Ensuring Quality Teaching

This report presents selected findings from the school principal data files of the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS).  It provides the following descriptive information on school principals by school type, student characteristics, and other relevant categories: number, race/ethnicity, age, gender, college degrees, salary, hours worked, focus of work, years experience, and tenure at current school.

Research supports that school districts' prereferral consultation teams adhere less closely to quality consultation procedures and are less effective than those conducted through university research projects. This study investigated whether this finding might be due to incompatibilities between school settings and recommended team consultation practices.

The fact that well-qualified teachers are inequitably distributed to students in the United
States has received growing public attention. By every measure of qualifications—
certification, subject matter background, pedagogical training, selectivity of college attended,
test scores, or experience—less-qualified teachers tend to be found in schools serving
greater numbers of low-income and minority students.

Environmental features of elementary school classrooms are examined in relation to distraction and privacy. Teachers' adjustments of their activities to make their settings less distracting are also explored. 

The purpose of this study is to assess whether academic achievement in fact increases after the introduction of high-stakes tests. The first objective of this study is to assess whether academic achievement has improved since the introduction of high-stakes testing policies in the 27 states with the highest stakes written into their grade 1-8 testing policies.

This article discusses instructional coaching as well as the eight factors that can increase the likelihood that coaching will be a real fix for a school. Instructional coaching holds much potential for improving the way teachers teach and the way students learn, but that potential will only be realized if leaders plan their coaching program with care. 

In general, social validity data reflect the social significance of target behaviors, the appropriateness of procedures, and the perceived importance of results. Intervention integrity data provide evidence that treatments are implemented in the intended fashion.

When mentors are well-selected, well-trained, and given the time to work intensively with new teachers, they not only help average teachers become good, but good teachers become great. And because new teachers are most often assigned to the poorest schools and the most challenging classrooms, instructional-mentoring programs provide a powerful lever for closing the teacher-quality gap and ensuring that all students, regardless of their backgrounds, have a real opportunity to succeed.

A new report from the Center for American Progress suggests American students would be better served by allowing teachers more time to collaborate with colleagues, planning lessons, and reviewing the effects of instruction.

Over the last decade, policy and business leaders have come to know what parents have always known: teachers are the largest school-based factor in student achievement. Yet not all schools have equal access to the most effective teachers. High-needs schools that serve large proportions of economically disadvantaged and minority students are more likely to have difficulty recruiting and retaining teachers, particularly in high-demand subjects like math and special education.

The Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary School Principals in the United States is a subsection of the NCES 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). It provides descriptive statistics on K-12 school principals in areas such as: race, gender, education level, salary, experience, and working conditions.

This article outlines how far the community schools movement has come since the AFT made community schools a priority in 2008. It explains why the movement has grown, clarifies what exactly makes a community school different from other schools, lays out how community schools work, and shows the positive results that community schools are attaining.

The updated and expanded second edition of this classic text provides new research and insights into how principals can encourage the teacher development that enhances student learning.

This paper theorizes that variations in learning and the level of learning of students are determined by the students' learning histories and the quality of instruction they receive.

This systematic descriptive historical review was conducted to examine the status and trends in expository text structure instruction efficacy research for first through twelfth grade students. The analysis included sixty studies, which spanned the years 1978 to 2014.

Many U.S. school districts have difficulty hiring enough qualified teachers to replace those who retire, transfer to other districts, or leave the teaching profession. Some subjects are more difficult to staff and some schools have higher turnover than others, creating recruitment and hiring bottlenecks.

The purpose of this guide is to help district leaders take on the challenge of ensuring that students have equitable access to excellent teachers. It shares some early lessons the Education Trust has learned from districts about the levers available to prioritize low-income students and students of color in teacher quality initiatives. The guide outlines a seven-stage process that can help leaders define their own challenges, explore underlying causes, and develop strategies to ensure all schools and students have equitable access to effective teachers.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how student teaching experiences impact the sense of teaching efficacy and feelings of preparedness of pre-service teachers in an early and elementary teacher education program. The study used an action research, mixed-methods design.

During recent decades, the notion of team leadership has emerged as a central theme in the international discourse on systemic education reform. This issue of Research in Educational Administration and Leadership not only captures a collective sense of commitment to education as means for advancing national social, economic, and political wellbeing but also reflects a changing nature of leadership across a wide spectrum of educational organizations and contexts. 

Using 4 years of panel data constructed from the North Carolina Teacher Working Condition Survey, this study uses value-added modeling approaches to explore the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of four measures of their working conditions and their principal.

Handbook of Response to Intervention in Early Childhood represents an ambitious undertaking: namely, to gather within a single volume all of the knowledge that exists on a topic that has attracted much attention in recent years.

This paper examines how the hiring process is changing as a result of teacher evaluation reforms.

Thorough and comprehensive, this book offers essential information about how to form leadership teams, identify high stakes problems, build commitment, create a school-wide vision and establish school-wide goals, handle setbacks, maintain the vision and sustain change, evaluate and assess comprehensive school change.

Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. 

The most recent incarnation of ESEA, signed into law in January of 2002 by President George W. Bush, is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). We’re now 13 years into NCLB, so reauthorization is long overdue. It is not just the long delay that argues for congressional action, but the extent to which the Obama administration has replaced the provisions of the bill with its own set of priorities implemented through Race to the Top and state waivers. 

In the past, the accreditation process put a premium on compliance and included some reporting requirements that did not necessarily lead programs toward excellence or increase teacher candidates' impact on schools and learning. The accreditation process enabled institutions to think they were "done" once they earned accredited status, and did not do enough to encourage programs to tackle complex challenges confronting P-12 schools.

Education researchers and policy makers agree that teachers differ in terms of quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific teacher credentials and student achievement.

In this article, we summarize and review the research on teams and groups in organization settings published from January 1990 to April 1996. The article focuses on studies in which the dependent variables are concerned with various dimensions of effectiveness. A heuristic framework illustrating recent trends in the literature depicts team effectiveness as a function of task, group, and organization design factors, environmental factors, internal processes, external processes, and group psychosocial traits.

This book reviews the evaluation research literature that has accumulated around 19 K-12 mathematics curricula and breaks new ground in framing an ambitious and rigorous approach to curriculum evaluation that has relevance beyond mathematics. 

One of the more difficult issues involves a debate between observers who are concerned about an overall teacher shortage, and others who see it largely as a distributional problem where some schools have a relative surplus of teachers while other schools struggle with a persistent, unmet demand for qualified teachers.

We study the effectiveness of teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) in Washington State, which has one of the largest populations of National Board-Certified Teachers (NBCTs) in the nation. Certification effects vary by subject, grade level, and certification type, with greater effects for middle school math certificates. We find mixed evidence that teachers who pass the assessment are more effective than those who fail, but that the underlying NBPTS assessment score predicts student achievement.

The goal of this article is to illustrate various strategies that the Hawaii Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division adopted to increase the use of empirical evidence to improve the quality services and outcomes for youth.

This study hypothesizes the following: Trust and leadership dimensions that support empowerment and involvement will predict an educational organization’s ability to minimize a threat–rigid response and flexibly negotiate new demands.

This book by organizational psychologist Aubrey C. Daniels is a guide for anyone who is required to supervise people and is particularly relevant to school principals. It is based on applying positive consequences to improve performance and offers strategies to reduce undesirable behavior so your school and employees can be successful.

This report gauges progress toward achieving high quality teaching in every classroom,
using data about teaching conditions that are, new since publication of an earlier report by
the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.

What is it that keeps some people in teaching and chases others out? What can be done to increase the power of the teaching profession to recruit and retain effective teachers and to create a stable, expert teaching force in all kinds of districts?

The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable amount of policy directed at teacher education-and an intense debate about whether and how various approaches to preparing and supporting teachers make a difference. A set of policy initiatives was launched to design professional standards, strengthen teacher education and certification requirements, increase investments in induction mentoring and professional development, and transform roles for teachers.

The authors respond to Dan Goldhaber and Dominic Brewer’s article in the Summer 2000 issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis that claimed from an analysis of NELS teacher and student data that teacher certification has little bearing on student achievement. Goldhaber and Brewer found strong and consistent evidence that, as compared with students whose teachers are uncertified, students achieve at higher levels in mathematics when they have teachers who hold standard certification in mathematics. 

Recent debates about the utility of teacher education have raised questions about whether certified teachers are, in general, more effective than those who have not met the testing and training requirements for certification, and whether some candidates with strong liberal arts backgrounds might be at least as effective as teacher education graduates.

This article illustrates how successful leaders combine the too often dichotomized practices of transformational and instructional leadership in different ways across different phases of their schools' development in order to progressively shape and “layer” the improvement culture in improving students' outcomes.

This book examines the nature of successful school leadership: what it is, what it looks like in practice & what are the consequences for schools & pupils.

Research shows that the most powerful, in-school influence on learning is the quality of instruction that teachers bring to their students. In the next decade, more than 1.5 million new teachers will be hired for our schools; unfortunately, teacher preparation programs may not be up to the task of delivering the teacher workforce we need, and critics have identified lax selection of teacher candidates, coursework disconnected from classroom practice, and weak clinical opportunities as indications that we are inadequately preparing teachers. 

The future of virtual environments is evident in many fields but is just emerging in the field of teacher education. In this article, the authors provide a summary of the evolution of simulation in the field of teacher education and three factors that need to be considered as these environments further develop. The authors provide a specific example of the work at two universities that use a specific virtual environment, TLE TeachLivE™, in teacher education.

The focus of this project is to create research in teacher education that positively impacts teacher recruitment, preparation and retention in urban environments. The novel approach we are using to attack this problem is that of capturing, analyzing, synthesizing and simulating human interactions in Mixed Reality (part real, part synthetic) environments, thereby creating training/screening settings that are realistic and yet do not put actual children at risk.

This report highlights the key research literature that addresses the principal competencies important for positive student and school outcomes.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) recently released a summary report of the impact of School Improvement Grants (SIG). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided states and school districts with $3 Billion for SIG. By accepting SIG grants states agreed to implement one of four interventions to improve the lowest performing schools: transformation, turnaround, restart, or closure. The goals of SIG were to improve practices in four main areas: (1) adopting comprehensive instructional reform strategies, (2) developing and increasing teacher and principal effectiveness, (3) increasing learning time and creating community-oriented schools, and (4) having operational flexibility and receiving support. The report finds minimal positive effects from the grants and no evidence that SIG had significant impacts on math and reading scores, graduation rates, or increased college enrollment.

Teachers work in isolation from one another. They view their classrooms as their personal domains, have little access to the ideas or strategies of their colleagues, and prefer to be left alone rather than engage with their colleagues or principals. Their professional practice is shrouded in a veil of privacy and personal autonomy and is not a subject for collective discussion or analysis.

A meta-analysis of after-school programs that seek to enhance the personal and social skills of children and adolescents indicated that, compared to controls, participants demonstrated significant increases in their self-perceptions and bonding to school, positive social behaviors, school grades and levels of academic achievement, and significant reductions in problem behaviors.

Research strongly suggests that feedback obtained through direct observations of performance can be a powerful tool for improving teacher’s skills. This study examines a peer teacher observation method used in England. The study found no evidence that Teacher Observation improved student language and math scores.

When schools form partnerships with families and the community, the children benefit. These guidelines for building partnerships can make it happen.

This study investigates the relationship between measures of mathematics teacher skill and student achievement in California high schools. Test scores are analyzed in relation to teacher experience and education and student demographics. The results are consistent with the hypotheses that there is a shortage of qualified mathematics teachers in California and that this shortage is associated with low student scores in mathematics.

This article describes an innovative approach, developed by North Carolina State University,
to prepare leaders specifically for work in rural schools in high poverty districts. 

The first portion of this article describes the development and validation of a classroom observation measure. The goal of the measure was to assess the quality of reading instruction provided to first-grade English learners.

This book is written by Tom Gilbert who is one of the most influential theorists in building a science of performance management. Although not explicitly written for educators, it offers concrete examples principals can apply to improve the performance of teachers and other school personnel so student’s can ultimately be successful.

A review of the literature demonstrates that schools are frequently called upon to improve by developing high levels of teacher collaboration. At the same time, there is a paucity of research investigating the extent to which teachers’ collaborative school improvement practices are related to student achievement.

This descriptive study examines the relationship between student teaching experiences and a teacher’s future effectiveness on the job. The primary finding is that teachers are more effective when the student demographics of their current schools are similar to the student demographics of the schools in which they did their student teaching. This study suggests that further experimental research be conducted to determine if the data hold up. If they do, the implication is that, in recruiting new teachers, school principals would be well served by choosing candidates whose student teaching experiences were in schools whose demographics match those of their own schools. Teacher preparation programs can also assist by assessing candidates’ preferences for where they plan on working and match student teaching placements to schools with similar demographics where new teachers are likely to be employed.

We use a unique longitudinal sample of student teachers (“interns”) from six Washington state teacher training institutions to investigate patterns of entry into the teaching workforce. We estimate split population models that simultaneously estimate the impact of individual characteristics and student teaching experiences on the timing and probability of initial hiring as a public school teacher. 

New teachers have unique needs as they enter the classroom. Ensuring that they have high-quality support allows them to become effective teachers faster and builds their confidence to stay longer in the profession.

In schools throughout the country, it is testing season--time for students to take the Big Standardized Test (the PARCC, SBA, or your state's alternative). This ritual really blossomed way back in the days of No Child Left Behind, but after all these years, teachers are mostly unexcited about it. There are many problems with the testing regimen, but a big issue for classroom teachers is that the tests do not help the teacher do her job.

Is dismissing poorly performing teachers truly feasible in America today? After all the political capital (and real capital) spent on reforming teacher evaluation, can districts actually terminate ineffective teachers who have tenure or have achieved veteran status?

To assess the effect of “metacognitive” instruction on reading comprehension, 20 studies, with a total student population of 1,553, were compiled and quantitatively synthesized. In this compilation of studies, metacognitive instruction was found particularly effective for junior high students (seventh and eighth grades). Among the metacognitive skills, awareness of textual inconsistency and the use of self-questioning as both a monitoring and a regulating strategy were most effective. Reinforcement was the most effective teaching strategy.

Examines trends in the evolution of the principalship in the United States from the 1960s to the present.

This paper explores several types of school contexts (institutional, community, socio-cultural, political, economic, school improvement) and what we have learned about how they shape school leadership practice.

This longitudinal study examines the effects of collaborative leadership on school improvement and student reading achievement in 192 elementary schools in one state in the USA over a 4-year period

This article reviews the evolution of instructional leadership as a model for principal practice, examines barriers to its successful enactment, and proposes strategies

This chapter of Handbook of The Economics of Education reviews research on teacher labor markets, the importance of teacher quality in the determination of student achievement, and the extent to which specific observable characteristics often related to hiring decisions and salary explain the variation in the quality of instruction.

This new research addresses a number of critical questions:  Are a teacher’s cognitive skills a good predictor of teacher quality? This study examines the student achievement of 36 developed countries in the context of teacher cognitive skills. This study finds substantial differences in teacher cognitive skills across countries that are strongly related to student performance.

This Wallace paper summarizes a decade of the foundation’s research in school leadership to identify five critical roles for school principals to be effective.

Using findings generated from a large-scale survey of 1,400 Ontario principals, this paper reports on the influence of opportunities for school–community involvement on the work principals do on a daily basis and details how involvement in such activities influences and impacts their workloads.

This longitudinal study examines the effects of distributed leadership on school improvement and growth in student math achievement in 195 elementary schools in one state over a 4-year period.

Noting that the evidence of families' influence on their children's school achievement is consistent, positive, and convincing, this report examines research on parent and community involvement and its impact on student achievement.

This updated and substantially expanded edition reveals how to build strong collaborative relationships and offers practical advice for improving interactions between parents and teachers, from insuring that PTA groups are constructive and inclusive to navigating the complex issues surrounding diversity in the classroom.

Is a popular innovation for increasing human capital in the teaching profession—competitive college scholarships for teachers—effective? 

This report provides descriptive information on traditional public, charter, and private school principals over the period of 1987-88 through 2011-12. It includes comparative data on number of principals, gender, race/ethnicity, age, advance degrees, principal experience, teaching experience, salaries, hours worked, focus of work, experience and tenure at current schools, etc.

The authors outline some of the mechanisms through which parental school involvement affects achievement and identify how patterns and amounts of involvement vary across cultural, economic, and community contexts and across developmental levels. Then propose the next steps for research. 

In this book E.D. Hirsch, the author of Cultural Literacy, makes a case against much of what schools are now trying to do to improve education. Lifelong learning, multiple intelligences, learning style, metacognitive skills, cooperative learning, critical thinking, and learning to learn will do little for students, he says.

The specific purposes of this article are to identify and synthesize the empirical research on how leadership influences student achievement and to provide evidence on how school leaders should direct their efforts.

The authors conducted correlational analyses to examine the strength of the relationship between each of the seven competencies and found that the model appears to reflect the internal states of principals who orchestrate school turnaround. 

Community colleges typically offer extensive developmental education programs to students
with weak academic skills in order to prepare them for college-level coursework. Yet, for
students referred to developmental mathematics education, rates of completion in
developmental math courses and in college-level math courses required for a degree are
particularly low.

Keep students engaged and actively learning with focused, relevant discussion. Second only to lecture as the most widely used instructional strategy, there's no better method than classroom discussion to actively engage students with course material. Most faculty are not aware that there is an extensive body of research on the topic from which instructors can learn to facilitate exceptional classroom discussion.

Contemporary educational theory holds that one of the pivotal causes of inadequate student
achievement, especially in disadvantaged schools, is the inability of schools to adequately
staff classrooms with qualified teachers. Deficits in the quantity of teachers produced and in
the quality of preparation prospective teachers receive have long been singled out as
primary explanations for underqualified teaching.

This review critically examines 15 empirical studies, conducted since the mid1980s, on the effects of support, guidance, and orientation programs—collectively known as induction—for beginning teachers.

the authors build on this body of work by further examining how working conditions predict both teachers‘ job satisfaction and their career plans.

The primary obstacle to faster progress in U.S. education reform is hard to put your finger on, because it’s an absence, not a presence. It is not an interest group or a manifest social problem. It is the infrastructure we never built for identifying what works. It is the organizational framework we’ve not yet constructed for building consensus among education leaders across the country to identify what’s working.

This comprehensive review provides a framework for the expanding body of literature that seeks to make not only teaching, but rather the entire school environment, responsive to the schooling needs of minoritized students

Work sheet on the school-wide benchmarks of quality. Benchmark's include: faculty commitment, effective procedures for dealing with discipline, data entry and analysis plan establishment, expectation and rule development, and so on.

Public school teachers often receive training in a professional development seminar or workshop format. These formats may be ineffective for teaching specific skills intended to be used in the classroom due to lack of practice opportunities.

The study explored the following overarching question: What does it take for leaders to promote and support powerful, equitable learning in a school and in the district and state system that serves the school? The study pursued this question through a set of coordinated investigations,

For decades we’ve been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there’s still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable—we need to know whether what they’re doing is actually working.

In recent years, states have sought to increase accountability for public school teachers by implementing a package of reforms centered on high-stakes evaluation systems. We examine the effect of these reforms on the supply and quality of new teachers.

This study is among the first to address the empirical limitations of prior studies on organizational contexts by leveraging one of the largest survey administration efforts ever conducted in the United States outside of the decennial population census.

Instead of looking at the principal alone for instructional leadership, we need to develop leadership capacity among all members of the school communities.

Starting in independent professional schools 150 years ago, teacher education in the United States ended up in universities. This was not the result of a plan to enhance the quality of professional education for teachers. Instead, it was a side effect of the growing dominance of the university over all matters educational, which meant that teacher education, like other professional domains, had no other place to go.

Plaintiffs, representing the class of black children in California who have been or in the future will be wrongly placed and maintained in special classes for the "educable mentally retarded" ("E.M.R.") challenge the placement process for those classes and particularly certain uses of standardized individual intelligence ("I.Q.") tests in California.

This study addressed teachers' and parents' perceptions of the meanings and functions of parent involvement. 

Effective school districts maintain superintendent and school board collegiality which can foster success and connectedness among members. Delagardelle and Alsbury (2008) found that superintendents and board members are not consistent in their perceptions about the work the board does, and Glass (2007) found that states do not require boards to undergo evaluation for effectiveness.

This study examines the relationship between two dominant measures of teacher quality, teacher qualification and teacher effectiveness (measured by value-added modeling), in terms of their influence on students’ short-term academic growth and long-term educational success (measured by bachelor’s degree attainment).

This article describes a 4-year program of research about transformational forms of leadership in schools
responding to a variety of restructuring initiatives.

For aspiring leaders, this framework provides important insights about what they will need to learn to be successful.

The purpose of this paper is to provide one perspective on this question, focusing in particular on findings that may be applicable in the Nordic context.

This study aimed to estimate the impact of collective, or shared, leadership on key teacher variables and on student achievement. 

Using meta-analytic review techniques, this study synthesized the results of 79
unpublished studies about the nature of transformational school leadership (TSL) and its
impact on the school organization, teachers, and students.

In 2008 the authors published an article in this journal entitled Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership (Leithwood, Harris, and Hopkins 2008). This article revisits each of the seven claims, summarising what was said about each in the original publications, weighing each of the claims considering recent empirical evidence, and proposing revisions or refinements as warranted.

The authors begin with eight basic understandings, assumptions, or starting points for our subsequent account of how to lead the successful turnaround of underperforming school. 

This report by researchers from the Universities of Minnesota and Toronto examines the available evidence and offers educators, policymakers and all citizens interested in promoting successfulschools, some answers to these vitally important questions

Guided by a synthesis of theory on human motivation and evidence about teachers’motivation to implement school reform, this study aimed to better understand the responses of teachers and school administrators to government accountability initiatives and to assess the extent to which leadership practices had a bearing on those responses

The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between principal leadership, dimensions of school capacity, and teacher professional learning in 32 Hong Kong primary schools.

This meta-analysis finds a positive relationship between school principals spending time on five commonly assigned roles and student achievement. 

Recent studies concerned with goal choice and the factors that influence it, the function of learning goals, the effect of goal framing, goals and affect (well-being), group goal setting, goals and traits, macrolevel goal setting, and conscious versus subconscious goals are described.

This article analyses findings from two studies conducted collaboratively across two educational settings, New Zealand and England, in 2001–2002. These studies examined the impact of national educational policy reforms on the nature of primary teachers’ work and sense of their own professionalism and compared these impacts across the two countries.

About 11,500 Los Angeles Unified elementary school teachers and 470 elementary schools are included in The Times' updated database of "value-added" ratings.

The College board was recently released SAT scores for the high school graduating class of 2015. Both math and reading scores declined from 2014, continuing a steady downward trend that has been in place for the past decade. Pundits of contrasting political stripes seized on the scores to bolster their political agendas. Petrilli argued that falling SAT scores show that high schools needs more reform. For Burris, the declining scores were evidence of the failure of policies her organization opposes. This articles pointing out that SAT was never meant to measure national achievement and provide detail explanation. 

The long term trend test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (LTT NAEP) is the longest running test of student achievement that provides a scientifically valid estimate of what American students have learned. 

The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of the relationships among principal transformational leadership, school leadership-team transformational leadership, and school culture.

This study investigates teacher empowerment in schools that have at least four years of experience with some form of decentralized or school-based management. 

Focusing on school leadership relations between principals and teachers, this study examines the potential of their active collaboration around instructional matters to enhance the quality of teaching and student performance

The present paper is an attempt to formulate a positive theory of motivation which will satisfy these theoretical demands and at the same time conform to the known facts, clinical and observational as well as experimental. It derives most directly, however, from clinical experience. 

The goal of the Massachusetts Educator Evaluation Framework is to support student learning by providing educators with enhanced opportunities for professional growth and feedback for improvement. Distributing leadership is a key strategy to ensure the provision of high quality feedback.

This report examines the evidence about the emerging approach, Integrated student supports (ISS), from multiple perspectives. 

This book introduces the foundations of the recently revised professional educational leadership standards and provides an in-depth explanation and application of each one.

This paper presents the research base and conceptual framework for a new principal leadership assessment tool: the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED™).

This article presents findings from the authors' exploratory study of 12 instructionally effective
school districts (IESD) in California. 

The purpose of this analysis is to describe the research base that undergirds the emerging concept of learning-centered leadership.

The National Center for Education Evaluation, a division of the Institute of Education Sciences has released a new research brief that evaluated two strategies for improving educator effectiveness as measured by improvements in student outcomes.  

This paper enters debate about how U.S. schools might address long-standing disparities in educational and economic opportunities while improving the educational outcomes for all students. with a vision and an argument for realizing that vision, based on lessons learned from 60 years of education research and reform efforts. The central points covered draw on a much more extensive treatment of these issues published in 2015. The aim is to spark fruitful discussion among educators, policymakers, and researchers.

This book offers a comprehensive and strategic approach to address what has become labeled as "talent and human capital."

This report reviews studies that have investigated the relationships between principal characteristics (including precursors, behaviors, and leadership styles) and student achievement.

This book provides essential information to better understand and improve the nature and quality of school and family partnerships for the benefit of all children

The COVID pandemic has meant that large numbers of students are learning by Zoom instead of in classrooms, and schools are struggling to reach students who don't have sufficient access to the internet or computers. In all this disruption, there is still one constant: the importance of effective, skilled teachers.

Our nation faces a daunting challenge in making sure that we have a sufficient supply of well-educated, well-prepared teachers for our children. There is surely widespread agreement that good teachers are vital to our future. However, there is not widespread agreement about how we accomplish this goal. Some propose that we raise standards for entry into the teaching profession, while others suggest that we lower unnecessary barriers.

Administrator support has been identified as a key factor in deterring teacher turnover. Yet, the specific ways school principals directly or indirectly influence teacher retention remain underexamined. The paper aims to discuss this issue. 

This booklet focuses on parents—the child’s first and most powerful teachers.

This study examined the school-level effects on tested student achievement in 129 high poverty elementary schools that implemented a common set of comprehensive parent engagement strategies over a 2-year period. 

This article focuses on an overlooked factor in the unequal sorting of teachers across schools: the geographic preferences of teachers. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, the author examines the patterns of geographic mobility of new teachers and compares them to the patterns of other college graduates.

This paper is a synthesis of the evidence-base on school leadership and its impact on student performance.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative impact of different types of leadership on students' academic and nonacademic outcomes.

Whether they are termed regional or assistant superintendents, area directors, instructional leadership supervisors, executive officers, or some other title, a leadership hierarchy is employed in school districts in the United States whereby principals report to and are managed or supported by principal supervisors. Traditionally, this role has primarily been one of representing the demands or expectations of the central office to the school by focusing on providing information about district initiatives and ensuring compliance.

Teams and other collaborative structures have become commonplace in American schools, although historically school staff members functioned more independently from one another. In this article, we describe the growing influence of collaboration and teaming in a variety of school contexts, but focus on the empirical literature on problem-solving teams as reflecting the state of research and practice in the schools.

This report is the first in a series by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) that examines the current status of states' teacher policies. Updated on a two-year cycle, each will cover a specific area of teacher policy. This report focuses on state teacher policies governing what states require in evaluations of both teachers and principals.

This report is about conceptual and methodological issues that arise when educational researchers use data from large-scale, survey research studies to investigate teacher effects on student achievement. We use data from Prospects to estimate the "overall" size of teacher effects on student achievement and to test some specific hypotheses about why such effects occur.

This study examines the influence of principal leadership in high schools on classroom instruction and student achievement through key organizational factors, including professional capacity, parent–community ties, and the school’s learning climate.

This report sets forth a framework of essential supports and contextual resources for school improvement, examines empirical evidence on its key elements and how they link to improvements in student learning, and investigates how a school's essential supports interact with community context to affect student learning.

For many centuries, the professor was the primary source of information, the font of knowledge. Books were nonexistent or scarce, as they still are today in developing countries of the world, and information was passed orally from teacher to pupil. The didactic lecture is an effective method for conveying information from one person to a larger number of students, but, as most of us have experienced, simply telling information to someone does not ensure that learning takes place.

This paper reviews evidence from six recent studies, which collectively suggest that teachers who leave high-poverty schools are not fleeing their students, but rather the poor working conditions that make it difficult for them to teach and their students to learn. They include school leadership, collegial relationships, and elements of school culture.

The purpose of this study was partly to test the factor structure of a recently developed Norwegian scale for measuring teacher self-efficacy and partly to explore relations between teachers' perception of the school context, teacher self-efficacy, collective teacher efficacy, teacher burnout, teacher job satisfaction, and teachers' beliefs that factors external to teaching puts limitations to what they can accomplish.

Professional development (PD) has been defined as facilitated teaching and learning experiences designed to enhance practitioners' knowledge, skills, and dispositions as well as their capacity to provide high-quality early learning experiences for young children. The purpose of this study was to use a framework from the National Professional Development Center on Inclusion (2008) to characterize key components of early childhood PD by conducting a descriptive systematic review of empirical literature.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative. The initiative's goal is dramatic gains in student achievement, graduation rates, and college-going, especially for LIM students. 

The report examines the internal and external conditions that matter for students’ and teachers’ feelings of safety.

This paper examines the critical issues that need to be addressed if value-added modeling is to be effectively used in education.

This volume provides a comprehensive summary of developments in theories and techniques within the areas of sampling, measurement, and statistical methods for analyzing behavioral data. By unifying new theories, techniques, methodologies, terminology, and language in behavioral observation research, the authors provide a comprehensive source for students and researchers.

Based on a synthesis of unpublished transformational school leadership (TSL) research completed during the last 14 years, this study inquired into the nature of TSL and its effects on student achievement using review methods including standard meta-analysis and vote-counting techniques. 

This study reviews evidence about the overall influence of direction-setting leadership practices (DSLPs), 1 of 4 major categories of practices included in a widely known conception of effective leadership (e.g., Leithwood & Louis, 2011) and a focus of many other such conceptions, as well.

This paper examines the effects of principal leadership and peer teacher influence on teachers' instructional practice and student learning.

The National Teacher and Principal Survey is completed every four years soliciting descriptive information from principals and teachers across the 50 states. A few highlights include: Sixty percent of school principals have been at their schools for three years or less. 

This empirical study of the practice of five elementary school principals whose student achievement gains were three times the expected rate of progress redefines some capabilities identified in the literature as central to leadership for learning.

While most educators believe working in teams is valuable, not all team efforts lead to instructional improvement. Through richly detailed case studies The Power of Teacher Teams demonstrates how schools can transform their teams into more effective learning communities that foster teacher leadership.

The hypothesis that guided this study was that the degree of teacher professionalism in a school would be related to (a) the professional orientation of principals in their exercise of administrative authority—especially, the extending of adaptive discretion to teachers in the conduct of their work—and (b) the trust evident among various actors in the school community.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships among faculty trust in the principal, principal leadership behaviors, school climate, and student achievement.

This report looks at New York City's efforts to create an evidence-based and collaborative teaching culture.

What we don't know about learning could fill a book—and it might be a schoolbook. In a
masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, the eminent psychologist Jerome
Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do
so.

The purpose of this study was to examine various factors that are often present in principal–teacher interactions and teacher–teacher relationships to see how those may have an impact on teachers’ classroom instructional practices.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss findings from Learning from Leadership. This study was designed to identify and describe successful educational leadership and to explain how such leadership can yield improvements in student learning.

The purpose of this Handbook on Restructuring and Substantial School Improvement is to provide principles for restructuring and substantially improving schools.

This article offers practical suggestions on how to build a data-based culture in schools.

This paper considers issues surrounding the use data and data based decision-making in schools. It describes the state of the field and possible future directions in school based technology.

This is an analysis of a district-wide evaluation of data uses and procedures for data-based decision-making.

This report examines the pervasive and longstanding failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of teachers. 

This Op-Ed commentary by Daniel Willingham discusses the current knowledge base on effective reading instruction in the context of a recent New York Times article on the topic.

The purpose of this essay is to describe quality teacher induction that has evolved from “fourth-wave” (1997–2006) teacher induction program development and research. A definition of quality induction is proposed, and a set of induction goals and components are outlined.

This book represents the contributions of prominent researchers, teacher educators, policy makers, teachers, and parents on current and emerging issues facing the field of special education, and their critical thinking on how to ensure that students with disabilities receive free appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.

This policy brief surveys historical and contemporary trends in teacher preparation, and explores what is known about the quality of five of the most prominent independent teacher education programs in the U.S., including their impact on teacher quality and student learning. The author's analysis demonstrates that claims regarding the success of such programs are not substantiated by peer-reviewed research and program evaluations.