Where Teachers Thrive: Organizing Schools for Success

Where Teachers Thrive is based on interview studies conducted in fourteen high-poverty, urban schools. It focuses on the context of teachers’ work, examining why some schools failed to make progress, while others achieved remarkable results. It explores the challenges that administrators and teachers faced and describes what worked, what didn’t work, and why.
 
The book highlights the school-based systems and practices that support teachers’ professional growth and effectiveness, including a rich and interactive hiring process; team‐based curriculum planning and assessment; informative feedback on instruction; and ongoing professional learning. Critical to all of these is the role of the principal as an essential agent in a school’s success. Importantly, principals in successful schools regard teachers as their partners in school improvement.  Teachers are the agents, not the objects of reform.