The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

What new teachers say about Teaching Excellence

December 17, 2009 by Jeremy Jones

Teaching Excellence is the professional development and certification program for all first year teachers at YES Prep.  To learn more about Teaching Excellence, please email teaching.excellence@yesprep.org.

“I couldn’t have done my job last year without Teaching Excellence because the knowledge and skills they provided me with were invaluable. The instructional coaches have knowledge and insight from their many years of teaching that helped me avoid the most common mistakes that new teachers make. I became a better teacher much, much faster than I could have on my own.” – Lindsey Windham, English I Teacher, YES Prep East End

“Teaching Excellence gives me quality materials that I can immediately implement in my classroom. There are so many things that I know I will learn over time

Continue reading What new teachers say about Teaching Excellence...

--
0 Comments

Change Teacher Education in Texas

December 15, 2009 by Chris Barbic

In response to the Houston Chronicle article, “Group gives bad grade to Texas teacher education”

Teaching Excellence, doing “Whatever it Takes!” to change teacher education in Texas

While many Texas’ schools of education are being chided for their poor job of training teachers, YES Prep Public Schools teacher training program Teaching Excellence is boasting the student achievement of their first year teachers.

For the past six years, Teaching Excellence has been working to develop a teacher education model that supports teachers in the first year of their craft and ensure that they have the background necessary to perform in the classroom. From the inception of our program, we have always kept the goal in mind – student learning and student mastery. The students of YES Prep have

Continue reading Change Teacher Education in Texas...

--
0 Comments

First Year Teachers Have an Immediate Impact

December 10, 2009 by Jeremy Jones

YES Prep Ensures Immediate Classroom Success for First Years

Teaching Excellence is the year long professional development program for all beginning teachers at YES Prep and ensures that new teachers are immediately successful in redirecting the life paths of their students toward college graduation. By heavily investing in our young talent, we increase the learning curve for new teachers and speed up the teacher development continuum. 

Teaching Excellence provide multiple layers of support for new teachers including, but not limited to:

1)      Professional Learning Experiences - The cornerstone of Teaching Excellence is relevant and scaffolded professional learning experience that allows new teachers to implement instructional and management strategies in their classrooms the

Continue reading First Year Teachers Have an Immediate Impact...

--
0 Comments

Building Excellent First Year Teachers

December 05, 2009 by Jeremy Jones

YES Prep hired 95 teachers for the 2009-2010 school year and just about half of those teachers were brand new to education. We love recruiting leaders from all academic and professional backgrounds and we can do so without fear or insecurity because of our outstanding first year teacher support, development and training program that ensures brand new educators will have immediate success with their students. 

Our year-long, new teacher development program, Teaching Excellence, was recently recognized by the Texas Education Agency as a model teacher preparatory and training program for young educators.  Teaching Excellence pairs new teachers with an instructional coach and facilitates relevant and applicable professional learning experiences on classroom management and culture,

Continue reading Building Excellent First Year Teachers...

--
0 Comments

November Edition of English Insider: A Newsletter for Teachers Of English and Reading

November 30, 2009 by Jeremy Jones

Best Practices for English, Literature and Reading Instruction

• Put up posters with prompts for students to use academic language.Include sentence stems to help students build academic vocabulary and encourage them to use such vocabulary in whole class and small group discussions. (Kyrlyn Chatten, 10th grade EE)

• Use a word wall color coded by part of speech (for example, nouns in blue, verbs in green, etc.) or by theme (for example, character traits in red, words that connect to social studies in yellow) (Natalie Lund, 7th grade EE)

• Use “high impact” visuals to help our English Language learners grasp vocabulary words and concepts. (Nella Garcia, Director of Teacher Deveopment)

• Use quick, high interest movie clips to illustrate concepts and

Continue reading November Edition of English Insider: A Newsletter for Teachers Of English and Reading...

--
0 Comments