RTT/Teaching As Leadership
- Title: Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher's Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap
- Authors: Teach For America, Steven Farr
- Publication info: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, April 2008
- Preview/purchase on Amazon
RTT relevance
This is a helpful resource for training program organizers to better understand Teach For America and what they believe teachers need to know and do. The book does not specifically discuss their summer institute (5-8 week training program) in detail, but the content is similar. It is best used as a guide for what a trainer needs to teach and why. There is insufficient detail in the book to put it directly into the hands of inexperienced trainees.
Book summary
The Teach For America (TFA) philosophy can be summarized as:
- Set Big Goals
- Invest in Students and Their Families
- Plan Purposefully
- Execute Effectively
- Continuously Increase Effectiveness
- Work Relentlessly
It fits that the book is also divided into these six sections. Each section discusses why the section title (i.e. set big goals) matters to closing the achievement gap in urban schools, then jumps into the specifics of what TFA teachers are prepared to do. The book is sprinkled with many stories of specific teachers and how the ideas in the book made their classroom more successful. Each section ends with a checklist of tasks and detailed summary of the action steps needed to implement the ideas in the book.
This review would benefit from a section-by-section summary
