The mission of Hoot Education, Inc. is to ensure that every student has an effective teacher.
The vision for Hoot Education is to provide a platform which enables teachers with an effective way to increase the knowledge and skill sets required to increase their efficacy, resulting in helping children achieve excellence.
Improving schools through better coaching of teachers
Effective schools require effective teachers. In fact, scientific research has proven that highly effective teachers achieve 5 times the academic growth among their students than less effective teachers. In fact, the quality of classroom teaching is the only factor ever shown that can mitigate home factors such as poverty. The question then is how to get a highly effective teacher in front of every child, in every classroom, in every school, nationwide.
It is no easy task to ensure that teachers receive the training and support necessary for them master the highly complex job of meeting the individual needs of a classroom full of academically diverse students. To date, we have failed our teachers miserably, providing little, if any support. Not surprisingly, the majority of our teachers never achieve their potential for excellence as educators; not surprisingly, 50% of our teachers leave the field within 3 to 5 years of entry. In the face of the continuous loss of our teaching force, our needs for new teachers continue to increase. By 2020, we will need 281,500 more K-5 teachers than today, a growth of 17%.
Most teachers want to be highly effective. However, they face a number of barriers in achieving this goal:
- Inadequate understanding in the intricacies of the science of effective instruction.
- Poor understanding of how to use assessment data to guide their teaching.
- Significant teacher isolation, making it difficult for them to enhance their knowledge and skills.
- A lack of access to knowledgeable mentors with whom they can apprentice new techniques, routines, and strategies.
The typical approach to improving teacher effectiveness is primarily to provide teachers workshops about scientifically proven practices, with little subsequent mentoring. This approach continues to fail. Even so, our nation’s schools currently spend $17.4 billion annually on just such ineffective professional development programs. This money can be much better spent.
To date there are only 3 approaches of professional development that have scientific evidence to show that they impact teacher effectiveness: (a) Instructional Coaching, (b) Professional Learning Communities, and (c) Personalized Study Groups. However, implementing these approaches well has been plagued by problems of lack of access to personnel with adequate expertise, significant time inefficiencies, and increased costs related to loss of time and travel. To date, technology has not been implemented to facilitate these approaches. The Hoot Education Platform changes this scenario.
Built on a $6 million research investment from the U.S. Department of Education, the Hoot Education Platform wraps all three approaches into one technology supported model.
Hoot Education, in partnership with the Institute for Evidence-Based Education at Southern Methodist University, is now offering coaching certification and coaching services to districts nationwide.