In too many districts, evaluation of teachers ensures competence but does little or nothing to encourage and support expertise. In this thought-provoking and groundbreaking book, Tony Frontier and Paul Mielke address this issue head-on, combining the conceptual and the practical by offering a compelling vision of teacher growth, along with nearly three dozen step-by-step protocols for working with teachers. They present a powerful rationale for reconceptualizing teacher evaluation by creating a balanced system of three equally important components: * Reliable and valid evaluation. * Empowering and focused supervision. * Meaningful and purposeful reflection. Each component is discussed in terms of its purpose, premise, processes, practices, and payoffs. Revealing examples based on the authors’ experiences in classrooms across the country show what evaluation, supervision, and reflection look like when they’re not done well--and what they could look like if done more effectively. Providing insight and inspiration, Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter paves a clear path to better teaching and helps you acknowledge and support the hard work that teachers do every day to make learning come alive for their students.

Frontier and Mielke combine the conceptual and practical by offering a compelling vision of teacher growth and dozens of step-by-step protocols for working with teachers.

In Teacher Evaluation That Makes a Difference, Robert J. Marzano and Michael D. Toth introduce a new model of teacher evaluation that takes into account multiple data-rich measures of teacher performance and student growth to ensure fair, meaningful, and reliable evaluations for all teachers.

The authors discuss four elements of change and outline five essential practices for leading dynamic, innovative educational systems that prepare students for a changing world.

Teaching in the Fast Lane offers teachers a way to increase student engagement: an active classroom. The active classroom is about creating learning experiences differently, so that students engage in exploration of the content and take on a good share of the responsibility for their own learning. It's about students reaching explicit targets in different ways, which can result in increased student effort and a higher quality of work. Author Suzy Pepper Rollins details how to design, manage, and maintain an active classroom that balances autonomy and structure. She offers student-centered, practical strategies on sorting, station teaching, and cooperative learning that will help teachers build on students' intellectual curiosity, self-efficacy, and sense of purpose. Using the strategies in this book, teachers can strategically "let go" in ways that enable students to reach their learning targets, achieve more, be motivated to work, learn to collaborate, and experience a real sense of accomplishment.

This book makes sense of complex topics by distilling them to basic concepts. It provides normal physiology integrated with indications for and evaluation of disease states. With a fresh clinical approach, it helps answer reoccurring questions.

Feeling overwhelmed—constantly, on a daily basis—has unfortunately become the status quo among educators. But it doesn't have to be. Schools need to stop adding more programs, strategies, activities, resources, projects, assessments, and meetings. Though they are often implemented with the best intentions, these things ultimately end up as clutter—that which inhibits our ability to help students learn. Instead, teachers need more clarity, which emerges when we prioritize our efforts to do less with greater focus. This isn't simply a matter of teachers doing less. Rather, teachers need to be intentional and prioritize their efforts to develop deeper understanding among students. In Teaching with Clarity, Tony Frontier focuses on three fundamental questions to help reduce curricular and organizational clutter in the interest of clarity and focus: * What does it mean to understand? * What is most important to understand? * How do we prioritize our strategic effort to help students understand what is most important? By prioritizing clear success criteria, intentional design, meaningful feedback, and a shared purpose, teachers can begin to clear away the curricular clutter that overwhelms the profession—and embrace the clarity that emerges.