TeachME Professional Development

1. Which of the following accurately describes the results of academic challenges that American students are facing today?

2. Two common education reform errors include putting too much burden on any one element of the system to solve all of our nation's education problems and implementing piecemeal strategies in an ad hoc, uncoordinated way

3. The Blueprint for Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching (RESPECT) is a framework for parents, students, educators, policymakers, business and community leaders, elected officials, and other partners to use in guiding collective efforts to strengthen America's public education system by rethinking:

4. A school culture that calls shared responsibility and leadership includes each of the following characteristics EXCEPT:

5. Attracting a high-performing and diverse pool of talented individuals to become teachers and principals is a critical priority to transforming the teaching profession, whether these are new graduates or career switchers, and whether they enter the profession through traditional or alternative pathways.

6. School communities thrive when there is unstructured time for individual work so that teachers may reflect on improving their own skills before working collaboratively with other professionals.

7. Effective educators have high standards of professional practice and demonstrate their ability to improve student learning and their effectiveness must be evaluated based on:

8. In order to attract quality professionals, educators need to be offered career pathways that provide opportunities for increasingly responsible roles that is coupled with appropriate compensation.

9. Successful schools and districts are those whose climates and cultures, use of time, approaches to staffing, use of technology, deployment of support services, and __________________________ are optimized to continuously improve outcomes for the students they serve.

10. The 'Blueprint for Reform' was proposed by President Obama in 2010 to focus on today's students, stating that in order to prepare them we must focus on diversity, making decisions that are based on achieving positive student results, and that maintains a focus on possibilities instead of barriers.

11. Which of the following is NOT considered one of the critical building blocks for making the RESPECT vision a reality?

12. In order to ensure that every student exits high school prepared for postsecondary study, informed citizenship, and workforce participation, high levels of student achievement will be judged by one universal measure that assesses students' ability to understand and apply the knowledge and skills that matter most

13. Two important elements in transforming current educational practices include increased student equity, judged by continuously narrowing the gaps in achievement and opportunity between more- and less-privileged populations of students and increased global competitiveness, judged by American students' academic performance on internationally benchmarked measures.

14. Even the most committed and effective teachers and leaders need appropriate school conditions and _________________ in order to sustain their efforts in the most challenging environments.

15. Although all schools rely on good teachers and strong school leaders to create the right conditions for teaching and learning, the dynamics of the profession are strikingly different across districts because of size, location, or demographics, and these differences must be acknowledged by stakeholders.

16. Four stages of educator engagement include developing professional knowledge of reformed practices, applying professional knowledge to classroom practice, collaboratively participating in reform efforts and:

17. Ideal teacher and principal evaluation systems include multiple measures of performance, with student growth data as a significant factor, and rather than treating the evaluation process as an end unto itself, it would be used as a tool for managing and supporting the education workforce.

18. Experts believe that transforming the teaching profession calls for redesigning the profession so that we unleash the inherent joy in teaching and learning, nurturing _________________ in our schools and classrooms, and delivering the outcomes that our children deserve and our country's future demands.

19. Research has shown that innovative curriculum is second only to teaching among school influences on student success and that the impact of the curriculum is most significant in schools that have the greatest needs.

20. In a highly functioning school, teams of teacher-leaders and principals work in partnerships to identify challenges, propose solutions, and share in distributed leadership and decision-making at all levels, including hiring, structuring the school day and school year, and designing professional learning