Supporting Good Teaching Through Professional Conversations

Talk by Charlotte Danielson at ECIS Adminstrators' Courageous Leadership Conference Istanbul April 2011

Look at the quality of conversations and the contribution to professional learning:

• Environment of trust
• Self-assessment
• Reflection on practice
• Professional conversation
• A community of professional inquiry

Opportunities for Productive Professional Conversations:

• Conversations following observations
• Coaching conversations with mentors/peers/admin

Developing Conversation Skills:

• Establishing rapport
• Active listening
• Linguistic skills of paraphrasing/probing/clarifying
• Refrain from giving advice

Limitations of Feedback:

• Difficulty of not being judgmental/condescending/patronizing
• Meaningful conversations should be about asking questions and solving problems.

Power and Leadership:

• Teachers and administrators hold unequal amounts of power
• Relating to performance appraisal, the 'buck' stops with the admin.

The "Big Ideas"

• The nature of learning...it is done by the learner and involves active intellectual involvement
• The nature of student motivation is fired by the need for human connection, the drive for competence and mastery, the need for autonomy and choice and a student's intellectual curiosity

Please refer to:

http://www.danielsongroup.org/
charlotte_danielson@hotmail.com


"Mindset" by Carol Dweck