Starting a Teaching Skills Database

With two weeks until the start of the DeLeT program, I've been thinking a lot about what skills I'm going to need in order to become an effective teacher. In my private wiki, I plan to create a page for each skill and fill it with personal notes, class discussion, readings, and any other advice I come across. This tool will become my ever-evolving teaching skills database, which is something I wish I'd had when I was learning the craft of novel writing.

When I started writing children's books for submission, I devoured manuals on craft and technique, I clipped articles, I attended workshops and conferences, and I depended on spiral notebooks to keep it all documented for further review. The problem was that notebooks could be lost or misplaced, they couldn't be accessed for quick reference from another location, and it was difficult to change, edit, or reorganize them on the fly. It became increasingly difficult to incorporate new ideas with the old ones in any meaningful way, or to have the notes available at my writing computer where I needed them, so I dumped the books and started keeping the skill-sets only in my mind: plot, character, mechanics, hooks, pacing, foreshadowing, etc. Keeping everything in my head was like keeping balls in the air during a juggling act, and invariably something was dropped in the first draft that had to be picked up again for the second or third. I got good enough at the juggling act to get a book into print, but I have learned to accept that the occasional dropped ball will always be part of my personal writing process.

If teaching is an art, like writing is an art, the required skill-sets will be unique to each artist depending on their own personal style, subject matter, strengths, weaknesses, interests, and goals. For example, you might think that some skills, like the proper use of punctuation and capitalization, would be applicable to everybody until you run into an effective and successful poet like e. e. cummings who could do very well without them. The skills in my teaching skills database will eventually be unique to me, but here at the very beginning of the process I'm going to have to draw heavily from other sources.

One online resource I found is a rubric used by school administrators to evaluate their teachers, which is nice because it's always good to know how to please a potential boss. Another resource is a list of items teachers frequently ask for feedback on when others sit in and observe their classes, demonstrating the areas teachers worry about most or have the hardest time judging on their own. From these two lists I can already see that teachers and principals have entirely different ideas about what makes an effective teacher, and students or their parents would probably disagree with both of them. During my DeLeT classes, I will certainly encounter many other sources to supplement these.

Kim Marshall's Teacher Evaluation Rubrics consist of 60 equally-weighted skills grouped into 6 domains of 10 apiece:

A. Planning and Preparation for Learning
- includes Knowledge, Strategy, Alignment, etc.
B. Classroom Management
- includes Expectations, Relationships, Respect, etc.
C. Delivery of Instruction
- includes Expectations, Effort-Based, Goals, etc.
D. Monitoring, Assessment, and Follow-Up
- includes Criteria, Diagnosis, On-The-Spot, etc.
E. Family and Community Outreach
- includes Respect, Belief, Expectations, etc.
F. Professional Responsibilities
- includes Attendance, Reliability, Professionalism, etc.

I've chosen this as my base, and have been asking myself whether any of these 60 skills could be removed, shifted to another domain, combined, or split into two or more sub-skills. Also, some skills seem conspicuously absent. This otherwise comprehensive list, last updated only two weeks ago, doesn't include a single item involving the successful integration of new technologies into the classroom. And most amazing of all, for a list created so that administrators can provide feedback to teachers, is that the implementation of prior administrator feedback is not an item under consideration!

The list of requested teacher feedback comes from a Word document that Google found for me on the University of Northern Iowa School of Education website. The list claims to be adapted from The Art of Cognitive Coaching by Art Costa and Bob Garmston. I can't tell if the file is associated with a course or comes from a student or faculty member's personal account, and it may disappear at any time, so I grabbed a copy for my files.

Rather than being triple-worried about the "Expectations" of others, it seems that teachers care about whether they tap their pencils too much while lecturing, use too much sarcasm, show inappropriate favoritism, give unclear instructions, and otherwise unknowingly and unconsciously fall into bad habits that distract their students from effective learning. These particular items jump out at me because they resemble general concerns people have about public speaking.

I feel good about adding "speaking skills" to my own personal version of Mr. Marshall's list because it will allow me to quantify all the ways my own workshops and presentations have already contributed to my future teaching success, and it will allow the studies I do from now on to make me a more effective public speaker. I'm also adding "technology skills" including the use of technology in lesson planning, presentation of materials, student assignments, providing feedback to parents and administrators, and whatever else I can think of.

I have a long way to go in defining the categories, and even longer before I fill them with usable information, but I feel good about having a process and the start of a Teaching Skills Database that will eventually become a useful tool in my professional toolbox.