Joe Ashby was a a multi-classroom leader (MCL) at Buena Vista Enhanced Option Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee before finishing his doctorate and moving on to be a principal in California. He recently wrote an article about that experience for Real Clear Education, and he focused on the flexibility and growth that was present in Read more about Giving, Receiving Professional Development Every Day[…]
Teachers need helpful feedback and support to improve their instruction and own their professional growth. Over the past four years, 30 states have changed how they evaluate teachers, and another 14 states are slated to do so in the next two years. As many of those states are learning, however, simply developing new evaluation tools Read more about Giving Teachers the Feedback and Support they Deserve[…]
TNTP has spent the last two years trying to answer the question, “Do we know how to help teachers get better?” Their new report,The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development, shares what they found. The Mirage examines how three large public school districts and one charter school network support teachers’ Read more about Do we know how to help teachers get better?[…]
Professors Matthew Kraft and John Papay discuss research showing that the school contexts in which teachers work have a profound influence on their effectiveness. Below are excerpts from their article: An emerging body of research now shows that the contexts in which teachers work profoundly shape teachers’ job decisions and their effectiveness. Put simply, teachers Read more about Developing Workplaces Where Teachers Stay, Improve and Succeed[…]
Two new research studies that evaluated vast amounts of data both concluded that teachers continue to improve over the course of their careers. The prevailing wisdom from previous research, which many teachers and teachers unions have disputed, said that teachers improved in their first several years of teaching, but then plateaued. The studies looked at Read more about Teaching Experience Matters More Than We Used to Think[…]
Teacher employment policies — tenure, dismissal and seniority — have been debated for years, but with recent cases playing out in the courts the disputes have been elevated to new levels. What is best for students and teachers is a complex topic with varying view. This Education Commission of the States policy analysis uses the Read more about Vergara and the Complexities of Teacher Employment Policies — an ECS Policy Analysis[…]
As many of you know, Grant Wiggins suddenly passed away on Tuesday this week. He was a giant in the field of education, transforming the way many educators think about teaching, learning, thinking, and assessment. Grant’s work on Understanding by Design and Essential Questions have influenced our work as educators, and his willingness to engage Read more about Remembering Grant Wiggins[…]
The Noyce Foundation supports major research and development efforts by quality national organizations to create new models for the recruitment, compensation, development, evaluation, and accountability of school principals and teachers as well as district and other leaders. The collection of R&D efforts includes resources from Education Resource Strategies, New Leaders, New Visions for Public Schools, Read more about Human Capital Resources for Schools and Districts[…]
NCES has recently released “Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First Five Years: Results From the First Through Fifth Waves of the 2007–08 Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study“. The first results of this nationally representative study that looked at the fates of about 2,000 teachers who were new to the field in 2007 or Read more about Longitudinal Research on Teacher Attrition[…]
There is no systemic evidence that all the best teachers are leaving. In fact the opposite appears to be true. More research and more years of data, are needed, but early results seem promising that evaluation is playing a positive role in keeping the best educators. Numbers have already been crunched on teacher retention and Read more about There Isn’t Really a Mass Exodus of Good Teachers[…]
More than 87 percent of TFA teachers say they don’t plan on remaining teachers throughout their careers, compared with 26.3 percent of non-TFA teachers working in the same subjects, grades, and schools, according to an analysis released last week by Mathematica Policy Research (PDF). The study suggests the risk of turnover is relatively high for Read more about Teacher Retention and TFA[…]
Often, it seems in schools that reform after reform is layered on with little thought to alignment or coherence. The Center on Great Teachers and Leaders is responding to that problem with a new special issues brief titled, A Framework for Coherence: College and Career Readiness Standards, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, and Educator Effectiveness. Read more about Coherence in Education Reform[…]
The Center for American Progress recently released a new Education Resource Strategy report, which offers teacher salary redesign lessons from 10 first-mover districts. Effective teachers are the biggest in-school factor related to student success. Across the country, a diverse set of districts are pioneering innovative approaches to teacher compensation that reward their best teachers and Read more about Do More, Add More, Earn More[…]
In the final installment of Marc Tucker’s blog series on the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, Gene Wilhoit, the former Executive Director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, discusses the need to transform how we recruit, train, and develop our teachers and the consequences of failing to do so. Wilhoit and Read more about Gene Wilhoit: Transforming how we recruit, train, and develop teachers[…]
It is a well-accepted tenet of education research at this point that teacher quality is the biggest school-based factor in student achievement, but how much is teacher quality associated with education background and certification status? This is the question that new research from the Bush Institute seeks to answer. One report in particular stands out: Read more about The Bush Institute releases Teacher Effectiveness Research[…]
Anyone following education policy over the past several years has most likely read a headline along the lines of this: “Disgruntled New Teachers Leave the Profession in Droves.” Despite such recent education policy stories, the picture since 2007 has been decidedly rosier: Fully 70 percent of beginning teachers stay in the profession for at least Read more about Despite Reports to the Contrary, New Teachers Are Staying in Their Jobs Longer[…]