Intro to a Teacher's Take on The Art & Science of Teaching

This post is teacher and blogger Dina Strasser's first in a series on Marzano's The Art and Science of Teaching. Read Marzano's response here.

Robert Marzano is a guru, as I'm sure most of the readership knows. His name is consistently the only one I can throw out at educator-type cocktail parties and have teachers from all walks of the profession say, "Oh, yeah, HIM." So you can imagine my delight and sense of honor at being asked to chronicle my ongoing tango with his latest book, The Art and Science of Teaching (2007). 

I first encountered Dr. Marzano directly at his 2008 ASCD Annual Conference in New Orleans keynote. I fell for his presence; not only because he backs up every single assertion he makes with gobs of quantitative research, but because he is as unsparingly and honestly critical of his own teaching as of anyone else's; indeed A & S is essentially a revisiting (and occasional revision) of the principles he discusses in his earlier work Classroom Instruction That Works (2001). This is not something that a teacher may necessarily know from reading A & S, but it may be the most important thing to know about it, ironically. Dr. Marzano is not some education "expert" eating sugar plums in the ivory tower. I trust him. You should too.

The other assertion I need to make right off the bat is about where I am professionally myself: in my tenth year of teaching, but only my second in a new subject area (middle school English/Language Arts). I tell you this because I feel it encapsulates the weird, but useful, universe in which I live at the moment. I am both experienced and green; understanding keenly what I need to do to be an effective educator, and still struggling mightily to do it. In other words, if you're a teacher, I am probably just like you in one way or another. I hope you can trust me as well.

Keeping that in mind, I'll be dividing up my posts in the following way, hoping that it proves the most efficient and thought-provoking way to address the very dense amount of information in A & S, for a readership with everything to do, and no time to do it in (as always).

Summary: I'll hit the high points of the chapter I'm working with (there are ten total, and I'll be devoting a post each to them).

Stuck in My Head: These will be those tidbits and odd and ends that I will probably remember until I retire; the mantras I hope to recite always.

Playing It Out: Here, I'll talk about my implementation—or failed attempts to implement—the recommendations of the chapter in my own 7th grade English classroom. Yep, you can call this a warning: I can surmise that about half the time here, I'll be writing about my failures. I've learned, over the years of talking to and writing for teachers, that we actually learn more from honesty about our struggles than from anything else. This is scary, frankly, but I hope Dr. Marzano would approve.

Take Away This: Questions, suggestions, final thoughts, criticisms—these will go here, as an express invitation to the readership to do some schemata-formatting, and really apply what they read here to their own work. This is the beauty of blogging—it is far less conviction than conversation. I look forward immensely to engaging with you, particularly in the comments, as we go. 

Lastly, a brief plug: if you want to get a fuller view of my practice, you can stop by my own teaching blog, http://theline.edublogs.org, anytime.

Next post will be on Chapter 1. Can't wait.

Dina Strasser is a middle school English/language arts teacher in upstate New York and blogs at The Line.