Teaching for Student Achievement

PGCTF (and I assume all other New Teacher Project Teaching Fellows) provide Fellows with a handy guidebook called Teaching for Student Achievement. The book is pretty massive - almost 500 pages for Gen Ed and 600 pages for Special Ed. After enrolling, Fellows receive an Independent Study Guide (ISG) which details assignments to be completed prior to the beginning of Institute. One of those assignments is to read the guidebook in its entirety. It's a pretty daunting task to me, because I have never read what is basically a textbook from cover to cover. On the other hand, I am very excited for this book to tell me all the secrets to being an awesome teacher. Of course I know that it isn't going to do that, but I like the idea of it.

I keep meaning to start reading the book, but I keep going over the introduction chapter each time I pick it up because each time I skim, rather than read, the text. To be honest, it's not that riveting (yet). And because of that and the fact that I hate reading information I need to know (i.e. for school or for Fellows) without taking meticulous notes, I decided that I would blog about important things I'm reading as I go along - both to entertain myself and to retain the info.

I hope everyone enjoys going through the guidebook with me! :o) I imagine these blogs will be very long...

A little information on the guidebook: it was written by TNTP in collaboration with TFA and is a "research and data-driven device" (in other words, they study what works and pass it on). Also, in the first few sentences, it stresses that my primary responsibility as a new teacher is to immediately increase student achievement. I'm down with increasing student achievement and hope to be as immediate in doing so as soon as possible.