Peer Review
Federal Education Officials Hope Teacher-Led Conferences on the No Child Left Behind Act Will Soften Opposition.
The tabletop in front of 6th grade teacher Nancy Kerr was crowded with test tubes and small objects in zipper-lock bags. It looked like a setup for a scientific experiment, and it was—the props belonged to Iowa high school teacher Shannon C’de Baca, who was about to lead an inservice workshop on how to teach density, mass, and volume to elementary and middle school students. But it was also a setup for another kind of experiment: to see if teachers would swallow the requirements of No Child Left Behind more willingly if fellow teachers presented them.
Her book bag stuffed with pamphlets for the July session’s morning presentation and one to follow in the afternoon, Kerr sat in a room with about 20 other classroom instructors from across the country listening to C’de Baca. Kerr’s day began with a speech by a top federal education official; it would end with a tutorial on the No Child Left Behind Act. In between, she attended seminars like this one on how to improve her classroom teaching. She was one of more than 200 instructors from 31 states who had arrived in St. Louis for a "teacher to teacher" workshop, one of seven staged this summer across the country by the U.S. Department of Education.
All told, some 1,400 spots in the workshops, which were also held in Denver; Portland, Oregon; Pittsburgh; Orlando, Florida; Anaheim, California; and Boston, filled up within 11 days of their announcement. An additional 7,000 teachers were on a waiting list, according to education department officials, who said this was the first time they haveoffered direct teacher-to-teacher professional development aimed at helping K-12 instructors understand and meet the requirements...
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