Teachers at Their Best

The purpose of this book is to change the conversation about teacher induction, preparation, and development and how we create effective teachers. Our national discussion about how to create effective teachers needs to move away from how higher education can do a better job preparing our teachers and move toward how our local schools can do a better job inducting, preparing, and developing our teachers over a full career. There are two interconnected and irrefutable reasons for this. First, school culture supersedes all rational strategies for teacher development, and, second, teachers learn to teach in the schools where they work, not in higher education or any of the alternative routes which the ineffectiveness of higher education teacher preparation have caused to emerge. With the affirmation of these postulates, this book clarifies that teachers are at their best when they are working together in collaborative cultures where teacher thinking and decision-making lead schools in continuous improvement and change. Elaborating on the importance of these best conditions for optimal teacher development, this book will insist that it is the entirety of a school culture that produces effective teachers, and schools with authentic learning communities produce the cultures that produce effective teachers.

Dr. Waters is becoming a prolific writer on teacher preparation and teacher learning. His thought provoking works will force one to think differently about how new teachers are trained and how established teachers continue to learn about their craft. In his latest work, Teachers at Their Best, Dr. Waters continues his discourse on how teacher learning is best when situated in collaborative cultures and not as a result of side show ‘professional development’ or courses taken on the campuses of higher education. By providing important recent research on the power of cultural learning on teacher development, Dr. Waters hits another homerun!, Teachers at Their Best is a definite read for educators considering the impact teachers can have on school reform efforts.  The author reminds readers that teachers know what to do, and if placed in schools that are redesigned to meet their needs, schools can overcome most of the structural obstacles impeding student success. This book is designed to inspire readers to create communities of practice that are “intentionally developmental cultures” where all teachers are destined to become effective teachers.

Rich Waters is a career high school teacher and Ph.D. whose interests in school reform and teacher education led him to assist in the creation and co-coordination of a professional development school and later to become a founding member of the National Association of Professional Development Schools. His decades of work and recent research in a high school helped him to see the need to situate teacher induction, preparation and development in local schools, not on the campuses of higher education.