful corps members, we've learned that teachers who make dramatic academic gains with their students exhibit specific habits, which we've built into our teacher development curriculum, the Teaching as Leadership framework. We aim to develop corps members to a level of "beginning proficiency" on most aspects of this framework by the end of the summer institute, so that when they move into their full-time regional placement regions, the focus is on moving corps members toward "advanced proficiency" in the framework. We prioritize particular aspects of the Teaching As Leadership framework—establishing ambitious goals, setting up long-term plans, assessing students and managing data—to foster a data-driven classroom that enables teachers to reflect upon student performance and make appropriate adjustments to their instruction throughout the year. To help do this, our regional program staff facilitates a formal cycle with corps members several times a year that includes observing and reflecting on the particular ways in which individual teachers can improve their students' performance. These sessions, along with alternative certification courses, content-area/grade-level meetings, and regional workshops, help corps members develop the habits and approach needed to make significant gains with their students.
2. What does your team do to support corps members?
   My team of eight program designers develops the approaches, strategies and tools for teacher support after corps members complete the summer institute; there is a whole other group of designers who focus on the summer institute curriculum. We work on resources such as the Student Achievement Toolkit project, which aims to assemble goals, long-term plans, diagnostic tests, assessments and tracking systems for every teaching placement in every region. We analyze the causes of corps member struggles and design professional development programs that address those issues in engaging, relevant ways. We also plan the ongoing professional development of our program staff.
3. How do you work with corps members who are struggling?
   The first thing to remember is that every corps member struggles at some point; teaching is hard work. Our corps members are committed to working extremely hard in order to improve, so that's half the battle right there. Challenges in the classroom take many different shapes, and the solutions are going to look different if students are not comprehending instruction versus not listening to the teacher. We train our corps members and our program staff on how to analyze problems and prioritize effectively. Problems in the classroom may be linked to a range of issues from a teacher's failure to establish and assert his/her authority to inadequate planning to lack of structure with rules and procedures. Once we determine the root of what's holding students back, we can focus on developing our teachers in those areas. We have developed national resources to help corps members who are struggling in particular areas—such as establishing structure in their classroom, or tracking student progress to understand their students' needs. Helping corps members make measurable growth in specific areas of their practice is critical; improvement can feel completely overwhelming if you try to "fix" too many things at once.
4. In your experience, what impact do you see the support having with individual corps members?
   I am in the very fortunate position of being able to travel around the country and see our students and teachers doing incredible work every day. Our program staff finds that corps members' classrooms evolve throughout the year as corps members consistently seek to improve by reflecting on what's effective and what isn't, and learning new ideas to incorporate into their approach. Our Student Achievement Toolkit project has been really helpful in ensuring teachers are collecting regular data about student performance, a practice that makes it clear what instructional changes are necessary. As more and more corps members get comfortable with using student assessment information to drive their planning, we are going to continue to see major growth in student achievement. Our surveys also indicate that corps members find one-on-one conversations with their program directors to be one of the valuable pieces of our support. It is exciting to see a real "meeting of the minds" after a classroom observation, where a program director and corps member get to the heart of a classroom challenge and have "Aha" moments together about how to move forward. These two people stay in touch about the impact of the strategies they discussed, so that the corps member can determine what to keep doing, and what to adjust.

Andrew Mandel is the vice president of interactive learning and engagement and served as vice president of design for the Teacher Support and Development team from 2005 to 2008. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in American history and literature, and received a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he studied teacher professional development and educational media. Andrew taught seventh grade language arts as a 2000 corps member in the Rio Grande Valley.

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