Exceeding Expectations

In recent years our education system has been under great pressure. There have been calls for expanded accountability, particularly through standardized testing and more-rigorous teacher evaluation processes. Attention has been turned to the use of value-added scores to assess how much student progress a given teacher stimulates. These scores have been at the center of much controversy. In this book we use them in a different way.

Over the past seven years, we have worked closely with teachers across Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas who consistently achieved high value-added scores. These are teachers who, by objective measures, produce more than expected learning year in and year out. In this book we do not advance a position on value-added scores. We only use them to help identity the highly effective teachers (HETs) profiled in this book. (If you want to learn more, we provide some background on value-added scores in the research box below.)

We brought HETs into workshops to help them learn from each other so that they could become even more effective. At these workshops HETs spent a day interviewing one another, sharing their assumptions, and telling stories about their practice.

In addition to the workshops, which involved more than 350 HETs, we have also held intensive interviews with 30 of the highest-performing teachers in the state of Ohio. These teachers were at the very top of the value-added scale in three of the previous four years. In this book you will meet these teachers and read their stories. (In those stories all student names have been changed.)

Their accounts may sometimes surprise you and cause you to think about teaching and learning in a more complex and adaptive way. That is what their stories forced us to do. Throughout this book we reflect on their experiences and offer some tools to help you assess and grow your own practice. Our hope is that the tools will help you liberate the best teacher in you again and again.