LEAD Public Schools deserves more explicit and unequivocal praise than I have been offering.  In the previous 3 posts, I was focusing on the idea of Exalting the Teaching Profession.  The failings I was pointing to in that area are not really the failings LEAD.  Exalting the Teaching Profession is something that we need to do at the community, societal, really, the species level.  It's something that we need to accomplish if we hope to survive as a species.  When we fall short, we see the evidence in our schools, but it is not, strictly speaking, the fault of the schools. PROMOTING the Idea that Great Teaching is Possible -- that really is something that falls fully within our powers.  And at every level of their organization, the professionals at LEAD Public Schools were superb PROMOTERS. Promoting the Idea that Great Teaching is Possible is vital because current social conditions aside, humans are disposed to valuing the teaching profession.  We have evolved as clan creatures.  We do not, as a species, leave the rearing of our young solely to parents, as evidenced by the fact that typically, even established homeschool programs involve some kind of coordination between families, not simply isolated family units going it alone. Our task as educators is to change that, so that in those moments where parents look to see if there is any decent teaching going out there, they see something.  It's alright if parents see teachers failing from time to time, especially if teachers fail in trying to achieve objectives that perhaps parents had not considered worth pursuing. I am going to speak in positive terms about LEAD's particular approach to this problem.  In my inside experience of LEAD, I saw four things that I admired somewhat covetously (as a manager and promoter of Project GENIUS):

• aggressive recruitment of talent
• a conscious application of best practices into operations
• mechanism for implementing and maintaining those best practices
• a process by which to revise that mechanism.

I am going to discuss each of the above in turn.... AGGRESSIVE RECRUITMENT OF TALENT.  This fascinated me from the very beginning.  Everybody I worked with at LEAD was highly motivated -- this IN SPITE of a high turn-over rate.  I studied their recruitment strategy (because I want ProGEN to emulate it).  It boils down to one thing:  be famous.  The founder of LEAD Public Schools worked in the Clinton White House, and then came to Nashville and launched LEAD as a Social Movement.  He just recently launched an affordable housing initiative and ran for mayor. A CONSCIOUS APPLICATION OF BEST PRACTICES.  Across all of LEAD Public Schools, they have decided to apply what is known as the Teach Like a Champion pedagogy.  An author named Doug Lemov did a national study across a broad range of successful classrooms and schools (favoring under-resourced schools) and distilled them into a nicely written book (now, Teach Like a Champion 2.0) which contains a vast store of easy-to-implement, discrete techniques in a language that teachers can then adopt and discuss amongst themselves.  Here's a YouTube playlist that lays out a lot of examples. A MECHANISM FOR IMPLEMENTING AND MAINTAINING THOSE BEST PRACTICES.  There was a 0ne-month run-up to our first day of school much of which the first couple weeks was devoted to classes structured around principles drawn from Teach Like a Champion.  So to give some examples ...

• There was a class in "positive narration."
• There is a class in a technique called "cold calling."
• There is another class on designing "exit tickets."

As the training days progressed, attention pivoted towards implementation plans specific to each teacher at each school, but these opening couple of weeks got everyone speaking the same language. A PROCESS BY WHICH TO REVISE THE MECHANISM.  I would say that because of the external demands placed on LEAD Schools by Common Core reforms, this was the weakest link in the chain.  It was all that we could do the learn the details of the curriculum that we were being required  to cover.  There was not enough time for us to work together on ways to creatively apply either the Teach Like a Champion principles or the EngageNY content.  But the administrators at LEAD definitely had an intuitive understanding that weekly team meetings would be necessary for us to fine tune our shared pedagogy. If we had had just a couple more hours in the day, we would have been masterful.