What Bill Gates Learned From Washington State's Teacher of the Year
From the minute you meet Katie Brown, you get the feeling she’s an amazing teacher. Her intelligence and passion jump out. You immediately think: I would love for my kids to be in her classroom. It’s no surprise to learn she was named the 2014 Washington State Teacher of the Year.
Katie has had a busy summer meeting with policymakers, connecting with colleagues across the country, and even attending Space Camp with the top teachers from other states. So I really appreciated her taking the time to stop by my office last week.
Katie teaches at Shuksan Middle School in Bellingham, a couple hours north of Seattle. Shuksan is a low-income school where two thirds of the students get free or reduced-price lunches. It used to be the kind of school that parents tried to keep their kids from going to, she told me. But in the past few years, things have really turned around. There’s now a waiting list for students to get in. Katie said they have kids who cry on the last day of school—they just don’t want to leave.
A turnaround like that doesn’t happen overnight, of course, and there’s no one factor that causes it. Katie said it started when a strong new superintendent and principal came in and started changing the culture. It’s more collaborative now, and the school has created “a culture of high expectations, balanced with high affection.” There’s also a new focus on data. Shuksan’s teachers start every school year with a “data walk-through,” where they get together and pore over every bit of information about their classes that they can find—from test scores to attendance records and student perception reports—so they can see which areas they need to work on. “You can’t argue with a graph,” she told me. (For a data person like me, that was music to my ears.)
In addition to working with ELL students—kids who are learning to speak English—Katie spends a lot of time coaching her fellow teachers. I was curious about that work, because I think one of the keys to improving education is to help more teachers learn from the very best. Katie had an insight that really struck me: She said we’ve known for a long time that most students won’t learn if you just stick them in a classroom and make them listen to a lecture. They have to put the learning to use and make it relevant to their own lives. And yet most teachers still get their professional development at seminars and conferences, where they sit listening to lectures. “We would never do that with kids,” Katie said, “but we still do it with teachers.”
So she has taken a different approach to coaching teachers at Shuksan. It breaks down into four key areas, as Katie explains in this video:
The approach she describes requires a lot of collaboration, which is easier said than done. For example, opportunities for teachers to work together have to be embedded in the school day: As Katie said, “We can’t expect teachers to seek out other teachers at night, from home.”
We also had a great discussion about the use of standardized test scores. Katie said she’s not opposed to testing students to see whether they’ve mastered the material—in fact, it provides important data that guides her work as a teacher. But we have to be careful how we communicate those results to the kids and their parents.
Katie told me about one recent student of hers, a boy whose family had just moved here from another country. He started the year speaking no English at all—not even “hello”—What Bill Gates Learned From Washington State's Teacher of the Year | EdSurge News: