Measuring teacher mindsets and student leadership growth: Insights from the global teacher and teacher coach study

• In Event: Teaching as Collective Leadership - Research and evidence from the Teach For All network

Proposal

From 2021 - 2022, Teach For All (TFAll) piloted the Teaching as Collective Leadership (TACL) framework to understand its potential impact on teachers and students before scaling. The pilot also helped to produce new research and measurement tools to support evidence-generation and monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning across the TFAll network.
Most prominently, The Global Teacher and Teacher Coach Study marked the first effort to implement applied research to learn about the TACL framework from data from 48 initial teachers and 24 teacher coaches from 9 different network partner organizations. The study tests two different delivery methods of the TACL framework: a series of workshops between teachers and their teacher coaches and a second intervention to provide virtual instructions on how to use the TACL framework and resources on teacher mindsets and classroom strategies to support student whole child development. Additionally, the study experimented with formative observation rubrics and teacher debrief tools for coaches and teachers which emphasize teachers’ agency to drive improvements in their classroom practices and mindsets to support. Each of these tools was developed to be locally contextualized to align to their local student and teacher outcomes. The study provided user-feedback on these measurement tools to make adjustments to bring to scale to the Teach For All network and beyond.
This presentation will focus on the development of new contextualizable measurement tools (formative and summative) to provide teachers and coaches with feedback on teacher mindsets related to holistic student development that happened through the study. In particular:

1.The creation of the Student Leadership Measurement Library to support network partners and teachers to monitor student leadership growth across the five student outcomes families—wellbeing, connectedness, awareness, agency, and mastery. This library is not meant to offer measurement tools “off-the-shelf” but rather as one component of a holistic framework that aims to co-create a wide range of locally customized resources and tools for teachers, teacher coaches, and program designers. Network partners select tools from the library that are aligned with partners’ vision of student success. Through this practical exploration with partner organizations, we expect to discover new implications for Teaching As Collective Leadership which will lead to new ways of conducting research and learning on teacher training and development.

2.The development of the research instruments and measurement tools to analyze shifts in teacher mindsets with respect to the TACL framework lenses (students as leaders, teachers as learners, community as power and our work as systemic): the Teacher Mindset Survey (TMS) and the Student Perception Survey (SPS). The TMS captures self-reported affirmations aligned to TACL from the perspective of the individual. The SPS captures from the perspective of the teacher’s students observer-reported observable attributes of the teacher’s mindsets related to the TACL lenses.

3.A set of new formative classroom observation rubric, teacher self-reflection guide, and coach debrief tools - which primary purpose is to provide feedback between teachers and teacher coaches to strengthen teacher practice and mindsets and to promote a culture of data usage aligned to holistic student development and teacher development.

Author

• Robert Dean, Teach For All