Items from the Newest Harvard Education Letter

I’ve got kind of a love/hate thing going on with the Harvard Education Letter. On one hand, it’s damnably expensive, and I’ve been tempted to let it go a couple of times, but every now and then they come out with a stellar enough issue that I can’t let it go. This month’s issue has a great article on a group of superintendents in Connecticut who are using a “medical rounds” model to observe teachers and gain a greater understanding of professional practice. My district has been working with the BERC Group on a project much like this; I’ve had a couple different groups of teachers come through to watch my calendar time. It’s also reminiscent of the Japanese lesson study model that got pushed pretty hard after the last TIMSS study.

Years ago I read an article about using case studies in business school (I think it may have even been Harvard). I’ve always thought that was a direction that education schools should go in as a way to teach concepts. So much of the work is impractical—social justice, preeminent psychologists, and the like—that actually grounding the work in something real would be helpful. That’s the complaint that many students have (see newoldschoolteacher, for example), and it also seems like one of the easiest areas to fix.