Articles

[hockeygod]

Hockey coach banned for pulling team
Player on opposing squad made racist remarks

By GALEN EAGLE and BRENDAN WEDLEY, QMI Agency

December 16, 2010

PETERBOROUGH — A minor hockey coach’s stand against a racial slur directed towards one of his players has been suspended for a year.

Greg Walsh pulled his team from the Nov. 15 house league game after the officials and the opposing coach let a player back on the ice after he called 16-year-old Andrew McCullum, one of two black players on Walsh's team, the N-word.

He has been suspended until April 10.

The Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) delivered its decision on Thursday after a hearing held at the league’s offices in Richmond Hill on Dec. 11.

Walsh was reluctant to talk about the ruling as he contemplates how to move forward.

“At this point, I have no comment,” he said. “I’m dumbfounded, so I have no comment.”

Walsh has the option of appealing the decision.

OMHA executive director Richard Ropchan characterized the suspension as fair, saying Walsh's suspension could have been for longer.

The OMHA sees the racial slur and Walsh’s actions as two separate issues, Ropchan explained.

The Peterborough Minor Hockey Association suspended the offending player for three games, which settled the racial slur issue, Ropchan said.

“They dealt with the situation of the racial slur and we were satisfied with how they dealt with that. Refusing to start play was all we had to deal with,” he said.

The OMHA does not make the rules, it just enforces the rules and the rule Walsh broke was a very severe one, he said.

“(Taking a team off the ice) affects a lot of players and people and schedules and things like that,” he said.

“We are put in a position to have to apply the regulation and the necessary suspension based on the criteria set forth by Hockey Canada.

“It is a Hockey Canada regulation and it is very severe and (Walsh) was made aware of the consequences.”

Under the suspension, Walsh is prohibited from any involvement in all hockey under Hockey Canada jurisdiction until April 10.

The team walked off the ice in unified protest to a racial slur directed at McCullum.

McCullum and a player from the opposing team were sent to the penalty box after they exchanged some words on the ice.

“He kept chirping me in the box. I was sitting trying to ignore him and the people that were keeping the score came over to me and said he called me the N-word,” McCullum told QMI Agency earlier this month. “I felt very angry and upset about it.”

When the penalty was over, McCullum skated directly over to his bench and told his head coach.

“(Walsh) called in the refs and told them he was going to forfeit the game if the coach on the opposing team let his player play,” McCullum explained. “They said they couldn’t do anything because they didn’t hear it.”

When the player returned to the ice for the third period, the team forfeited the game.

The coach of the opposing team was John Welsh, who is also the president of the Peterborough Minor Hockey Association.

Welsh has not responded to repeated requests for an interview during the past two weeks.

McCullum said the OMHA ruling shocked him. It sends a very poor message that racism is OK, he said.

“I feel upset about it, surprised,” he said Thursday. “He did a good thing. He shouldn’t be punished that bad for what he did.”

McCullum’s mother, Debbie, said she was at a loss for words when told about Walsh’s season long suspension.

“It is ridiculous. I guess it just doesn’t pay to stand up for something,” she said.

Daryl Taylor, who is one of two people to take over the team's coaching in Walsh’s absence, said he too was disappointed but not surprised.

“When we made the decision to leave the ice that’s what I figured would happen,” Taylor said.

“I don’t necessarily agree (with the rule) in this circumstance, but I think (Walsh) was prepared to take the punishment whatever it was.”

In the wake of Walsh’s original suspension, the story caused a major uproar in the hockey world. The Peterborough Examiner newspaper and the OMHA have been flooded with e-mails in support of Walsh’s actions, criticizing the OMHA for sending a poor message.

Ropchan said the organization understands the criticism but reiterated the OMHA was just enforcing the rule.

“We have received a lot of criticism on it … but we have to apply (the rules) as they are written,” he said. “We do take the racial slurs and racism very seriously and there is no place for it in hockey, but that’s a separate issue.”

But Ropchan was vague as to what Walsh could have done differently in the same situation. He could have gone to the referees or made a formal complaint to the league, Ropchan suggested.

This was the second time in three years that McCullum has been the victim of a racial slur under Walsh’s watch and Walsh was not satisfied with how the league dealt with the situation previously.

Walsh took a strong stand against racism in hockey in comments he made to the media after the incident.

“There is just no place in society for that language. Period. End of story,” Walsh said Dec. 2. “It’s important that we can provide an atmosphere for the kids to learn more about life than just playing hockey. It’s more than hockey. It’s about turning young men into adults.”

The team's manager, Tracy Groombriddge, said the team will try to get on with their season but said the OMHA ruling will not set well with the players.

“I think it’s telling people that they really shouldn’t stick up for what they believe in and it’s a shame. It sends a really bad message to Andrew,” she said.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Banned hockey coach speaks out

By QMI Agency
December 17, 2010

The governing body for minor hockey in Ontario needs to have the guts to take a stand against racism, says a local house league coach who was suspended for the rest of the season for pulling his team from a game after a racial slur was hurled at one of his players.

Greg Walsh learned on Thursday that the Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) had suspended him until April 10 for forfeiting a game on Nov. 15 when the player who uttered the racial slur was allowed to return to the ice in the third period.

The player who used the racial slur against one of Walsh’s players was later given a three-game suspension.

Walsh compared the punishments.

“In the end, if you want to use the basics, is you have society saying it’s only worth three games to hurl a racial slur at a fella… and if you want to stand up against that then you get suspended for the rest of the year,” he said on Friday.

Despite the suspension, Walsh said he doesn’t regret the actions he and his team took to protest the use of the N-word.

“This is not about one person, or one hockey team, or one guy. It’s about that society needs to rid itself of behaviour like this,” he said.

Walsh became most animated when he recalled watching McCullum apologize to him on a national news broadcast after the season-ending suspension had been handed down.

“It’s absolutely disgusting that he should have to feel any remorse for what happened, and they created it. I’m just defending him,” Walsh said.

Ontario Human Rights Commission Barbara Hall voiced her support of Walsh’s actions in a letter to The Examiner on Friday.

Walsh bravely defended his player’s right not to be the subject of racial slurs and led his team off the ice in protest, Hall states.

“His action was admirable,” she states. “But the way he is being treated by the Ontario Minor Hockey Association – a full-season suspension – is not. All of us, on and off the ice, should stand up and say no to racist conduct.”

Sports organizations should be prohibiting, not sanctioning, racist conduct, Hall states.

Hall couldn’t be reached for an interview.

Walsh was immediately suspended following the game on Nov. 15. The OMHA held a hearing at its offices in Richmond Hill on Dec. 11 and on Thursday it issued its ruling.

The incident happened during a game at the Kinsmen arena.

The player hurled a racial slur at Andrew McCullum as the two players were in the penalty box after a confrontation on the ice near the end of the second period.

On-ice officials couldn’t penalize the player because they didn’t hear the slur, the OMHA states in a release issued on Thursday.

Walsh brought it to the attention of the officials and the opposing team’s coach, but the player was back on the ice to start the third period. That’s when the team forfeited the game in protest.

The coach of the opposing team is John Welsh, the president of the Peterborough Minor Hockey Association (PMHA).

The player who uttered the racial slur, the coach of the opposing team and an assistant coach of the opposing team were given three-game suspensions by the PMHA on Nov. 17.

The PMHA is reviewing its internal policies and procedures as a result of the incident, the OMHA states in a release issued on Thursday.

Walsh is being penalized for pulling his team from the game.

The PMHA has refused to comment at this time, but the OMHA stated that the PMHA supported Walsh throughout the hearing process.

Walsh wouldn’t comment on the level of support he has received from the PMHA or on reports that the PMHA lobbied the OMHA to immediately lift Walsh’s suspension.

“I have no comment,” he said.

The OMHA focused on Hockey Canada regulations rather than considering the specifics of the situation, Walsh said.

“The OMHA does not want to be involved. They do not want to help. They just want to blame somebody else for the problem. It’s a Hockey Canada regulation,” he said.

On Thursday, OMHA executive director Richard Ropchan said the PMHA dealt with the racial slur issue with the three-game suspension of the offending player.

The OMHA only had to deal with the refusal to start play, which is a regulation set by Hockey Canada, Ropchan said.

Peterborough MP Dean Del Mastro, who is the parliamentary secretary to the minister of sport, expressed disappointment over the OMHA’s suspension of Walsh.

“This has become a national story,” Del Mastro said. “I saw it as an opportunity to reaffirm that frankly there’s no place for racism in Canada… They had an opportunity, in my view, to take a strong stance that would have been on the right side of the issue.”

Del Mastro said he believes that the player who uttered the racial slur and his family are genuinely remorseful.

“I don’t think we as a community should be beating up on them,” he said.

Organizations that control minor sports in Ontario need to take action soon to ensure that it’s clear that any form of prejudice or racial slurs is unacceptable, said Hamilton East-Stoney Creek MPP Paul Miller, the NDP sports critic.

“They need to revisit their rules governing these kinds of incidents,” he said. “They have to send a strong message.”

Miller added he doesn’t agree with the OMHA looking at the racial slur and forfeiting of the game by Walsh’s team as separate issues.

The player who uttered the racial slur, his coach and his assistant coach got three-game suspensions, while Walsh is suspended for the rest of the season, Miller pointed out.

“That’s hardly fair,” he said. “What’s wrong with that picture?”

The OMHA was penned in by its regulations when it considered Walsh’s suspension, Del Mastro said.

“There isn’t a lot of latitude in the rules … It’s something that the OMHA may want to consider in the off-season,” he said. “If the public at large was polled on this, I don’t think you’d find very many people that think Greg Walsh should have been suspended for even a minute.”

NOTE: Coach Greg Walsh made a point on Friday of defending the sponsor of the opposing team, Austin Trophies. Austin Trophies is a great sponsor of the league, Walsh said.

bwedley@peterboroughexaminer.com

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Hockey coach's suspension lifted

OMHA reverses ruling on coach who pulled team from game after racial taunt

Last Updated: Monday, December 20, 2010

An Ontario minor hockey coach who was suspended after a racial slur prompted him to pull his team from the ice said Monday that the Ontario Minor Hockey Association has rescinded the suspension.

Peterborough hockey coach Greg Walsh, who was suspended for the year after he pulled his team from the ice following a racial slur, said the penalty has been rescinded.

Greg Walsh, a coach from Peterborough, Ont., called CBC News to confirm that the suspension had been lifted.

The OMHA also confirmed the move.

"The board met behind closed doors yesterday and decided to end Walsh's suspension," OMHA director Richard Ropchan said. "This is the right decision to move forward."

Walsh, the coach of the NAPA Auto Parts team, pulled his team from the ice after one of his players was the target of a racial slur from the opposing team.

On Nov. 15, one of Walsh's players on the NAPA Auto Parts team, Andrew McCullum, 16, was sent to the penalty box along with a rival from the Austin Trophies.

While they were in the Kinsmen Arena penalty box, the boys heckled one another. McCullum told his coach that the opposing player directed the N-word at him.

The referee benched both players for the rest of the period, but when the offending player came out to start the third period, Walsh and his team left the ice. That move was against the rules of Hockey Canada, the sport's national governing body.

The Ontario Minor Hockey Association last week decided to suspend Walsh from the Peterborough Minor Hockey Association Midget House League until April 10.

The ruling came after a Dec. 11 hearing into the incident.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/12/20/toronto-hockey-coach.html#ixzz18jDnPdtw

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Minor hockey officials want apology for reinstated coach

By Linda Nguyen, Postmedia News December 21, 2010

Two Ontario minor league hockey teams will boycott all tournaments in Peterborough, Ont., until a local coach there gets an apology for being suspended for intentionally forfeiting a game after a racial slur was directed at one of his players.

"Essentially, we won't come back to Peterborough for a tournament again until we get an apology from the Ontario Minor Hockey Association," Keith McDonald — coach of the two London, Ont., teams — said on Tuesday.

Greg Walsh, who coaches the Peterborough team NAPA Auto Parts, was reinstated Monday after he was automatically suspended following a forfeiture during a Nov. 15. game.

At that game, Walsh pulled his team off the ice after referees did not immediately discipline a player on the opposing team for allegedly calling one of his players the "N-word." Officials said they did not hear the racial slur from the player on the Austin Trophies which was directed at 16-year-old Andrew McCullum.

That player, his coach and assistant coach were later suspended for three games.

Walsh was told last Thursday his suspension was going to last until April 10. But the OMHA contacted him Monday to notify him that they have reversed the suspension effective immediately, following a weekend board meeting.

Nevertheless, McDonald doesn't think it's enough.

"I just think it was the public backlash that caused the OMHA to reverse their decision," he said. "Not because of what happened. People make mistakes but I think the OMHA needs to admit theirs and make sure we have policies and procedures in place."

He said the parents of his players, who are between the ages of 7 and 10, support the boycott.

The OMHA originally said it had no choice but to suspend Walsh because it had to follow Hockey Canada's rules. The association said it has been in contact with Hockey Canada and will review the policy biannually as scheduled.

Spokesman Richard Ropchan had no comment Tuesday on the boycott.

The Peterborough Minor Hockey Association is also in the process of looking at its policies to prevent future similar incidents.

Peterborough is about 150 kilometres northeast of Toronto.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Doyle: Suspended minor hockey coach finally reinstated
loosepucks.com 12/20/10 15:56 blog

It took way too long, but a minor hockey coach who took a stand against racism in a Peterborough midget house league can finally go back behind the bench.
…

Greg Walsh made national headlines when he pulled his team off the ice after one of his players was on the receiving end of a racial slur during a midget house league game in Peterborough in November. The Ontario Minor Hockey Association held a hearing into the incident and decided to uphold Walsh's suspension for the remainder of the hockey season. But now, the OMHA's Board of Directors has decided to overturn the suspension and allow Walsh to get back to coaching.

The incident happened during a mix-up between two players in a Peterborough Minor Hockey Association game. One was accused of directing "The N-word" towards the other player, who is black, while in the penalty box. The on-ice officials did not hear it, but it was overheard by timekeepers. Walsh informed the referees and the opposing coach of it and informed both that if the player was allowed to return to the game – his team would not. When the player who used the slur returned in the third period, Walsh and his players decided they would not play and left the ice.

The player involved along with the coach, who is also President of the Peterborough Minor Hockey Association, were both suspended three games and have since returned to action. But Walsh was facing a more severe punishment for pulling his team off the ice and failing to play.

Before I go further, I will disclose that I know Walsh through my days in Peterborough. But I have not spoken to him since this incident occurred, or actually in a couple years since I moved to Sarnia.

I do not agree with how the Ontario Hockey Minor Hockey Association handled this incident. First of all, the hearing should have occurred quickly. Why was it a few weeks before a hearing took place? In this day-and-age of modern technology – conference calls, web meetings, etc. could have taken place if a face-to-face was difficult to coordinate. I understand the rule, and potential severe punishment, for pulling your team off the ice. That rule is necessary so that you don't have coaches pulling their team off anytime a coach is unhappy with a referee. The integrity of the game itself could be compromised if a coach could withdraw his team anytime they are losing and a call is missed. But the OMHA stuck to its rulebook and slapped Coach Walsh with a major suspension, despite evidence his team had been wronged. The lengthy suspension was justified by saying that it could have been a calendar year. Since that ruling came down, there have been whispers that major sponsors were threatening to pull their support from the OMHA.

How do I think it should have been handled?

If I was heading up this situation, I would have thanked Walsh for bringing this situation to light and taking a stand. But I would have also asked him to acknowledge withdrawing his team from a game is not something that can be taken lightly no matter the situation. With that in mind, I would have reinstated him immediately after the hearing, calling it "time served". He could not go unpunished for pulling his team off the ice, that is a rule and he was aware of it. But to sit out the rest of the year for taking a stand against something we all agree with him taking a stand against was ridiculous. I would have also ordered a review of player conduct regarding racial, ethic and social discrimination in all minor hockey branches under their jurisdiction. What is the punishment for stooping to that level? How is it to be handled if not heard by the on-ice officials? What should a player do if he/she feels they have been victimized not only by an opponent, but what if the comments are coming from their own team? It can happen.

People are calling the three-game suspension to the coach and player involved to be too light. You have to factor in how many games that league plays. I do not have that number, but when I played house league hockey we played one game per week with another game thrown in on a weeknight every couple weeks. This is not the OHL where three games could be served over one weekend. Three games is also a higher percentage of the season than a league like the OHL. I believe the player involved is remorseful for what happened, and his suspension along with an apology should suffice. If it happens again – well of course that is different and penalties should escalate for repeat offenders. But one slip of the tongue should not tarnish a person for life if they are willing to learn from it.

Running minor hockey is not an easy task – it is a job I certainly would not want. You have overzealous parents who think their kid is heading to the National Hockey League going up against people who are just looking for a recreational activity. Hopefully this situation will turn into a lesson for minor hockey executives as well. At least the OMHA Board of Directors got it right in the end.

tdoyle@loosepucks.com
Twitter: Loosepucks
http://www.facebook.com/loosepucks

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

OMHA reverses suspension in racist slur case

By QMI Agency

Last Updated: December 20, 2010

Peterborough – A Peterborough hockey coach who was suspended for the season after pulling his house league team from a game to protest a racial slur hurled at one of his players has been reinstated.

The Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) reversed its decision on Monday, immediately reinstating Greg Walsh, who was told Thursday that he was suspended until April 10.

The OMHA wouldn’t say why it reversed its decision, made at a Dec. 11 committee meeting at league offices in Richmond Hill, Ont.

Walsh’s team forfeited a game Nov. 15 after officials failed to penalize the player who uttered the racial slur and the opposing coach failed to pull the player from the game.

Walsh expressed surprise Monday over the OMHA’s reversal.

“It’s very humbling in the end the support that we received, really from all across the country,” he said. “I applaud the OMHA for looking at it. We had planned an appeal anyways, but it’s very nice to see that they saw merit in the case.

“It was nice to see that the public really had a voice and it was heard.”

Walsh hopes the racial slur was an isolated incident in Peterborough hockey.

“It’s still a problem in society. It’s not just hockey,” he said. “This is just another life lesson that we learned as a team.”

The 30-member board met Sunday afternoon to discuss the suspension, OMHA executive director Richard Ropchan said Monday.

“They decided to have a closed-door meeting and to review the decision,” he said. “Based on its review, the board decided to terminate the suspension immediately and basically we move on.

“I’m very pleased with the board’s decision and we move on.”

Ropchan said he’s the spokesman for the OMHA and that was the information the board gave him to make public.

Walsh was temporarily suspended on Nov. 15, pending the outcome of a hearing, for pulling his team from a game that was held at the Kinsmen arena in Peterborough.

A player uttered a racial slur at Andrew McCullum as the two players were in the penalty box following a confrontation on the ice near the end of the second period.

A referee didn’t hear the racial slur, but Walsh brought it to the attention of the officials and the opposing team’s coach.

The player was back on the ice to start the third period and that’s when Walsh’s team forfeited the game in protest.

The coach of the opposing team is John Welsh, president of the Peterborough Minor Hockey Association (PMHA). Welsh hasn’t responded to numerous requests for interviews over the last two weeks.

The player who uttered the racial slur, his coach and an assistant coach were given three-game suspensions by the PMHA on Nov. 17.

The PMHA supported the immediate reinstatement of Walsh, said Jeff Ayotte, a lawyer representing the PMHA.

“It was the right thing to do. Given the nature of the one boy’s comments, the PMHA does not condone in any way racism or any type of conduct like that,” he said.

As a result, the PMHA is reviewing its policies and procedures.

The PMHA plans to roll out its new policies next month, Ayotte said.

“Education is the key and greater penalties, greater sanctions if it does occur,” he said. “It’s about more than hockey. It’s for children. And we’re trying to provide a safe environment where they can continue to play and learn.”

Walsh and his NAPA Auto team have offered their support for the policies and procedures review.

Right now, a racial slur is considered a minor penalty until the second incident, Walsh said.

“There’s no more minor penalty for that,” he said. “I would like to see that that is called as a major penalty by the PMHA, then the person that had made that slur would have gone through the same process that I went through."

Walsh is looking forward to getting back behind the bench.

“It’s very gratifying because we are a team. I get to get back with the kids that I have a great deal of respect for. I get to coach my son, which means a lot to me too,” he said.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

After reading this one, I wonder what some people are thinking… the lowest level peewee team… really parents???

Controversy pushes girl off coed hockey team
December 22, 2010
Robert Cribb – Toronto Star

For 12-year-old Kayla Watkins, the public humiliation was too much.

After learning a parent on her coed peewee hockey team — comprised entirely of boys except for her — called for restrictions on her ice time or her removal from the team unless her skills improved, she did the only thing she thought she could: She quit.

“I felt that if I went back all the parents would have been watching every move I made and always staring at me,” said the outgoing preteen, who has been playing the game since the age of four.

“To play hockey you shouldn’t have to go through what I went through. I was just looking to have friendship and play the game I love.”

The controversy that seized the Toronto Ice Dogs PeeWee “A” club — minor hockey’s lowest level of competitive play — emerged last month at a parents’ meeting called by George Atis, who has a child on the team, but is not part of the coaching staff.

The Thornhill lawyer drafted the agenda which included this item: “Kayla Watkins — Player Ability Limitations and Suggested Options.”

“It is now 14 games into the season and I have noticed that Kayla’s play has not improved,” the agenda reads. “It is at the point where many of the team members do not want to play on this team if this situation is not addressed.”

Atis then details two possible options for consideration, either moving Kayla from defence to forward and keeping her off of power plays and penalty kills, or playing her every second shift on defence and again keeping her off special teams “until her skating and shooting improves.”

“If Kayla is NOT amenable to the above options, the coach should find Kayla a new team to play on — commensurate to her skill level — for the balance of the season,” the agenda reads.

Atis also raised concerns about Kayla changing in the same locker-room as the boys, stating, “there have been many ‘near miss’ incidents where the boys have almost been exposed to Kayla.”

Vanessa Watkins, Kayla’s mother and team manager, says she was shocked by Atis’s targeting of her daughter.

“Do we not put our kids in team sports to learn to be a team player, to win as a team, to lose as a team and it’s not about me, me, me?”

In an interview Monday, Atis defended the agenda, saying it voiced concerns from boys on the team who were both squeamish about undressing in front of Kayla and frustrated with her play on the ice.

“I wrote the agenda, I stand by it,” said Atis, whose son Michael has played with Kayla for the past two seasons until her recent departure.

“I lay the blame, if you must know, at the feet of Vanessa Watkins . . . If it was my child, he would have never been in that position because I would not have put him on a team where he was not competing and where he was a liability to the team.”

While such disputes are common at higher levels such as triple-A hockey, they shouldn’t happen at single-A, Kayla said.

“(Atis) is not my coach so I don’t know how he’s judging my play,” she said. “If there’s something wrong, my coach should have talked to me, not him. And my coach never did.”

Paul Macchia, Kayla’s coach, says he chose her to be on his team and never wanted her to leave.

“There’s always complaints from parents about ice time but I’ve never seen an issue where it has gone this far before,” he said. “I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish. It’s not an individual player losing a game. She made mistakes but so did others on the team. We’ve been the same since she left.”

The team is currently 10th out of 12 teams in their division with a record of 8-13-1.

Sheree Watkins, Kayla’s grandmother who attended the meeting and many of her granddaughter’s games, called it a mean-spirited attack on the team’s only girl.

“It floored me that a lawyer would write an agenda like that. There was just so much discrimination.”

Atis said he supports coed hockey generally and that his move wasn’t about gender discrimination. It was about skill level.

“This should have never come down to a singling out of Kayla in this fashion. I think you should look to Vanessa and ask her if she felt truly in her heart . . . if Kayla was at the same level as her teammates.”

Kayla found out about everything when she spotted a copy of the agenda in her mom’s email.

“I was very upset. I do think parents can be over the edge,” she said.

Atis said he never intended Kayla to see the agenda.

“As a parent, my heart goes out to her. If Kayla truly read this agenda by accident, it is very unfortunate . . . I am mortified that Vanessa or Sheree or whoever shared this agenda with Kayla would actually do so . . . I believe Kayla’s feelings could have been spared. That, to me, is the great shame in this process that Kayla would feel as she did.”

Since quitting the Ice Dogs, Kayla has moved to the all-girls North York Storm.

She may miss the challenge of playing with boys. But the culture is far more welcoming, she says.

“Everyone’s nice to each other. It doesn’t matter if we win or lose. If we lose a game, it’s okay because everyone picks each other up.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

And now for something completely different (that's for you Kai!) – some good news articles! You have to see John Wooden's TED Talk…

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/john_wooden_on_the_difference_between_winning_and_success.html

For a list of all TED Talks, see:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?utm_campaign=ted&hl=en&utm_medium=on.ted.com-twitter&utm_source=blog.ted.com&key=0AsKzpC8gYBmTcGpHbFlILThBSzhmZkRhNm8yYllsWGc&utm_content=site-basic#gid=0

How John Wooden changed my life: Exclusive interview with Steve Jamison

Steve Jamison has co-authored five books with John Wooden, produced a documentary about him, and is consultant to his leadership program at UCLA. All this came about after one fateful meeting, for an innocuous interview.

Coach Wooden has influenced the lives of many, and he discusses his inspirational philosophy on personal success in today’s heartwarming TEDTalk. To understand why Steve got hooked by the story of this legendary basketball coach, read below the fold >>

An excerpt from the interview:
When I got back to transcribe the conversation, I realized that every single sentence was fully formed, enlightening and substantive. I just kept re-reading it. And it was about leadership and life, not basketball. He said things like, “Don’t forget, Steve, the most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”What did Coach Wooden think about his talk being posted on TED.com?

He said, “Fine.” Well, he was delighted with TED when he was there. But he’s just come out of the hospital, and although his recovery is coming along fine, he was in the hospital for three weeks. And he’s currently on some very serious medication, so that’s all he could manage. But he is recovering, and was able to celebrate daughter’s birthday with her this weekend.

When we watched the video here at TED, we were all very impressed with Coach Wooden’s wit and public speaking prowess, especially considering his age.

He’s always had the ability to hold the attention of crowd. He’s got a sense of humor and a profound presence that is unique and probably brought on by his phenomenal experience and age. His presence is just riveting.

How did you first meet Coach Wooden and how did your relationship with him evolve?

It was totally unforeseeable. I interviewed him for another project I was doing that involved talking to the top performers in sports to understand their way of thinking and see how that could be applied elsewhere.

In my mind, he wasn’t a big deal. I was more impressed with his players. If you’re an average fan, like I was, you don’t talk to the bench. I knew he was good, but I didn’t go into the interview with any sense of awe. I actually took my dad along, because my dad understood and he was excited.

All of that changed when I met Coach Wooden. He has this combination of great inner strength and great inner youthfulness. As we went on, I got to see much more of what he was about.

When I got back to transcribe the conversation, I realized that every single sentence was fully formed, enlightening and substantive. I just kept re-reading it. And it was about leadership and life, not basketball. He said things like, “Don’t forget, Steve, the most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

So when I saw the transcript, literally I thought, “This is a book!” I called Coach with a great deal of enthusiasm to tell him about my intentions. He was polite, and said no. But I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I called him back in a week. And he said he had a lot of things on his agenda, and he was serious, even though he was in his 80s.

But I kept going back, and eventually wrote him a letter. I tried to convince him with all the usual arguments — money, visibility. He didn’t care. Then I remembered that he had said, “I am a teacher.” So I sent him a note that said this book is an opportunity to teach. He agreed to work on it.

Eventually we found a publisher, and created a small, blue book that started a real relationship in my life with Coach, that has turned into a great friendship. He views his team as an extended family, and we were a different type of a team, but we were a little team of two in writing this book.

I thought that was it. But the little blue book, “Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections,” became popular and the publisher asked if there were any other books we’d like to do. So we did another fabulous book together. We did a PBS show and I was the producer, called “John Wooden: Values, Victory and Peace of Mind.” We’ve also done a children’s book called “Inches and Miles” and other books since then.

Why do you think the books have had so much success?

These were all driven by John Wooden’s appeal. He talks about not just leadership, but his life and his father’s influence. A lot of young people get advice from their dad and just forget it. But he carried his dad’s advice with him all through his life.

His dad emphasized the golden rule and that was fundamental to his coaching. His definition of success comes from his father telling him not to compare himself to others, just do your best.

Coach was values-driven and character-based before those terms were coined. He understood how to treat people right, but he was also very demanding. His strategy is based on his dad, but also on his coach at Purdue, Piggy Lambert, who was another one of the greatest coaches of all time. He also had this “team as an extended family” idea.

I remember that first transcript, I sent it to my dad, and asked, “What do you think?” He sent it back with a note that said, “Everything that Coach Wooden says is pure gold. Don’t mess it up.”

It sounds like Coach Wooden was really influenced by his father and the idea of family. His father must also have been a tremendous man.

Yes he was. I once went to his father’s gravesite, actually — just to pay my respects to that kind of a man.

And the team is an extended family. All the players still contact Coach, and stop by for lunch or breakfast regularly. They send him letters, postcards and birthday cards from everywhere.

One of Coach’s first players, from his first high school team in 1932, contacted him while we working on a book. He hadn’t much longer to live, and wanted to talk to Coach. After they had spoken, I asked the player quickly, “How’d it go?” He replied, “Coach Wooden really cared about us boys on the team, and made us practice extra because of it.”

It sounds like Coach Wooden has an amazing philosophy.

Well, when he first started teaching he thought he was supposed to like all the players all the same. But then he started coaching, and he realized that he didn’t like everyone the same. He read something that Amos Alonzo Stagg had written, where he said, “I don’t like all my players the same. But I love them all the same.”

So, Coach changed his pre-season talk from, “I will like you all the same,” to “I will not like you all the same. I will love you all the same and I will give you the treatment you earn and deserve.”

He also liked when people paid attention to little things. I remember being at a game with him, where they sent in a waiter to serve his dinner. Now, this waiter didn’t know who Coach was, but he took his time making sure everything was done correctly, adjusting the cutlery and the flowers till they were just right. When the waiter left, Coach said, “Steve, if there’s a secret to success, it just might be little things done well. I love to see little things done well.”

He loved when people paid attention to perfecting the relevant details. And every season, he would show his players how to put on their socks. They had to learn to put on their socks properly to avoid folds, creases and wrinkles, because folds, creases and wrinkles could cause blisters. Blisters cause pain, and pain causes distraction, and that can come at the wrong time.

He also insisted that they double-knot their shoestrings. All of these nuts and bolts combined with the different elements of leadership — that’s what he was getting at. In my opinion he was the best at getting players to perform at the highest level they can.

How about the John Wooden Global Leadership Program at UCLA? How did that come to be? And to what extent are you involved with it?

I’m a consultant to that program. Coach sees over it and approves what’s done.

I was seeing from my results in book sales that there was a great interest in these skills in corporate America. So I got the idea for a program like this and I said, UCLA is the place for it. And so I set up a lunch meeting for Coach with Dean Judy Olian, and he had a great impact on her. She called me and said, “Let’s do it.”

Coach agreed to it because we have a banquet each year and the proceeds go to student scholarships. When you say scholarships for young people, you’re talking his language.

Right now, it’s still an award and a banquet with a distinguished keynote speaker. But in the future we’re hoping to get Coach’s teachings integrated into the curriculum.

Are there any other plans for the future?

Well, we would like to see the children’s book, “Inches and Miles,” animated. We’ve had a couple of offers on that, but not one I like yet. But you know, a child will watch “Winnie the Pooh” 400 times. Imagine if they did that with something that contained lessons that were this important.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Here is another good one – Stuart Brown on "Play." He also has a book out… now it is on my list! Amazing pictures and description of a polar bear and a husky (dog) playing!

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html

Keep it fun, coaches!

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

A couple of sites of interest with tons of articles and videos. Tom mentions the site on the home page, down toward the bottom.

Minnesota Hockey… I posted some of these links under the thread "Competitiveness."

http://www.minnesotahockey.org/page/show/80470-home

http://minnesotahockeyhep.com/

————————–
Dean, I think the Minnesot hockey program is the most open to new ideas and really tries to help their coaches.

I couldn't believe how enthused they were about high school hockey when I went there to play for Bemidji State. The fans at the games were unbelievably loud and the enthusiasm was more than I have seen at games in any other hockey place I have been (and that is almost every hockey power).

On a Thursday afternoon at 1pm on a workday the arena where the NHL team played was full for a high school qualification game. No one went to clas but all watched on TV. Canada and Minnesota are equal in their love for our favourite game.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

A Canadian goaltender’s lesson in life

From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jan. 07, 2011

Perhaps you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but just maybe this old dog has something to teach a few people.

We will meet Sheba later.

But let us begin around midnight Wednesday on the Peace Bridge leading from Buffalo, N.Y., to Fort Erie, Ont. Dan Visentin, a high school math teacher, is driving. His wife, Liz, also a teacher, is in the car, as are his parents Italo and Rita Visentin.

Italo Visentin knows something about dreams. More than a half century ago he and Rita came from Italy to nearby Niagara Falls with no idea what would happen to them in this strange new country where they didn’t even speak the language. Yet it all worked out wonderfully. He became a crane operator; their children excelled in school and life; retirement gave them time to spend with grandchildren – and they had just witnessed one of them have a dream shattered.

Mark Visentin, who turned 18 only last August, was in goal for Team Canada at the World Junior Championship when the unimaginable happened. Canada was ahead 3-0 heading into the third period of the gold medal game and seemed on cruise to avenge the championship lost to the Americans last year in Saskatoon. The young Canadians had already effortlessly dispatched this year’s Americans 4-1 and seemed to be doing the same to the Russians – only to have Russia score two goals in 13 seconds, tie the game in less than five minutes and storm on to a stunning 5-3 victory.

Even without the radio on, everyone in the car knew what was being said: the greatest collapse ever …the team had choked…the goalie was the goat. They hoped that Mark, travelling behind in another car with his girlfriend Harmony, didn’t have his radio on. He didn’t.

“How ya doin’ tonight?” the border guard asked as Dan Visentin handed over the four passports.

“Depressed,” Mr. Visentin answered.

The guard, flicking through the passports, paused and looked up, surprised.

“Oh shit,” he said, “you’re a Visentin.”

“I’m the father.”

The guard handed back he passports. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You have a great kid there – you got to be proud of him.”

“We are.”

“He’s going to be a great goalie one day.”

“We know.”

Mark Visentin made it through at another border booth and drove slowly to his parents home in little Waterdown. No radio. Hardly any words. What was there to say?

He had already said what he thought he had to say. He had sobbed on the ice and wept in the dressing room – no different from any of the other shattered players – and when Andre Brin, Hockey Canada’s media person at the tournament, tentatively asked if anyone was ready to meet the media, Mark Visentin volunteered immediately.

“I’ll come out,” he told Mr. Brin.

A lot of goaltenders would have refused. Some of the gathered media reacted with surprise when the black curtain split open and out stepped the Canadian goaltender of record, eyes clear, head held high, and prepared to talk as long as there were questions.

“I like to get stuff done and not leave it,” he says.

He put no blame on the defence that at times let him down, no blame on the forwards who had their own breakdowns. He took full responsibility.

“I’m not the guy who blames his team,” he says. “You really wish you could have provided a couple of saves when they were needed but I didn’t. They kind of took it to us.”

He had felt the tide turning, as coach Dave Cameron later put it. He watched the “spark” go into the Russians and knew that it had gone out of his own team. “We pushed the panic button a bit,” he says. “We tried to get back but….”

He knew he could talk forever and the score would never change. “No one to blame but me,” he says. “I try to make myself accountable for what happens.”

It is, in fact, the accountability and responsibility of that critical position in hockey that first appealed to him. In his first year of novice they let each youngster try goaltending, and when some of the children balked, he volunteered. In his second year he went fulltime in the nets.

“I fell in love with it,” he says.

“Only fat kids who can’t skate play goal,” his father would kid him. But Mark stuck with it even though he had shown promise as an out player.

“The goaltender can be a game-changer,” he says, “and that is a great, great feeling. But if you’re going to do that, you have to accept the ups and downs that come with it.”

His great hero was Curtis Joseph, then the goaltender for the nearby Toronto Maple Leafs. He and his friends would play on the backyard rink and he would imagine he was “CuJo” kicking out the pucks – at least when Sheba, the family’s golden retriever puppy wasn’t running off with them.

An only child, he had formed a remarkable bond with the dog. They grew up together and today are teenagers together, Sheba 14 and Mark 18, though she long ago lost interest in chasing pucks.

Dan Visentin didn’t push his son. He himself had never played the game and he left the coaching to others. One minor hockey coach, Ken Jaysman, took Mark as goaltender on his AA Novice team and the team went through the season undefeated – Mr. Jaysman’s attitude and love of the game making a huge impression on the youngster.

Soon he was considered a goaltender to watch. At 16, he made the leap to major junior, drafted by the Niagara IceDogs, a team that plays out of St. Catharines, Ont. At 17, six weeks short of his 18th birthday, and much to his own surprise, he became a first round draft pick (chosen 27th overall) of the Phoenix Coyotes.

“I felt like I had a heart attack,” he said of the surprise first-round choice, a selection that Sports Illustrated tagged the biggest surprise of the opening round of the draft. To Mark Visentin, however, it was “the best day of my life.” He had no idea that, before the year was out, he would also go through the worst day of such a young life.

He hopes, like every player named to the Team Canada junior team, to have a professional career, but he is an excellent student with an average consistently above 80 per cent and intends to take courses at Brock University for as long as he’s a junior. “You have to have a back-up plan,” he says.

But the main plan is obviously to go as far as he can in hockey. Last summer he was invited to the junior camp, but when he got there they lumped him in with the under-18s rather than the under-20s and he was sure he would never be able to impress the ones he needed to. But then they made him one of four goaltenders invited to the December camp in Toronto. His roommate was Olivier Roy, who got his call from team management early that final morning of camp and told Mark, who figured this meant he himself hadn’t made it.

“Who’s your partner going to be?” the disappointed youngster asked.

“You!”

It seemed that partnership would be in the back-up role, with the year-older Mr. Roy pegged to get the most work, but after Canada lost 6-5 in a shootout to Sweden, the switch was made to Mark Visentin. He allowed a weak goal in the quarter-final against Switzerland, but it was the only goal allowed, and he was as good as the rest of his team against U.S.A., when Canada won 4-1 to reach the final. There was no doubt, by this point, that the 18-year-old goaltender would play the gold medal game in a championship that was created for, and has traditionally been decided by, 19-year-olds.

He prepared as usual – a meal of chicken parmesan, listen to some music (everything from rap to country) on the iPad Hockey Canada gave each player for Christmas, get to the rink, work on his sticks, go through the warm-up – but no one, not the coaches, not the country, was prepared for that third period.

It has been described as the greatest collapse ever in Canada’s time in international hockey, but there are comparables. Alan Eagleson says what happened in Buffalo reminded him of Game 5 in the 1972 Summit Series. Team Canada was up 4-1 into the third period in Moscow, only to have the Soviets score two very quick goals – quicker even than the Russians scored their two on Mark Visentin – on Tony Esposito and then two more before the period was out to win 5-4.

Mr. Esposito, it might be worth pointing out, went on to a Hall-of-Fame career.

“People lose perspective,” says Dan Visentin. “The better team won.

“Mark will be fine. He’s not just my son, he’s my best friend – and he’s a great guy. He’s got his whole future in front of him.”

It took a long time for Mark Visentin to drive home that night. He thinks he probably got in around 3:30. “It was weird,” he says of the drive back. “There was just so much to take in.”

He was grateful for his goaltending coach with the IceDogs, Ben Vanderklok, who has worked hard on “focus” and “attitude” and “confidence” the past two years.

“It was a tough pill to swallow,” he says. “But I think I’m a better person for it. This has been a big learning curve.” If he gets a chance next year, when he’ll only be 19, he’ll be ready. He just hopes to get the chance.

There was no one up when he came through the front door, but then the sound of an old dog’s nails moving along the floor.

Sheba came hurrying toward him, wiggling and tail wagging.

“She was just happy to see me,” he says.

And he her, after the day he had just put in.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Easier said than done
Building NHL winner not simple

By STEVE SIMMONS, QMI Agency

Jan 12 2011

TORONTO – At the halfway point of another frustrating Maple Leafs season, it is far too easy and much too inaccurate to point to the Phil Kessel trade as the philosophical reason for the organizational stagnancy.

The other night, when the Leafs were playing the Los Angeles Kings, the obvious comparisons were made: One team building patiently through the draft. The other trying to fast track. One team doing it right, the story went. The other, missing all the cues.

If only building hockey teams were so simple.

While the Kings may seem to be a model for managerial patience and bottoming out — building through the draft being the catch phrase — understand this: The Kings missed the playoffs six straight years to get the draft picks necessary to compete. In the seventh building year, they made the playoffs and were eliminated in six games. This is Year 8. If the season ended today, the Kings would not be in the playoffs. So for all their patience, all their doing things the “right way” you can ask yourself a question: Where exactly are they?

It isn’t just the Los Angeles Kings, although they have the nicest roster of the recent rebuilds. The notion that Brian Burke messed up by trading away two first-round picks for Kessel is a wonderful debating point — but the evidence of successful teams building through the draft is not entirely clear.

The model franchise in all of hockey is the Detroit Red Wings. They’ve had 10 straight 100-point seasons. Almost everything they do seems like the right thing. Their team was built around three draft choices — Niklas Lidstrom, a third-round pick; Pavel Datsyuk, a sixth-round pick; Henrik Zetterberg, a late seventh-round pick. The Red Wings have traded their first-round picks away in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006. Only one important player on their team, Niklas Kronwall was their own first-round pick.

Which means what? It means there is no one way to find success in the NHL.

The Atlanta Thrashers have played 10 full seasons and have never won a playoff game. They have drafted first twice, second twice, third and fourth in their history: How has any of that helped them get to where they are today?

The Columbus Blue Jackets have played in one playoff round in 10 years of existence. They’ve had top 10 draft picks 10 different times. It hasn’t taken them anywhere near contender status.

The Florida Panthers have missed the playoffs 11 of the past 12 years and drafted top 10 on occasions. Their top picks produced Nathan Horton, Stephen Weiss and Jay Bouwmeester, all decent NHL players, none of them about to challenge for all-star status.

Even the New York Islanders, who have picked first twice, second once, and chosen third, fourth and fifth twice in the draft, remain the most dysfunctional franchise in all of hockey.

It works to build through the draft when you have early picks and they turn out to be Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. You can do it when you get lucky and win the Sidney Crosby lottery just after Evgeny Malkin had been selected. You can do it when you end up with Alex Ovechkin, and Nick Backstrom and Mike Green in a few short drafts.

But for every Chicago story, every Pittsburgh, every Washington, there’s an Atlanta, a Florida, a Columbus, and yes, even an Edmonton.

Even the Phoenix Coyotes are an example that questions that notion that drafting early means everything: The Coyotes missed the playoffs six years in a row in the Wayne Gretzky era. In that time, they drafted early five different times. Not one of the five picks has turned into a high-end NHL player. The Coyotes turned their team around in a completely non-conventional way, beginning with the hiring of coach Dave Tippett and the claiming of goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov on waivers. Only five of the regulars who play for the Coyotes were drafted by the team and the best first-round pick, Shane Doan, was selected by Winnipeg, if you believe that.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

What impact coaches?
Coaches matter, as long as they're entertaining

Michael Grange
Globe and Mail Blog
Posted on Wednesday, January 12, 2011

How much difference does coaching make?

It’s one of the endless debates in sports. Fire that guy; hire this guy.

So-and-so coach gets his guys to play hard; so-and-so coach can’t get his guys to execute, and on-and on.

It wasn’t long ago that firing Ron Wilson was the obvious solution to whatever was ailing the Toronto Maple Leafs and Rex Ryan was promising the New York Jets were headed to Super Bowl.

With the Jets facing New England in the Divisional playoffs Sunday and prohibitive underdogs, it's looking like Wilson will last longer than Ryan's pledge, but stranger things have happened.

Why fire Wilson? The reasons were varied: his club had quit playing for him; the Leafs' special teams – particularly penalty killing, considered one area where coaching matters most – remained near the bottom of the NHL; he was growing short with the media; and ultimately he’s heading for his third straight year out of the playoffs.

And then last night he puts a bunch of money on the wall as a bonus if his team can beat the San Jose Sharks – this while playing on the road on the second night of back-to-back – and his club goes out and rallies to win 4-2.

Was it coaching? Maybe, in theory he's a good one. The win gave Wilson 600 for his career. The only men who’ve won more?

Scotty Bowman (1244), Al Arbour (782), Dick Irvin (692) Pat Quinn (684), Mike Keenan (672) and Bryan Murray (620).

But if you’re looking for the so-called money quote; the line where there’s clear connection between Wilson putting his money down and the players lifting their level of play, it’s not quite there; bemusement would be my interpretation:

“He had some money up on the board there for his 600th win, so it was nice to take that from him,” said Clarke MacArthur, who scored two goals and established a new career-high in points with 36.

“I just said ‘Congratulations’, that’s about it” laughed Colby Armstrong when asked what he said to the coach after the game. “It’s pretty good though, 600 wins. It’s a tremendous feat as a coach.”

It’s been an interesting week for coaches. The other day Ryan seemed to go out of his way to break every rule in the unwritten rule book in advance of the Jets-Patriots matchup.

He questioned the preparation and dedication of Tom Brady and took the risk of alienating his own players by suggesting that he would be the difference if the Jets somehow upset the might Patriots machine.

As former New York Jet lineman Joe Klecko put it: Ryan’s thunder was his George Patton moment, in reference to the famed WWII leaders nickname: old blood and guts, his soldiers called him, as in his guts, our blood.

I suppose there’s no downside when you’re the underdog to rattling the big dog’s cage.

And make no mistake, his words were heard: “When he talks about and insults the preparation of Tom Brady … there’s one guy I know that takes that personally and that’s Tom,” former Patriot lineback Ted Bruschi said on Tuesday evening during at interview on The Michael Kay Show on ESPN 1050. “I think it just intensifies his focus to where you’ve added a little bit more motivation.”

But if the best quarterback in the game comes out and strafes the Jets and Ryan’s club once again gets blown out by Bill Belichick’s Patriots it will be hard to argue that Ryan’s transparent attempt to set the tone for the week was a waste of hot air of which, fortunately, his has plenty to spare.

There are those that have tried to measure the impact of coaches and managers in major sports, and for the most part the results are inconclusive, though their does seem to be some evidence that a really, really bad coach can hurt his team.

But for the most part the measures say the same thing: coaching doesn’t really matter. Even in cases where coaches are fired mid-season and teams seem to bounce back is usually just a regression to the mean, which is to say: teams can't lose forever. Did Wilson's money make a difference in his team getting their fourth straight win and his 600th? Maybe, if goalie James Reimer was short on cash.

But more likely not. Do coaches matter? It doesn't matter to me; my only expectation for coaches is that they entertain me in some fashion.

In this regard, Ron Wilson and Rex Ryan are doing pretty well

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

What Makes a Great Teacher?

For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t. Now, as the Obama administration offers states more than $4 billion to identify and cultivate effective teachers, Teach for America is ready to release its data.

By Amanda Ripley

On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math.

One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor’s math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked.

The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so.

At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools—not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it’s worth noting, not a very hard one).

After a year in Mr. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up—way up. He had started below grade level and finished above. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about 13 points—which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test scores achieved in other low-income D.C. schools that year. On that first day of school, only 40 percent of Mr. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. By the end of the year, 90 percent were at or above grade level.

As for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it—below grade level. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade level in math—despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. Taylor’s class down the road.

This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher—or the weak one—would become too great.

Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good schools—than among schools.

But we have never identified excellent teachers in any reliable, objective way. Instead, we tend to ascribe their gifts to some mystical quality that we can recognize and revere—but not replicate. The great teacher serves as a hero but never, ironically, as a lesson.

At last, though, the research about teachers’ impact has become too overwhelming to ignore. Over the past year, President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have started talking quite a lot about great teaching. They have shifted the conversation from school accountability— the rather worn theme of No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s landmark educational reform—to teacher accountability. And they have done it using one very effective conversational gambit: billions of dollars.

Thanks to the stimulus bonanza, Duncan has lucked into a budget that is more than double what a normal education secretary gets to spend. As a result, he has been able to dedicate $4.3 billion to a program he calls Race to the Top. To be fair, that’s still just a tiny fraction of the roughly $100 billion in his budget (much of which the government direct-deposits into the bank accounts of schools, whether they deserve the money or not). But especially in a year when states are projecting $16 billion in school-budget shortfalls, $4.3 billion is real money. “This is the big bang of teacher-effectiveness reform,” says Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that helps schools recruit good teachers. “It’s huge.”

Despite the perky name, Race to the Top is a marathon—and a potentially grueling one; to win, states must take a series of steps that are considered radical in the see-no-evil world of education, where teachers unions have long fought efforts to measure teacher performance based on student test scores and link the data to teacher pay. States must try to identify great teachers, figure out how they got that way, and then create more of them. “This is the wave of the future. This is where we have to go—to look at what’s working and what’s not,” Duncan told me. “It sounds like common sense, but it’s revolutionary.”

Based on his students’ test scores, Mr. Taylor ranks among the top 5 percent of all D.C. math teachers. He’s entertaining, but he’s not a born performer. He’s well prepared, but he’s been a teacher for only three years. He cares about his kids, but so do a lot of his underperforming peers. What’s he doing differently?

One outfit in America has been systematically pursuing this mystery for more than a decade—tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and analyzing why some teachers can move those kids three grade levels ahead in one year and others can’t. That organization, interestingly, is not a school district.

Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits college graduates to spend two years teaching in low-income schools, began outside the educational establishment and has largely remained there. For years, it has been whittling away at its own assumptions, testing its hypotheses, and refining its hiring and training. Over time, it has built an unusual laboratory: almost half a million American children are being taught by Teach for America teachers this year, and the organization tracks test-score data, linked to each teacher, for 85 percent to 90 percent of those kids. Almost all of those students are poor and African American or Latino. And Teach for America keeps an unusual amount of data about its 7,300 teachers—a pool almost twice the size of the D.C. system’s teacher corps.

Until now, Teach for America has kept its investigation largely to itself. But for this story, the organization allowed me access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial and error. The results are specific and surprising. Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.

Steven Farr is a tall man with a deep, quiet voice. He is Teach for America’s in-house professor, so to speak. His job is to find and study excellent teachers, and train others to get similar results. He takes his work very seriously, mostly because he has seen what the status quo looks like up close.

Farr grew up in a family of teachers in central Texas. When he graduated from the University of Texas, in 1993, he had a philosophy degree and an acceptance letter to Yale Law School, neither of which felt quite right. So he deferred law school and joined a new, floundering outfit, Teach for America.

After a little more than a month of somewhat uneven training, Farr walked into Donna High School in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas—a place he’d never been. Many of the three dozen kids in his classroom were the children of migrant workers; they would disappear for weeks at a time as their families followed the harvests.

Talking to Farr about those two years feels a little like talking to a war veteran. You and he both know that you can never understand what it was like, and the clichés come marching in. “It was the hardest, proudest, all of that,” he says, his voice drifting away. Then: “I was not the teacher I want our teachers to be.”

Farr lived with three other Teach for America teachers, in a house that had been confiscated by U.S. Marshals in a drug raid. He taught English and English as a Second Language. Texas required that students pass a standardized test before they graduate, and as test day approached, Farr felt a mixture of anxiety and resentment.

About a month afterward, he got the news: 76 percent of his students had passed; 24 percent were told they didn’t yet have the skills to graduate. Even though many were only sophomores, some of them dropped out as a result. The principal congratulated him on his scores, but Farr cried into his pillow that night. “Some of those kids did not pass because I was not as effective as I needed to be.”

After his two years were up, Farr went to law school, as planned. He came back to Teach for America in 2001—this time in charge of training and support. By then, the organization’s founder, Wendy Kopp, had begun to notice something puzzling when she visited classrooms: many Teach for America teachers were doing good work. But a small number were getting phenomenal results—and it was not clear why.

Farr was tasked with finding out. Starting in 2002, Teach for America began using student test-score progress data to put teachers into one of three categories: those who move their students one and a half or more years ahead in one year; those who achieve one to one and a half years of growth; and those who yield less than one year of gains. In the beginning, reliable data was hard to come by, and many teachers could not be put into any category. Moreover, the data could never capture the entire story of a teacher’s impact, Farr acknowledges. But in desperately failing schools, where most kids lack basic skills, the only way to bushwhack a path out of the darkness is with a good, solid measuring stick.

As Teach for America began to identify exceptional teachers using this data, Farr began to watch them. He observed their classes, read their lesson plans, and talked to them about their teaching methods and beliefs. He and his colleagues surveyed Teach for America teachers at least four times a year to find out what they were doing and what kinds of training had helped them the most.

Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a lesson plan?’” So Farr and his colleagues made lists of specific teacher actions that fell under the high-level principles they had identified. For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

“Strong teachers insist that effective teaching is neither mysterious nor magical. It is neither a function of dynamic personality nor dramatic performance,” Farr writes in Teaching as Leadership, a book coming out in February from Farr and his colleagues. The model the book lays out, Farr is careful to say, is not the only path to success. But he is convinced it can improve teaching—and already has. In 2007, 24 percent of Teach for America teachers moved their students one and a half or more years ahead, according to the organization’s internal reports. In 2009, that number was up to 44 percent. That data relies largely on school tests, which vary in quality from state to state. When tests aren’t available or sufficiently rigorous, Teach for America helps teachers find or design other reliable diagnostics.

So far, only one independent, random-assignment study of Teach for America’s effectiveness has been conducted. That report, published by Mathematica Policy Research in 2004, looked at the organization’s teachers and found that, in math, their students significantly outperformed those of their more experienced counterparts. (In reading, though, the teachers’ students did the same as other teachers’ students.) Another study is due out in 2012 or 2013.

Mr. Taylor, the fifth-grade math teacher in Washington, D.C., is not a member of Teach for America. He grew up attending D.C. public schools and then joined the profession the traditional way: he majored in education in college and then was certified. But Mr. Taylor has a lot in common with the teachers Farr has found to be most effective.

On a typical Monday, Mr. Taylor’s kids come to class and begin silently working on the Problem of the Day written on the blackboard. They sit in four clusters of desks. Each group has a team leader, who is selected by Mr. Taylor each month.

Mr. Taylor walks in and says good morning. “Good morning!” they answer in kid unison. He is wearing a scarf, a black-and-white pinstripe cardigan, and small, oval Dolce & Gabbana glasses, and he looks tired. He is taking classes on the weekends to get his master’s in education administration. He has a Bluetooth headset in one ear and an earring in the other.

After a few minutes, Mr. Taylor announces that it’s time for Mental Math. The kids put down their pencils and grab the orange index cards and markers on their desks. Mr. Taylor begins to walk around the class, reading problems aloud. “How many 5’s are in 45?” The kids have to do the math in their heads. All of them write their answers on their cards and thrust them up in the air. With a quick scan, Mr. Taylor can see if every child has written the right answer. Then he says, “What’s the answer?” And all the kids call out, “Nine!” When they get an answer right, they whisper-shout “Yes!” and pump their fists. If some kids get it wrong, they have not embarrassed themselves by individually raising their hand and announcing their mistake. But Mr. Taylor knows he needs to give them more attention—or, more likely, have their team leader work with them. Children, he has learned, speak to each other in a language they can better understand.

“Now I’m going to trick you,” Mr. Taylor says. “What’s 3 times 120?” The orange cards go down—and back up. “Ooh, ooh, ooh!” says one little girl, unable to contain herself. “‘Ooh’? Is that the answer?” Mr. Taylor says, silencing her.

Next, Mr. Taylor goes to the board to teach a new way to do long division. It’s a clever method that takes a little longer but is much easier than most other methods, and I’ve never seen it before. “You want to work smart, not hard,” he tells me later. “If you just show them the traditional method, not everyone understands.” He actually learned the method last year—from one of his students.

Mr. Taylor follows a very basic lesson plan often referred to by educators as “I do, we do, you do.” He does a problem on the board. Then the whole class does another one the same way. Then all the kids do a problem on their own. During the “we” portion of the lesson, Mr. Taylor calls on students to help solve the problem. But he does this using the “equity sticks”—a can of clothespins, each of which has a student’s name on it. That way, he ensures a random sample. The shy ones don’t get lost.

As the kids move into group work, there is a low buzz in the room. I try, but I can’t find a child who isn’t talking about math. One little boy leans across his desk to help another with a problem. “What do you add to 8 to get 16?” he says, and then he waits. “Eight,” the other boy says. “Then,” says the first, “you subtract that and what do you get?”

The activities come in brisk sequence, following a routine the kids know by heart, so no time is lost in transition. In Teaching as Leadership, Farr describes seeing such choreography in other high-performance classrooms. “We see routines so strong that they run virtually without any involvement from the teacher. In fact, for many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher’s absence.”

On the front wall, Mr. Taylor has posted different hand signals—if you need to go to the bathroom, you raise a closed hand. To ask or answer a question, you raise an open hand. “This way, I have the information before I even call on you,” Mr. Taylor explains. There is even a signal for when you are having a terrible day and don’t feel up to participating: you just put your head down on your desk. I ask Mr. Taylor how often kids exploit that option. “I’ve never had anybody put their head down,” he says, matter-of-factly. “In three years?” I ask. “No.”

Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem (“20 divided by 5”), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4’s. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you’re in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand.

Finally, after a dozen problems go by, a small voice from an even smaller boy pronounces, “Bingo!” Kids wail in despair as the tiny boy walks up to collect his prize (a pencil) from Mr. Taylor. “Dang!” one girl says. “Okay, relax,” Mr. Taylor says, smiling. “It’s just a game.” Before they leave, all the kids fill out an “exit slip,” which is usually in the form of a problem—one more chance for Mr. Taylor to see how they, and he, are doing.

When I talk to Mr. Taylor after class, I notice that he tends to redirect questions so that they reflect his own performance. When I ask him if his first year on the job was hard, he says, “I found that the kids were not hard. It was explaining the information to them that was hard. You paint this picture in your head about how you will teach this lesson, and you can teach the whole lesson and no one gets it.”

Like all the teachers I talked to in Washington, Mr. Taylor laments the lack of parental involvement. “On back-to-school night, if you have 28 or 30 kids in your class, you’re lucky to see six or seven parents,” he says. But when I ask him how that affects his teaching, he says, “Actually, it doesn’t. I make it my business to call the parents—and not just for bad things.” The first week of class, Mr. Taylor calls all his students’ parents and gives them his cell-phone number.

Other teachers I interviewed spent most of our time complaining. “With the testing and the responsibility and keeping up with the behavior reports and the data, it has gotten so much harder over the years,” said one fourth-grade teacher at Kimball, the same school where Mr. Taylor teaches. “It’s more work than it should be. They don’t give us the time to be creative.”

A 23-year veteran who earns more than $80,000 a year, this teacher has a warm manner, and her classroom is bright and neat. She paid for the kids’ whiteboards, the clock, and the DVD player herself. But she seems to have given up on the kids’ prospects in a way that Mr. Taylor has not. “The kids in Northwest [D.C.] go on trips to France, on cruises. They go places and their parents talk to them and take them to the library,” she says one fall afternoon between classes. “Our parents on this side don’t have the know-how to raise their children. They’re not sure what it takes for their child to make it.”

When her fourth-grade students entered her class last school year, 66 percent were scoring at or above grade level in reading. After a year in her class, only 44 percent scored at grade level, and none scored above. Her students performed worse than fourth-graders with similar incoming scores in other low-income D.C. schools. For decades, education researchers blamed kids and their home life for their failure to learn. Now, given the data coming out of classrooms like Mr. Taylor’s, those arguments are harder to take. Poverty matters enormously. But teachers all over the country are moving poor kids forward anyway, even as the class next door stagnates. “At the end of the day,” says Timothy Daly at the New Teacher Project, “it’s the mind-set that teachers need—a kind of relentless approach to the problem.”

Once teachers have been in the classroom for a year or two, who is very good—and very bad—becomes much clearer. But teachers are almost never dismissed. Principals almost never give teachers poor performance evaluations—even when they know the teachers are failing.

Ideally, schools would hire better teachers to begin with. But this is notoriously difficult. How do you screen for a relentless mind-set?

When Teach for America began, applicants were evaluated on 12 criteria (such as persistence and communication skills), chosen based on conversations with educators. Recruits answered open-ended questions like “What is wind?” Starting in 2000, the organization began to retroactively critique its own judgments. What did the best teachers have in common when they applied for the job?

Once a model for outcomes-based hiring was built, it started churning out some humbling results. “I came into this with a bunch of theories,” says Monique Ayotte-Hoeltzel, who was then head of admissions. “I was proven wrong at least as many times as I was validated.”

Based on her own experience teaching in the Mississippi Delta, Ayotte-Hoeltzel was convinced, for example, that teachers with earlier experience working in poor neighborhoods were more effective. Wrong. An analysis of the data found no correlation.

For years, Teach for America also selected for something called “constant learning.” As Farr and others had noticed, great teachers tended to reflect on their performance and adapt accordingly. So people who tend to be self-aware might be a good bet. “It’s a perfectly reasonable hypothesis,” Ayotte-Hoeltzel says.

But in 2003, the admissions staff looked at the data and discovered that reflectiveness did not seem to matter either. Or more accurately, trying to predict reflectiveness in the hiring process did not work.

What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record. In the interview process, Teach for America now asks applicants to talk about overcoming challenges in their lives—and ranks their perseverance based on their answers. Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues have actually quantified the value of perseverance. In a study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology in November 2009, they evaluated 390 Teach for America instructors before and after a year of teaching. Those who initially scored high for “grit”—defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-choice test—were 31 percent more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students. Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer. (Grit also predicts retention of cadets at West Point, Duckworth has found.)

But another trait seemed to matter even more. Teachers who scored high in “life satisfaction”—reporting that they were very content with their lives—were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. These teachers “may be more adept at engaging their pupils, and their zest and enthusiasm may spread to their students,” the study suggested.

In general, though, Teach for America’s staffers have discovered that past performance—especially the kind you can measure—is the best predictor of future performance. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers. And the two best metrics of previous success tend to be grade-point average and “leadership achievement”—a record of running something and showing tangible results. If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size, that’s promising.

Knowledge matters, but not in every case. In studies of high-school math teachers, majoring in the subject seems to predict better results in the classroom. And more generally, people who attended a selective college are more likely to excel as teachers (although graduating from an Ivy League school does not unto itself predict significant gains in a Teach for America classroom). Meanwhile, a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.

The most valuable educational credentials may be the ones that circle back to squishier traits like perseverance. Last summer, an internal Teach for America analysis found that an applicant’s college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college. If an applicant starts out with mediocre grades and improves, in other words, that curve appears to be more revealing than getting straight A’s all along.

Last year, Teach for America churned through 35,000 candidates to choose 4,100 new teachers. Staff members select new hires by deferring almost entirely to the model: they enter more than 30 data points about a given candidate (about twice the number of inputs they considered a decade ago), and then the model spits out a hiring recommendation. Every year, the model changes, depending on what the new batch of student data shows.

This year, Teach for America allowed me to sit in on the part of the interview process that it calls the “sample teach,” in which applicants teach a lesson to the other applicants for exactly five minutes. Only about half of the candidates make it to this stage. On this day, the group includes three men and two women, all college seniors or very recent graduates.

One young woman—I’ll call her Abigail—stands up to teach her lesson. She has curly blond hair and wears a navy-blue suit. She tells us she will be teaching a fifth-grade Spanish class. She tapes up a preprepared poster. (Female applicants are more likely to bring props, which is not a bad thing. In fact, women are more likely to be effective in Teach for America, Duckworth found.) Then she writes her objective on the room’s whiteboard: to teach the days of the week. Krzysztof Kosmicki, a Teach for America program director, starts the clock.

To me, Abigail’s objective seems a little dull (especially compared with that of another applicant, who taught “the five fluids that transmit HIV”). She asks the class to repeat each of the days of the week. “I know it’s confusing,” she says. So she teaches them a song to help keep them straight, and then has the applicants sing it—twice. “If I don’t hear everyone’s voice, we’re going to sing it again until I do.” When she asks what day it is, Kosmicki volunteers the wrong answer. She asks another applicant to help correct him, which he does, and then her time is up.

The last applicant to teach is a young man I’ll call Michael. He has been very quiet, but he becomes much more animated when he starts teaching. His objective is to teach the order of operations in a math problem. “Good morning, class!” he says. When someone gets something right, he says, “Correctomundo!” He seems confident. He asks if he can get a volunteer to answer part of the problem on the board, and one of the other applicants steps up. Kosmicki asks him to explain exponents again, which he does. Time’s up.

Later, I talk with Kosmicki about his impressions. He liked Abigail’s sample teach—but not Michael’s. Kosmicki is not very interested in the things I noticed most: charisma, ambitious lesson objectives, extroversion. What matters more, at least according to Teach for America’s research, is less flashy: Were you prepared? Did you achieve your objective in five minutes?

“Abigail’s sample teach was exceptional,” says Kosmicki, who taught for Teach for America in the South Bronx before starting a charter school in Newark, New Jersey. “It was abundantly clear to me that she had practiced.” The students successfully learned the days of the week “somewhere between the third and fourth minute,” Kosmicki says. He was interested in what Abigail was doing, but he had been more focused on the other applicants, acting as her class.

This summer, those who have been accepted will go to a Teach for America training institute. That’s when Steven Farr, the in-house professor, and his colleagues take over. For them, the challenge is not to pick the perfect teacher but to diagnose strengths and weaknesses early and provide intense, customized training to correct them. Farr is more hopeful each year. “When I see not a handful, not dozens, but hundreds of people being successful in a world where most people think success is not possible, I know it can be done,” he told me.

Of course, thanks to its mission and brand, Teach for America has been able to draw from a strong recruiting pool. (During the 2008–09 school year, 11 percent of Ivy League seniors applied.) Large, low-income school districts do not get nearly as many candidates per open position, and most of the candidates they do get aren’t nearly as high-caliber. Plus, the extreme hours that Teach for America teachers put in—for two years—are not sustainable for most people over the long term.

But if school systems hired, trained, and rewarded teachers according to the principles Teach for America has identified, then teachers would not need to work so hard. They would be operating in a system designed in a radically different way—designed, that is, for success.

This year, D.C. public schools have begun using a new evaluation system for all faculty and staff, from teachers to custodians. Each will receive a score, just like the students, at the end of the year. For teachers whose students take standardized tests, like Mr. Taylor, half their score will be based on how much their students improved. The rest will be based largely on five observation sessions conducted throughout the year by their principal, assistant principal, and a group of master educators. Throughout the year, teachers will receive customized training. At year’s end, teachers who score below a certain threshold could be fired.

The handbook for the new system looks eerily similar to the Teach for America model, which is not a coincidence. The man who designed it, Jason Kamras, is a former Teach for America teacher who taught in a low-income D.C. school for eight years before being chosen by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to help fix the schools. Rhee is herself a Teach for America alumna, who went on to run the New Teacher Project.

Washington, D.C., is also applying for Race to the Top money from the Obama administration, along with many states. To qualify, states must first remove any legal barriers to linking student test scores to teachers—something California and Wisconsin are already doing. To win money, states must also begin distinguishing between effective and ineffective teachers—and consider that information when deciding whether to grant tenure, give raises, or fire a teacher or principal (a linkage that the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, has criticized as “inappropriate” federal interference in local prerogatives). And each year, states must publish which of their education and other prep programs produced the most effective (and ineffective) teachers and principals. If state and local school officials, along with teachers unions, step up to the challenge, Race to the Top could begin to rationalize America’s schools.

By the time the Obama administration begins handing out awards this spring, Mr. Taylor will be finishing up another year at Kimball Elementary. On the mornings his students take their standardized tests, he will cook a hot breakfast of sausage, eggs, and toast for them, as he always does. But this tradition may be coming to an end. He’s thinking about quitting in the next few years.

Mr. Taylor wants to become a principal. In just three years as a teacher, he feels that he has already run up against the limits of his classroom. He wants to bring what he has learned to scale. That way, he says, “it won’t just stay with me, bundled in Room 204.” He is, like many great teachers, well aware that he is not one in a million—or at least, that he should not be.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
——

http://www.teachingasleadership.org/

http://www.teachforamerica.org/the-corps-experience/becoming-an-exceptional-teacher/

Teaching As Leadership: http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achievement/dp/0470432861
——

Positive predictors of teacher effectiveness

Angela Lee Duckworth a*, Patrick D. Quinn b and Martin E.P. Seligman a

a Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
b Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

(Received 5 March 2009; final version received 14 June 2009)

Some teachers are dramatically more effective than others, but traditional indicators of competence (e.g., certification) explain minimal variance in performance. The rigors of teaching suggest that positive traits that buffer against adversity might contribute to teacher effectiveness. In this prospective longitudinal study, novice teachers (N¼390) placed in under-resourced public schools completed measures of optimistic explanatory style, grit, and life satisfaction prior to the school year. At the conclusion of the school year, teacher effectiveness was measured in terms of the academic gains of students. All three positive traits individually predicted teacher performance. When entered simultaneously, however, only grit and life satisfaction remained significant predictors. These findings suggest that positive traits should be considered in the selection and training of teachers.

Keywords: learned helplessness; explanatory style; grit; life satisfaction; teacher performance

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/Positive predictors of teacher effectiveness.2009.pdf
—–

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Not allergic to ice: Severe allergies haven't kept Poti from NHL career

Joseph White, The Associated Press

11 Jan 2011

ARLINGTON, Va. – The spread was nice at the Capitals' annual media day luncheon. Flavourful meat. Fresh veggies. Players, coaches and reporters lounged around various tables, enjoying the food and chatting about hockey.

Over by the window, away from everyone else, sitting a chair at a table with nothing but a drink and nice view, was defenceman Tom Poti.

"They asked me if I wanted something," Poti said. "I said don't even worry about it. We're only here for 40 minutes and I can just go home and eat."

It was a rare moment in which Poti's many allergies made him stand out, which is quite remarkable – because he has a lot of them. No nuts. No chocolate. No fish. Nothing from the ocean. No MSG. Most spices and sauces are verboten. Everything he eats has to be cooked in separate, clean utensils. It's been this way since he began eating solid food as a toddler, when he would break out in hives, rashes and have other problems at nearly every feeding.

"They finally ended up taking me to an allergist. I almost died from the testing it was so bad," Poti said. "Nowadays they test for just one thing at a time, back then they'd test for everything (at once). I had to get filled up with adrenaline, things like that.

"They finally figured out what I could have and I couldn't have, and I've just been doing that ever since."

The 33-year-old Massachusetts native is now a veteran professional athlete, with 12 seasons in the NHL and an Olympic silver medal as a member of the U.S. hockey team at Salt Lake City in 2002. He's proof that even the most sensitive of constitutions can be productive at the most demanding of occupations.

"I don't think it's real easy for him, but it's something that he's adjusted to," teammate Brooks Laich said. "Especially with the amount of travel – you're on airplanes, you're in hotels. Kudos to Tom for just adjusting and being strong himself with it."

When the team flies to road games, the charter company has a list of Poti's allergens. When players go out to eat at a restaurant in another city, Poti will speak to the chef personally "and make sure he can take care of me. … That's the safest way to do it."

"I eat a lot of the same stuff most guys do," Poti said. "I can have chicken, steak, hamburgers, turkey – it just has to be plain. I don't cook with any oils or any spices. If I eat chicken, it's just plain grilled chicken. If I eat steak, it's just plain steak. Hamburger, I don't put any mustard, relish or ketchup or stuff on it – just plain."

Poti, his family and his teammates – he's been in Washington since 2007 – are so used to his routine that it has become second nature.

General manager George McPhee says Poti's allergies have never been an issue, and the few minor things the staff does on Poti's behalf are hardly an imposition. It's been eight years since Poti's last major scare, when he grabbed a bottle of his sister's lotion in the bathroom because his face and neck were dry. He didn't look at the ingredients, so he didn't realize it contained some type of nut oil.

"I started breaking out in hives and got rushed to the hospital," he said.

Poti carries an EpiPen everywhere he goes. At home, his wife does most of the cooking and has become good at being creative.

"There's certain things I've found that I can have. I use a lot of Italian dressing on things to spice stuff up for me," Poti said. "And I found a pasta sauce that agrees with me."

Poti serves as a spokesman for the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network.

"The biggest thing I tell kids – I've spoken to a lot of kids over the years – is don't let it hold you back," Poti said. "It's not easy, but I always tell them that everybody has something to deal with, everybody has some kind of problem, and I tell them the way I look at it: I'm fortunate, I can't eat this certain thing, but there's a lot of other things I can do."

Here's another way to put Poti's allergies in perspective. Over the last nine months, he's had two medical scares that are just as worrisome – if not more so – than his food allergies.

Last April 26, he was struck in his right eye by a puck during a playoff game. The impact broke four bones in his face, and he lost sight in the eye for more than 24 hours. He had plastic surgery and his sight recovered enough for him to return for the start of the season.

He still doesn't have 100 per cent feeling in his face, and the long-term prognosis for the eye is uncertain in part because of the steroid drops he's been using.

"Any time I could eat something and could go into anaphylactic shock," Poti said during training camp, "but the scariest thing for me was the eye."

Poti started wearing a visor on the ice, which his wife and mother had wanted for years.

"It's weird. It fogs up, and it gets wet and you can't see," Poti said. "It's a lot hotter under there, but I made some promises so I've got to keep it on. It's probably a good thing."

On Dec. 23, Poti suffered a concussion in the Capitals' overtime loss to Pittsburgh. The constant headaches caused him to miss three games – including the rematch against the Penguins in the Winter Classic – and to take the usual barrage of tests before returning last week.

Again, it made a hamburger without mustard seem trivial.

"With your allergies, usually if you stay away from some things, you're OK," Poti said after his first game back. "With a concussion, you never know what's going to happen."

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

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