Grow & Celebrate Your Most Valuable Teachers

Invest in Your Best: 9 Strategies to Grow, Support, and Celebrate Your Most Valuable Teachers
By Todd Whitaker, Connie Hamilton, Joseph Jones, and T.J. Vari
(Routledge, 2024 – Learn more)

Reviewed by Stephanie Choate

As a newer English Department Chair who is required to observe and evaluate the members of my department, Invest in Your Best piqued my interest immediately. The introduction of the book shares a common occurrence in schools: we tend to focus more on the teachers that need to improve than our best teachers.

I definitely did this the first few years as chair, and I can now see more clearly how this approach isn’t the best for the long-term growth of my department as well as the retention of my best teachers.

The authors have fulfilled many roles in education including teacher, principal, instructional coach, and superintendent, in addition to publishing multiple books. This varied perspective results in a book that truly understands the common pitfalls of teacher growth, feedback, and evaluation.

Introduction

The introduction to the book shares some vocabulary in order to offer a new perspective when looking at the teachers in our building. It suggests that we should focus on “asset based thinking” instead of “deficit based thinking.” This underscores the idea that we shouldn’t give all our energy to what needs to be fixed, but instead focus on what is already going well.

It also defines the different types of teachers: the superstars, the backbones (most of the faculty), and the mediocres. Anyone reading the book can easily place their teachers and even themselves into these categories. The main takeaway is that if you invest in the best teachers then the whole school will benefit.

How to Invest in Your Best

Each chapter is set up the same way: it starts with a story, discusses the cost of not investing, shares the investment strategy itself, offers the benefits of that strategy, and finally gives initial steps that can be taken to implement the strategy.

The book focuses on important topics including professional learning opportunities for our best teachers, differentiated experiences so that people are getting what they need the most, and how to best give feedback. The foundation of each topic is the idea that education is not “one size fits all.” For example, people like to hear praise and criticism differently, so asking what people want and need upfront is very important. What is interesting is that many of us understand this idea when planning lessons for our students, but often our Professional Learning activities “teach to the middle” and lose their efficacy.

There was one technique I am implementing right away this school year: R.O.L.E. Play. This system allows you to praise your best teachers while pushing your other teachers to improve. Instead of just having your teachers observe a class, you have the “host teacher” focus on a specific part of their lesson and meet with the observing teacher to discuss all the planning and reasoning behind the technique. Then the observer comes to the class, and finally they meet after the lesson to discuss what happened.

I would love to be able to go through this whole process with all the teachers in my department, but I definitely don’t have enough time. With this approach, I can have my best teachers in different areas be the host teacher to those that would benefit from seeing them in action. We often have our best teachers present to the whole faculty, but this becomes more of a “show and tell” experience instead of something a teacher can reflect on.

There are many other techniques (with helpful acronyms) shared throughout the book including the P.R.E.A.C.H. model of feedback and the Y.O.D.A. strategy that supervisors can use themselves to better understand their own strengths and weaknesses as they help the people they oversee improve.

The Take-Away

In education there is often the prevailing idea that silence is good. If you don’t hear anything then that must mean you aren’t doing anything wrong. But does that mean you are doing things right? Overall, this book helped me shift my perspective immensely. We all know who the best teachers are, but oftentimes they are completely overlooked and, in many cases, overworked. The strategies in this book will help my best teachers not only feel more valued but also help my whole department improve in their teaching practices.

Stephanie Choate is the English Department Chair and a teacher at Austin Preparatory School. A lover of Shakespeare, rhetoric, and young adult literature, Stephanie facilitates workshops with the PD Collab, has presented at a Keeping the Wonder workshop, and is also a trained executive function tutor. You can find her work and book recommendations on her Instagram: @scarvesandseminars.