Teacher Effectiveness Training

Course Description
Teacher Effectiveness Training (TET) is the most successful program for classroom management, discipline, and communication skills ever designed for teachers. Over 100,000 teachers have taken the TET course in more than twenty countries. The classic TET text by Dr. Thomas Gordon and the TET curriculum by Mr. Ken Miller have been translated into ten different languages.

The purpose of the TET course is for teachers to increase teaching/learning time, time on task, in their classrooms. The skills and methods of TET bring to teachers the results of a generation of educational research, consolidating and synthesizing this knowledge into a set of practical methods that teachers can apply to actually improve the quality of their teaching experience.

Teachers have three types of relationship times with their students: Teaching/Learning time, when teacher and students are on task, attentive, and participating; Student-Owned Problem time, when students experience upsets or problems that distract their attention from learning tasks; and Teacher-Owned Problem time, when the teacher experiences problems with unacceptable student behavior and is distracted from teaching tasks.

In TET, teachers learn specific skills of interpersonal communication and problem solving that they use to more effectively assist students with problems and to help get changes in unacceptable student behaviors. The result is that teachers teach more and feel better about themselves as teachers, because their students learn more.

These seven specific behavioral skills and their application in the classroom are taught in TET:

    1. Behavioral Observation
    2. Identifying Problem Ownership
    3. Demonstrating Understanding
    4. Being Understood
    5. Expressing Recognition
    6. Confrontation
    7. Win/Win Problem Solving

The TET curriculum design is based on a four-step experiential learning model, SIPA, in which:
    1. learning activities are structured
    2. students are involved in an activity
    3. they communicate about and process their personal experience with others
    4. they analyze and generalize for purposes of application to their classroom

A variety of structures and methods are used in TET. They include instructor presentations and demonstrations, small group exercises and discussions, role plays, simulations of typical classroom situations and written assignments.

Homework assignments are given that require the participants to implement and report on their experiences and utilize the TET communication skills in their classroom and personal lives. Reading and writing assignments are also given, and all students must pass a comprehensive final exam to receive credit.

Curriculum Design
TET is a 3 credit graduate level or forty-five hour professional development course taught on weekends or over five full days.

Course Materials
Course Materials: Text - Teacher Effectiveness Training, Thomas Gordon, Wyden Books, 1974. TET Workbook, Ken Miller, Effectiveness Training, Inc., 1987. I-cards.

Session Outline
Module 1
Contents:
  1. The purpose of TET
  2. Three kinds of time teachers have with students
  3. Overview of the seven skills of TET
  4. Demonstration: Listening to teachers

Module 2
Contents:
  1. Role play: "Case of The Missing Book Report"
  2. Overview of three methods of problem solving
  3. Workbook exercise: Setting Personal Goals
  4. Assignments and performance expectations
  5. Registration

Module 3
Contents:
  1. Skill #1: Observing behavior
  2. Exercise: Describing the instructor's behavior
  3. Skill #2: Identifying problem ownership
  4. Workbook exercise: Practice identifying problem ownership
  5. The nature of interpersonal communication
  6. The two conditions for effective communication: attention and intention
  7. Exercise: Attending to another

Module 4
Contents:
  1. Exercise: Creating intention to communicate
  2. Skills of #3 and #4: Demonstrating understanding and being understood, the basic skills of interpersonal communication
  3. Demonstration: Proving you understand
  4. Exercise: Demonstrating understanding
  5. The twelve roadblocks to communication
  6. Exercise: Effects of communication roadblocks
  7. Four listening behaviors: attending, door openers, acknowledgements, active listening
  8. Exercise: Listening to another

Module 5
Contents:
  1. Demonstration: Active listening
  2. Exercise: Active listening to a teacher's problem
  3. Common errors in active listening
  4. Appropriate conditions for active listening
  5. Exercise: Identifying problem cues and clues

Module 6
Contents:
  1. Being understood
  2. Exercise: Self-disclosing dyads
  3. Four types of self-disclosure messages: inform, appreciate, prevent and confront
  4. Skill #5: Expressing appreciation
  5. Exercise: Sending positive I-messages
  6. Exercise: Identifying fears of confrontations

Module 7
Contents:
  1. Typical confrontation messages
  2. Demonstration: Effects of typical confrontations
  3. Exercise: You-messages vs. I-messages
  4. Criteria for effective confrontation: Gets change in behavior, leaves student's esteem up, and leaves relationship undamaged
  5. The three-part confrontive I-message
  6. Exercise: Sending confrontation messages

Module 8
Contents:
  1. Demonstration: Managing resistance
  2. Shifting gears and the communication process
  3. Exercise: "Case of the Resistant Student"
  4. Four times confrontation doesn't get change
  5. Exercise: "Case of the Tardy Student"

Module 9
Contents:
  1. Workbook exercise: Assessing personal goals
  2. Three methods of conflict resolution: Win/lose, lose/win and win/win
  3. Effects of Method II
  4. Exercise: Reactions to power
  5. Effects of Method I

Module 10
Contents:
  1. The six steps of Method III
  2. Effective parent conferences
  3. Exercise: "Case of the Eager Beaver"
  4. Exercise: "Case of the Roving Teacher"
  5. The teacher's area of freedom
  6. Values conflict defined
  7. Final exam

Grading
To receive a "C" in the course:
  1. Attend all class sessions and participate in all class activities. No more than two hours of class time can be missed for a participant to receive credit.
  2. Pass the final exam with a grade of 80% or better.
  3. Complete all reading assignments.
  4. Complete all written assignments in the workbook.

To receive a "B" in the course:
  5. Complete an Audio Tape Assignment.

To receive an "A" in the course:
  6. Complete a Personal Journal.

Student Academic Integrity
Participants guarantee that all academic class work is original. Any academic dishonesty or plagiarism (to take ideas, writings, etc. from another and offer them as one's own), is a violation of student academic behavior standards as outlined by our partnering colleges and universities and is subject to academic disciplinary action.

Register
To register to take TEI's Teacher Effectiveness Training classroom graduate course, go to the Course Registration page.