Jon Saphier's New Book on High Expertise Teaching

In partnership with Corwin Publishing, Jon Saphier recently released a new book on High Expertise Teaching and how to get more of it in more places, more of the time.

High-Expertise Teaching and career-long professional learning about it has been a gaping hole in ed reform for the past 70 years. We’ve taken every other conceivable approach without denting the opportunity gap for students. 

Now consider this: The knowledge and skill to teach and lead at high levels is far larger and more complex than we have acknowledged or provided for. Thus there is a giant opportunity gap for teachers and leaders that is at great cost to our students. We have denied access to the existing treasury of skills to the majority of our educator workforce. 

This opportunity gap shows up in spotty PD on ever changing topics, lack of coherence for career-long learning, lack of clear processes for deep collaboration, and lack of follow-up support to get new practices thoroughly learned and adopted. This does not have to be. 

The opening chapters of this book make the case for the teacher opportunity gap and what is missing. Then each chapter takes a district-based process for teacher learning that could become potent if it were reengineered.  

Within each chapter is what leaders would do to get that process operating for the focused purpose of improving teaching and learning. Then the wind-up is the skills the leaders would need to accomplish these upgrades. Leadership skills are split into three chapters,  because this kind of leadership for sustainable improvement includes political savvy and courage as well as culture building  skills for a true Learning Organization. All of them can be grown!

The chapters of this book include:

I. SYSTEM ISSUES

• Scotoma in Policy, Reform, and Strategic Planning
• Three Strands—weaving High Expectations together w/Cul. Proficiency and Rigor to collapse the opportunity gap
• Archipelago -- Planning the Learning of White Educators 

II. SCHOOL-BASED PROCESSES

• The Skillful Culture Builder (Read Excerpt)
• How to Make Decisions that Stay Made  
• To See into the Soul of a School, Visit Common Planning Time Teams (CPTs) (Read Excerpt)
• BILTs Building Instructional Leadership Teams – Charter and Operation
• Crafting the Role of the Coach   

III. DISTRICT BASED PROCESSES

• Where to Show Up and What to Do (Read Excerpt)
• Teacher Evaluation for Constant Learning
• Supervising and Developing Principals
• Rigor and Curriculum Coherence 

IV. LEADERSHIP SKILLS

• The Nature of Professional Knowledge  
• Leadership Preparation Programs
• The Courage to Lead (Read Excerpt)
• Political Savvy and Mobilization  

V. THE REST OF THE STORY

• The Plan
• The Unwritten Chapters – Seven Potent Processes
• Hiring, Hiring, Induction, Access, and Academy, Pre-Service Education, Certification and Recertification

My hope here is to galvanize readers’ energy to reengineer the systems and processes that already exist within districts - processes that influence what any educator knows about High Expertise Teaching. And it is also about how to diagnose how those processes are currently working or not working within a school district, how to improve them, and how to integrate them.

I am making the case here that making these processes work well to grow High Expertise Teaching and be integrated with one another is the most important improvement agenda for American education because these systems are now isolated, disregarded, and tragically dysfunctional. Please fasten your seatbelts. The consequence of this inattention and dysfunction to teacher capacity is titanic, and the opposite of what successful countries have done for the last 20 years. And making High Expertise Teaching our number one priority is the pathway to collapsing the achievement gap in this country.