The Success at the Core organization has created a free field-tested professional development toolkit designed to help school leadership teams and teachers elevate classroom instruction and improve student outcomes. The SATC videos reveal exemplary teaching and teaming activities and can provoke powerful conversations about practice.
In their December 2011 newsletter, SATC featured a “Story of Use” written by Cathy Gassenheimer, highlighting ways in which ABPC has used the SATC materials. Here’s what Cathy had to say:
Stories of Use
This month’s use story comes from Cathy Gassenheimer, executive vice president for the A+ Best Practices Center.
I first learned about Success at the Core from a Harvard newsletter. Richard Elmore’s involvement in the project attracted me. Once I checked out the website, I was hooked!
The A+ Best Practices Center has three educator networks. Currently, these networks are focused on using formative assessment to improve teaching and learning and student motivation. Success at the Core has many relevant resources for this work. Because of that, we have shared SaC‘s link widely with all our educator networks, and we have shown several of the videos during our network meetings.
SaC‘s formative assessment videos – including the five Teacher Development assessment videos and the two videos embedded in the Leadership Development Common Formative Assessments module – are reported to be the most used resource by the center’s network members. Our educators have also reported using both the content and instruction strategies that appear under the Teacher Development tab.
One of our district partners, the Shelby County Schools (adjacent to Birmingham, AL), is using SaC as the primary professional development tool for all district middle schools. Lewis Brooks, the middle school director for Shelby County, reported that the quality and caliber of SaC materials is “outstanding.”
The A+ Best Practices Center is also using SaC resources with a pilot program focused on repurposing school-based reading coaches to instructional coaches. The three middle school coaches in the program have found the materials to be particularly valuable, but our elementary coaches have also benefitted from the free tools offered in Success at the Core. We have the link to SaC on our “valuable learning tools” tab and several instructional partners have shown a variety of the videos to their colleagues, both during the coaching cycle and during professional development.
In this time of limited resources, Success at the Core is an invaluable resource to educators. It should be an essential part of any middle school teacher or administrator’s “toolkit.”
Cathy W. Gassenheimer
A+ Best Practices Center
Montgomery, AL
