Hey Tappsters!
Welcome to the USA Teacher Tapper blog 🇺🇸🎉. We’re already loving hearing about your school experiences on Teacher Tapp and we can’t wait to share what you’re saying!
We’re on our mission to reach the first 150 teachers! Our team is out in the USA this week, at ResearchEd Delaware, so if you’re in the area, come and say hi 👋
Right, now on to this week’s round-up of some useful edu-data insights…
1. Disrupted lessons
Last week, we asked about lessons that go awry because of disruptive behavior. At the moment, the sample is small, so we don’t know how representative this is but it’s not dissimilar to the results we see in other countries, so don’t be alarmed!
But how do teachers manage disruptions caused by off-task behaviour?
85% of said they redirected student attention, while 57% used pause and wait to get everyone back on track.
Do all teachers use similar approaches, or might some differ based on whether they teach elementary, middle or high school students? Once our panel grows a bit further, we will be able to look at these breakdowns and reveal all!
2. Lesson observations
Lesson observations can sometimes be daunting experiences – and 35% of you have been observed teaching this semester already.
Two-thirds of teachers reported that their school evaluates lesson observations. However, not everyone is happy about it.
Although 55% of teachers in schools which evaluate are happy about the practice, the other 45% are not. This is a classic example of division in teacher opinions. It can be hard to keep everyone happy when there’s such differing views!
Beyond observations, what other professional development activities have teachers been up to so far this semester?
88% attended a professional development session, 73% collaborated with a group of teachers at school and 10% received direct coaching.
Of course, early joiners to the panel are most likely to be education-enthusiastic, so perhaps these figures are a bit skewed! The more teachers that sign up, the more robust these figures become – so do please tell your non-geeky friends about us too 🙂
3. Tapper locations
We’re so thrilled that people are already downloading Teacher Tapp across the US! Most of the teachers in the panel are currently from the East Coast, with the majority either in Maryland or DC.
So far we have Tappers in…
🦀 Maryland
🏛️ Washington District of Columbia
🗽 New York
🏞️ Virginia
🐂 Texas
🔔 Pennsylvania
🌉 California
🏙️ Illinois
🍊 Florida
🏖️ New Jersey
Of course, we want Teacher Tapp to be used by teachers across the US – and we can see that we have some respondents in many of the US states – but we’re not at all 50 yet!
How quickly can we reach all 50? The way to speed it up is to spread the word of Teacher Tapp! 📣
Daily Reads
We know lots of teachers on Teacher Tapp LOVE the daily reads, if you have ideas of reads we could feature, get in touch by emailing usa@teachertapp.com and we will check it out!
This week our most-read blog was on marginal learning losses
