Teacher Professional Development

This paper: reviews research on beginning teacher induction programs, summarizing previous reviews of the topic; identifies various state- and local-level induction programs, analyzing best practices that exist today. 

This article attempts an analysis of the accumulated literature on collegial relations with the intent of formulating a more robust conception, one that accounts for variation in teachers’ involvements with one another, the circumstances that surround those involvements, the meanings teachers and others attach to them, and the consequences that flow from them.

The U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology published this brief that summarizes research on the role of online communities of practice and social networks in supporting the professional performance of educators.

Knowledge of Diverse Learners (KDL) is increasingly recognized as an essential component of knowledge base for effective teaching as in today's schools, teachers must be prepared to teach a diverse population of student (Banks et al. 2005). In other words, teachers need to be aware that their students in a classroom are and always have been different from one another in a variety of ways. KDL refers to an understanding of diversity of students in terms of their abilities and interests and how they respond to diverse situations; an application of different teaching strategies; and how various types of classroom activities might be managed.

The main focus of this study is to find different kinds of variables that might contribute to variations in the strength and direction of the relationship by examining quantitative studies that relate mathematics teachers’ subject matter knowledge to student achievement in mathematics.

This article describes a school district administrator's research on optimal coaching experiences for classroom teachers. This research was done with the intent of gaining a better understanding of how coaching affects student learning. 

The authors examined the effects of six types of teacher professional learning activities on student achievement growth over 4 years using statewide longitudinal survey data collected from 467 middle school mathematics teachers in 91 schools merged with 11,192 middle school students' mathematics scores in a standardized assessment in Missouri. 

This essay suggests potential research avenues in the area of technology-mediated learning. It seeks to motivate greater depth of research into the question of how technology enhances learning. 

This issue is the second in a three-part series on quality teaching. The other two issues in the series focus on teacher recruitment and teachers' career structures and work environment. This issue examines research and expert consensus on teacher preparation,

This report highlights the work of New Teacher Center (NTC), a national nonprofit organization headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, that has partnered with states, districts, and policymakers to develop programs and policies that accelerate new teacher effectiveness.

This case study explored the use of the Bug-in-Ear (BIE) tool for undergraduate student-teacher supervision in the hands of a novice BIE2 coach, including the ease with which BIE equipment can be set up and operated by a novice coach and naïve users in the classroom. 

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a classroom-teacher-delivered reading intervention for struggling readers called the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), designed particularly for kindergarten and first-grade teachers and their struggling students in rural, low-wealth communities. 

Teacher preparation is at the core of most public universities’ missions, providing a vital function in pursuit of states’ ambitions for an educated and engaged populace. The member institutions of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities strive to continuously improve the development of teachers who will prepare future generations in their communities for success in college and careers.

Value-added assessment proves that very good teaching can boost student learning and that family background does not determine a student's destiny. Students taught by highly effective teachers several years in a row earn higher test scores than students assigned to particularly ineffective teachers.

The work of the New Teacher Center (NTC) highlights the importance of the conditions for success in its Program Theory of Action model. This paper also provides Conditions for Success Self-Evaluation Worksheet that will help you to evaluate your program’s readiness to effectively implement the Teacher Induction Pathway presented in the Adult Education Teacher Induction Toolkit. 

Despite increasing emphasis on preparing more and better teachers and despite the near universal presence of student teaching across teacher education programs (TEPs), numerous questions about what and how student teaching experiences contribute to preservice teachers’ development remain unanswered.

This article describes the efforts of eleven universities and colleges to assess their teacher education programs based on broad, commonly held outcomes.

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. 

This Research & Policy Brief addresses the aspect of the teacher support system that is perhaps the most important and often the most weakly implemented: teacher learning and development.

This research objective was to study soft skills of new teachers in the secondary schools of Khon Kaen Secondary Educational Service Area 25, Thailand. The data were collected from 60 purposive samples of new teachers by interviewing and questionnaires. The results of this study were informed that new teachers have all of soft skills at high level totally. Communicative skills were highest among seven of soft skills and next Life-long learning and information management skills, Critical and problem solving skills, Team work skills, Ethics, moral and professional skills, Leadership skills and Innovation invention and development skills were lowest in all skills. Based on the research findings obtained, the sub-skills of seven soft skills will be considered and utilized in the package of teacher development program of next research.

Significant dollars are spent each school year on professional development programs to improve teachers’ effectiveness. This study assessed the integrity with which pre-service teachers used a differential reinforcement of alternate behavior (DRA) strategy taught to them during their student teaching experience.

This 4-year study identifies the differences between a coteaching and a non-coteaching model of student teaching. Quantitative and qualitative results clearly demonstrate the positive impact of coteaching on learners. This emerging practice of coteaching in student teaching holds great promise in transforming the world of teacher preparation.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the simSchool (v.1) simulation as a tool for preparing student teachers for actual classroom teaching. Twenty-two student teachers used the simulation for a practice session and two test sessions; data included objective performance statistics generated by the simulation program, self-rated performance data, and qualitative opinions and perceptions from participants.

Recent calls to improve the quality of education in schools have drawn attention to the importance of teachers’ preparation for work in classroom settings. Although the practicum has long been the traditional means for pre-service teachers to learn and practice classroom teaching, it does not always offer student teachers the time, safe practice experiences, repetition, or extensive feedback needed for them to gain adequate knowledge, skills, and confidence.

This study examined results associated with a field-based undergraduate early childhood teacher education program designed as a response to calls for enhanced field experiences and community-situated teacher education that narrows the preparation-to-practice gap.

Using professional self-regulation in medicine as a model, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future has proposed sweeping changes in how teachers are trained and licensed, claiming that the reforms are well-grounded in research. This paper argues that the research literature offers far less support for the Commission's recommendations than is claimed. 

This article reviewed a number of comprehensive instructional-mentoring programs and identified three critical factors that seem to be making a positive difference. 

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.

Researchers at Learning Sciences International wanted to take a closer look at the impact PLCs have on the schools we work with. We hoped to tease out answers to two related questions about PLCs. When PLCs are working at optimum levels, what is their relationship to student achievement? Secondly, do cohesive and focused high-functioning PLCs have any impact on teacher morale?

The book presents many examples of Questioning the Author (QtA) in action as children engage with narrative and expository texts to construct meaning.

The main body of the report takes readers through the four stages that this study used to define the teacher career continuum: Preservice, Novice, Career, and Teacher Leader stages.

This study examines the impact of a nationally disseminated professional development program, Developing Mathematical Ideas (DMI), on teachers' specialized knowledge for teaching mathematics and illustrates how such research could be conducted.

This study used a delayed multiple-baseline across-participants design to analyze the effects of coaching on special education teachers’ implementation of function-based interventions with students with severe disabilities. This study also examined the extent to which teachers could generalize function-based interventions in different situations. 

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of what is known about teacher induction in special education and to outline recommendations for the design of induction programs and further research.

As part of a federally funded study of NCLB, RAND Corporation researchers, in collaboration with researchers from the American Institutes for Research, analyzed the progress that states, districts, and schools have made in implementing the teacher qualification provisions of NCLB through the 2004–2005 school year. 

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a meta analysis study with the goal of providing state and local education leaders with scientifically-based evidence regarding the effects of teacher professional development on improving student learning. The analysis focused on completed studies of effects of professional development for K-12 teachers of science and mathematics.

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) was awarded a grant from the
National Science Foundation to conduct a meta analysis study with the goal of providing
state and local education leaders with scientifically-based evidence regarding the effects of
teacher professional development on improving student learning. 

This paper seeks to estimate the effect that Career Leader (CL) program has had on teachers’ career decisions, specifically their decisions to stay in a specific school district or to remain in the teaching field.

Teacher professional development is essential to efforts to improve our schools. This article maps the terrain of research on this important topic. It first provides an overview of what we have learned as a field, about effective professional development programs and their impact on teacher learning. 

Using data from a large urban school district, this article tests the impact of structural, human, and social factors on the emergence of school-based professional community and examines the extent to which such developments in turn promote learning and experimentation among faculty

Methods for Effective Teaching helps teachers with every aspect of their day-to-day responsibilities. Readers learn about everything from planning and choosing the right instructional strategies, to delivering lessons, managing the classroom, disciplining students, assessing progress, and collaborating with colleagues and parents to actively engage students in learning. Numerous features, tables, and lists of recommendations help readers apply concepts and think critically about the decisions they'll have to make in their teaching careers.

This quantitative research valued added study assesses the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs in Louisiana to understand why some teacher preparation programs are more effective than other programs.

Effective teacher professional development is defined as structured professional learning
activities which result in changes in teacher practice and improvements in student learning
outcomes. Superintendents face common challenges unique to the rural environment which
hinder the delivery of effective teacher professional development in rural school districts.

This article discusses Ontario’s Teachers Learning and Leadership Program (TLLP), which aims to support experienced teachers’ professional learning, develop teachers’ leadership skills, and facilitate knowledge exchange to share practices. The author’s research identifies considerable benefits of professional learning led “by, with and for” experienced teachers involving collaborative learning and sharing of practices.

This paper describes a survey of teachers trained in Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement (TESA). The study examined whether teachers: agreed that TESA interactions were useful with today's children; continued to practice the TESA coding and observation process after being trained; and would recommend TESA to colleagues. 

In this article, the author argues convincingly for a view of American's cultural diversity as a self-evident reality - one that must be effectively addressed by inservice and preservice teacher education programmes.

This document includes the excerpts of five articles that provide a substantial evidence-based argument for the power of collaborative communities to improve teaching and learning. 

Teacher teams are increasingly common in urban schools. In this study, we analyze teachers’ responses to teams in six high-poverty schools. Teachers used two criteria to assess teams’ goodness of fit in meeting the demands of their work: whether their teams helped them teach better and whether the team contributed to a better school.

This small-scale pilot study investigated the role of school principals in the induction of new teachers in Ontario, Canada.

This paper examines the issue of efficacy of value-added measures in evaluating teachers. This question is important in understanding whether value-added analysis provides unbiased estimates of teachers’ impact on student achievement and whether these teachers improve long-term student outcomes.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the factors influencing school systems’ decisions behind crafting, developing, and revising differentiated pay plans that require districts to abandon the practice of providing only across-the-board salary increases for experience and advanced degrees by adding at least one additional criterion for compensating educators.

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. 

This study considered early career teacher attrition as an identity making process that involves a complex negotiation between individual and contextual factors.

The purpose of this overview is to provide information about teacher coaching as it is used in schools, the research that examines this practice as a method of teacher professional development, and its impact on student outcomes.

The purpose of this overview is to provide information about the role of formal teacher evaluation, the research that examines the practice, and its impact on student outcomes.

The purpose of this overview is to provide an understanding of the research base on professional development and its impact on student achievement, as well as offer recommendations for future teacher professional development.

The purpose of this overview is to provide an understanding of the research base on professional development and its impact on student achievement, as well as offer recommendations for future teacher professional development.

We use a rich administrative dataset from North Carolina to explore questions related to the relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement on the other. We conclude that a teacher's experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. 

Congress should redefine “professional development” and reengineer Title IIA to focus strictly on continuous performance improvement—of people and organizations—while keeping implementation flexible. A new Title IIA would make certain that state, district, and school leaders have the capacity required to manage professional development activities and resources more effectively to achieve Title II’s vital student achievement goals.

This article evaluates whether providing coaching between practice sessions in teacher education courses leads to more rapid development of skills and changes in teachers’ beliefs about student behavior, using mixed-reality simulations as a practice space and standardized assessment platform. We randomly assigned 105 prospective teachers to different coaching conditions between simulation sessions integrated into a teacher preparation program.

This study aimed to look into this by asking, “Which features of high quality online professional development were noted by participating educators in a statewide online teacher professional development program?” A survey was used to collect educators’ voices in this FIP professional development (PD) program.

The author reviewed about 1,000 articles to synthesize 119 studies from 1948 to 2004 with 1,450 findings and 355,325 students. The meta-analysis design followed Mackay, Barkham, Rees, and Stiles’s guidelines, including comprehensive search mechanisms, accuracy and bias control, and primary study validity assessment.

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.

The framework for teaching is a research-based set of components of instruction that are grounded in a constructivist view of learning and teaching. The framework defines four levels of performance--Unsatisfactory, Basic, Proficient, and Distinguished--for each element, providing a valuable tool that all teachers can use.

This article addresses the topics of staff assessment, teacher supervision, and professional development.

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.

Research shows how schools can create more powerful professional development experiences.

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.

Teacher professional learning is of increasing interest as one way to support the increasingly complex skills students need to learn in preparation for further education and work in the 21st century. Sophisticated forms of teaching are needed to develop student competencies such as deep mastery of challenging content, critical thinking, complex problem-solving, effective communication and collaboration, and self-direction. In turn, effective professional development (PD) is needed to help teachers learn and refine the pedagogies required to teach these skills.

This paper reviews 35 methodologically rigorous studies that have demonstrated a positive link between teacher professional development, teaching practices, and student outcomes. 

The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) is an authentic tool for evaluating prospective teachers by examining their abilities to plan, teach, assess, and reflect on instruction in actual classroom practice. The PACT seeks both to measure and develop teacher effectiveness, and this study of its predictive and consequential validity provides information on how well it achieves these goals.

This report examines practices in teacher and principal development in the United States in 2010. It looks at ineffective approaches as well as those models that show promise for improving educator and student performance.

This paper describes how teacher learning through involvement with student-performance assessments has been accomplished in the United States and around the world, particularly in countries that have been recognized for their high-performing educational systems

Going Virtual! 2010 is a follow-up report to the Going Virtual! Research series started in 2007. The purpose of the series is to describe current trends on the status of professional development for K-12 online teachers, as well as identify the unique needs and challenges faced by these instructors.

This chapter provides a survey of what is known about professional development for both brick and mortar and online teachers and uses this knowledge as a springboard to suggest policy and research implication of professional development and K-12 online teacher. 

This article offers ideas to improve the quality of inquiry into teacher learning, one of the most critical targets of education reform. 

The author suggests that we apply recent research knowledge to improve our conceptualization, measures, and methodology for studying the effects of teachers’ professional development on teachers and students. She makes the case that there is a research consensus to support the use of a set of core features and a common conceptual framework in professional development impact studies.

This paper discusses best practices in teachers’ professional development (PD) in the United States. We begin by presenting a conceptual framework for effective professional development, which suggests five key features that make professional development effective—content focus, active learning, coherence, sustained duration, and collective participation.

This paper discusses best practices in teachers’ professional development (PD) in the United States (U.S.).

This article examines the effects of professional development on teachers’ instruction. Using a purposefully selected sample of about 207 teachers in 30 schools, in 10 districts in five states, we examine features of teachers’ professional development and its effects on changing teaching practice in mathematics and science from 1996–1999. We found that professional development focused on specific instructional practices increases teachers’ use of those practices in the classroom. Furthermore, we found that specific features, such as active learning opportunities, increase the effect of the professional development on teacher’s instruction.

This study uses data collected in the intervention classrooms of Head Start REDI (Research- based, Developmentally Informed), a randomized clinical trial testing the efficacy of a comprehensive preschool curriculum targeting children’s social-emotional competence, language, and emergent literacy skills delivered by teachers who received weekly coaching support.

Of the five components of scientifically based reading instruction, traditional programs are
most likely to omit the first and most challenging instructional skill teachers need to teach
before children can learn to read: phonemic awareness.

The idea of improving schools by developing professional learning communities is currently in vogue. People use this term to describe every imaginable combination of individuals with an interest in education—a grade-level teaching team, a school committee, a high school department, an entire school district, a state department of education, a national professional organization, and so on.

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.

This paper draws upon a structured analysis of over 300 research-based papers on mentoring across three discipline areas in an attempt to make more valid inferences about the nature and outcomes of mentoring.

Classroom management is a topic of enduring concern for teachers, administrators, and the public. It consistently ranks as the first or second most serious educational problem in the eyes of the general public, and beginning teachers consistently rank it as their most pressing concern during their early teaching years. Management problems continue to be a major cause of teacher burnout and job dissatisfaction. Strangely, despite this enduring concern on the part of educators and the public, few researchers have chosen to focus on classroom management or to identify themselves with this critical field. 

Classroom management is a topic of enduring concern for teachers, administrators, and the
public. It consistently ranks as the first or second most serious educational problem in the
eyes of the general public, and beginning teachers consistently rank it as their most pressing
concern during their early teaching years.

This paper looks at methods to enable teachers to generalize skills taught in pre-service to use in the classroom.

This paper exams teachers' views on unions, tenure, pay-for-performance, alternative certification, and other issues and finds that while most teachers are strong supporters of standards, a sense of vulnerability, along with fears of politics and favoritism, make them loyal to the tenure system, loyal to their unions, and highly skeptical about pay tied to student test scores.

In reporting on one aspect of a national center's research on teacher education, this chapter examines two U.S. programs in which experienced teachers are expected to play major roles in the induction and socialization of beginning teachers. By exploring connections between what experienced teachers in the two projects do and the organizational and intellectual contexts within which they work, this analysis demonstrates that the contextual conditions of mentoring can lead to striking differences in the definition and enactment of mentoring roles. 

This paper reports the results of a literature review on the subject of beginning teacher induction, presenting a conceptually oriented discussion of the induction literature.

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 study employed a randomized experiment to examine differences in teacher and student learning from professional development (PD) in two modalities: online and face-to-face. 

Policy makers are concerned about reports of teacher shortages and the high rate of attrition among new teachers. Prior studies indicate that mentor-based induction can reduce the numbers of new teachers leaving schools or the profession

The Education Policy Institute and Ambition Institute were commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to examine the costs and benefits of a policy entitling all teachers to thirty-five hours of high-quality professional development every year. This rapid review provides evidence to help model these costs and benefits.

In this meta-analysis of studies that utilize formative assessment the authors report an effective size of .7.

A 5-year prospective, quasi-experimental investigation demonstrated that grade-level teams in 9 Title 1 schools using an inquiry-focused protocol to solve instructional problems significantly increased achievement. Teachers applying the inquiry protocol shifted attribution of improved student performance to their teaching rather than external causes.

This article aimed to present frameworks and practices coaches can use with classroom teachers to facilitate the implementation of evidence-based interventions in schools.

What we can do to support teachers: We must improve both the types and the usefulness of the professional supports offered and ensure that teachers have the resources needed to access those opportunities. Strengthening the system of supports includes increasing teachers' influence over their day-to-day work and developing cultures of learning.

This study uses a national probability sample of 1,027 mathematics and science teachers to provide the first large-scale empirical comparison of effects of different characteristics of professional development on teachers' learning.

In this article, a case is made for improving the school success of ethnically diverse students
through culturally responsive teaching and for preparing teachers in preservice education
programs with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to do this.

Nierstheimer, Hopkins, Dillon, and Schmitt (2000) reported increased efficacy for elementary
preservice teachers participating in a corrective reading methods course and pre-requisite
tutoring practicum. Likewise, Haverback and Parault's (2011) investigation of two field
experiences, tutoring and observing, on elementary preservice teachers' self-efficacy
showed that both groups reported growth in reading teacher efficacy. 

The study examines whether comprehensive teacher induction programs lead to higher teacher retention rates and other positive teacher and student outcomes as compared to prevailing, generally less comprehensive approaches to supporting new teachers

To evaluate the impact of comprehensive teacher induction relative to the usual induction support, the authors conducted a randomized experiment in a set of districts that were not already implementing comprehensive induction.

FIFTY YEARS after the release of "Equality of Educational Opportunity"--widely known as the Coleman Report--much of what James Coleman and his colleagues reported holds up well to scrutiny. It is, in fact, remarkable to read through the 700-plus pages and see how little has changed about what the empirical evidence says matters. The report's conclusions about the importance of teacher quality, in particular, have stood the test of time, which is noteworthy, given that today's studies of the impacts of teachers use more-sophisticated statistical methods and employ far better data.

In this paper, we describe the results of the first large-scale study, based on a unique data set from North Carolina, assessing the relationship between the certification of teachers by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and elementary level student achievement

Considering that having a quality teacher is the foremost in-school predictor of students' success, ensuring teacher excellence is vital to the nation's educational system. In "Creating a New Teaching Profession," diverse scholars assess the state of human capital development in the teaching profession today and how to progress.

In this paper we examine the mobility of early-career teachers of varying quality, measured using value-added estimates of teacher performance.

A growing literature documents the importance of student teaching placements for teacher development. Emerging evidence from this literature highlights the importance of the mentor teacher who supervises this placement, as teachers tend to be more effective when they student teach with a mentor who is a more effective 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.

Robust evidence of the effectiveness of professional development for teachers is limited. This study tested a pedagogy-based, collaborative PD approach for impact on the quality of teaching. This study illuminates how to support teacher learning for measurable positive impacts on teaching quality and teacher morale.

According to GAO’s survey results, most traditional teacher preparation programs at institutions of higher education nationwide required at least some training for prospective general classroom teachers on instructing students with disabilities and English language learners.

In this study I have profiled the background experiences, academic preparation and perceptions of a small number of cooperating teachers in a secondary Professional Development School site about their experiences in successful practice. The results indicate that cooperating teachers have a depth of understanding of their role in the process and that they undertake the responsibility with clear expectations for the experience.

This report provides information on the preparation provided to teacher candidates from
teacher training programs so that they can fully use assessment data to improve classroom
instruction. 

In this new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, we investigate the extent to which America’s traditional teacher preparation programs offer research-based strategies to their teacher candidates to help them better manage their classrooms from the start.

This paper examines general education literature reviews for the past decade and the special education literature related to: (a) the school and classroom conditions under which new special education teachers must perform and (b) induction for special education teachers.

With so much emphasis being placed on improving teacher performance, The National Association of Elementary School Principals and the National Association of Secondary School Principals have developed recommendations to support principals more effectively evaluate teachers.

The authors use their experience with a professional development project to propose a model of teacher community in the workplace. They describe a project that brought together 22 English and social studies teachers (and a special education and ESL teacher) from an urban high school over a period of 2 1/2 years.

This study draws on segmented labor market theory to examine the dynamics of the teacher labor market in charters and TPS, focusing on newly hired teachers. 

A research synthesis confirms the difficulty of translating professional development into student achievement gains despite the intuitive and logical connection. Those responsible for planning and implementing professional development must learn how to critically assess and evaluate the effectiveness of what they do.

Teachers Leading Educational Reform explores the ways in which teachers across the world are currently working together in professional learning communities to generate meaningful change and innovation in order to transform pedagogy and practice. By discussing how teachers can work collectively and collaboratively on the issues of learning and teaching that matter to them, it argues that through collective action and collaborative agency, teachers are leading educational reform.

The authors study the effects of various types of education and training on the ability of teachers to promote student achievement.

This tool is designed to assist schools track professional development cost.

Over the last two years, we’ve looked at the existing research and policy guidance on teacher development, with a critical eye to help us better understand what we already know. We’ve noticed that the common threads running through many previous studies, reports and commentaries on teacher development—once you dig into footnotes and peel back the compelling prose—are logical, practical ideas grounded in a selective review of the evidence base. 

Hattie’s book is designed as a meta-meta-study that collects, compares and analyses the findings of many previous studies in education. Hattie focuses on schools in the English-speaking world but most aspects of the underlying story should be transferable to other countries and school systems as well. Visible Learning is nothing less than a synthesis of more than 50.000 studies covering more than 80 million pupils. Hattie uses the statistical measure effect size to compare the impact of many influences on students’ achievement, e.g. class size, holidays, feedback, and learning strategies.

This unique and ground-breaking book is the result of 15 years research and synthesises over 800 meta-analyses on the influences on achievement in school-aged students. It builds a story about the power of teachers, feedback, and a model of learning and understanding.

This influential book is the result of 15 years research that includes over 800 meta-analyses on the influences on achievement in school-aged students. This is a great resource for any stakeholder interested in conducting a serious search of evidence behind common models and practices used in schools.

This book takes over fifteen years of rigorous research into education practices and provides teachers in training and in-service teachers with concise summaries of the most effective interventions and offers practical guidance to successful implementation in classrooms.

This report presents national data on teachers and teaching from the Schools and Staffing
Survey (SASS) and other sources. Where data permit, the report compares findings from the
early to mid-1990s with findings from the 1980s.

This study will discuss a guiding definition for blended learning, benefits, team support, policy, management issues, rationale for expansion, professional development, purchasing, funding, evaluation, and lenses of the future and implications.

Learning communities serve a variety of education constituencies, beginning with grade-level or subject-matter teams, vertical-grade or subject-band teams, school leadership teams, cadres of principals, or teams of employees in district offices.

The authors report an investigation of a five-step structured study-group approach to promoting a self-sustaining learning community that supports teachers in developing the ‘habits of mind’ necessary for improving literacy acquisition and development for urban African American students attending a low-performing, high-poverty elementary school. 

This paper defines and describes what is meant by "professional learning community"; describes what happens when a school staff studies, works, plans, and takes action collectively on behalf of increased learning for students; and discusses what is known about creating such communities of professionals in schools.

During the 1980s, our systems experienced team teaching and open classrooms. Educators began to talk about teachers' workplace and its effects on teachers' morale, knowledge and skills, and other characteristics.

This article explores the role and contribution of narrative interviews in educational research, by studying its application as data collecting technique in two different case studies: narrative interviews with directors of an academic college of education and with preschool teachers in Israel. The paper presents two case studies in which the narrative interview was used as a key methodological tool reflecting and describing the historical, cultural and educational contexts in which the subjects act, thus enabling a better understanding of the meaning of their behavior. 

This study have sought to investigate teacher success in Hong Kong. The study aims to achieve the following objectives: to acquire an initial understanding of how Hong Kong teachers conceptualize teacher success, to identify the factors hindering teacher success; to study the relationship between professional development and teacher success.

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.

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.

This review critically examines 15 empirical studies, conducted since the mid 1980s, on the effects of support, guidance, and orientation programs— collectively known as induction — for beginning teachers.

This research evaluated the impact of structured and intensive teacher induction programs over a three-year time period, beginning when teachers first enter the teaching profession. The current report presents findings from the second year of the evaluation and a future report will present findings from the third and final year.

Using longitudinal elementary school teacher and student data, we document that students have larger test score gains when their teachers experience improvements in the observable characteristics of their colleagues. Using within-school and within-teacher variation, we show that a teacher's students have larger achievement gains in math and reading when she has more effective colleagues.

Focusing on elementary classrooms, chapters include: Students' Feelings about School; Involvement and Withdrawal in the Classroom; Teachers Views; The Need for New Perspectives.

This piece describes the widely held perception among education leaders that we already  know how to help teachers improve, and that we could achieve our goal of great teaching in far more classrooms if we just applied what we know more widely. 

This report examines the policy frameworks supporting high levels of professional development in four states.

In order to learn more about how school districts support educator data use, we examined the intersection of data use and professional learning in three school districts. We found that a chasm exists in how educators frame―data use, with some framing data use as a student-oriented improvement process, and others framing it as a mere exercise in the accountability of teacher programs.

This article reports on a longitudinal study designed to explore these questions. In 1999, researchers from The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers selected and interviewed a diverse group of 50 new teachers in the Massachusetts public schools.

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

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the way in which principals in different countries are securing successful organisational change through systematically building social capital. It argues that how a school works as a cohesive unit and how people collaborates will ultimately define organisational performance.

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a well-documented group contingency designed to reduce disruptive behavior in classroom settings. However, few studies have evaluated the GBG with students who engage in severe problem behavior in alternative schools, and there are few demonstrations of training teachers in those settings to implement the GBG.

This book provides research as well as case studies of successful professional development strategies and practices for educators.

This paper highlights the importance of making the preparation of teachers as scientific as possible by basing instruction on scientific evidence and making teaching an applied science.

This article shared information about the Wing Institute and demographics of the Summit participants. It introduced the Summit topic, sharing performance data on past efforts of school reform that focused on structural changes rather than teaching improvement. The conclusion is that the system has spent enormous resources with virtually no positive results. The focus needs to be on teaching improvement.

This paper presents case study research that explores the dynamics and experience offered for a professor and learners participating in a hybrid-modeled classroom in teacher education. 

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.

this study presents and apply a framework for measuring the cost of coaching programs to 3 schools. Then the study discusses strategies for reducing the average cost of instructional coaching. 

This book examines the use of video recording to to improve teacher performance. The book shows how every classroom can easily benefit from setting up a camera and hitting “record”.  

This book offers strategies that make a difference in student learning including: content planning, instructional practices, and community building.

The authors introduce Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) as a way of representing what teachers need to know about technology and argue for the role of authentic design-based activities in the development of this knowledge.

This study review the empirical literature on teacher coaching and conduct meta-analyses to estimate the mean effect of coaching programs on teachers’ instructional practice and students’ academic achievement.

The authors conducted a comprehensive review of research to identify the impact of coaching on changes in preservice and in-service teachers’ implementation of evidence-based practices.

This study examined the effects of in-service plus follow-up coaching on first grade teachers’ accurate delivery of three research-based strategies during math instruction.

This study examined the effects of in-service support plus coaching on kindergarten teachers’ accurate delivery of group instructional units in math.

We use comprehensive data on student teaching placements from 14 teacher education programs (TEPs) in Washington State to explore the sorting of teacher candidates to the teachers who supervise their student teaching and the schools in which student teaching occurs. We find that, all else equal, teachers with more experience, higher degree levels, and higher value added in math are more likely to serve as cooperating teachers, as are schools with lower levels of historical teacher turnover but with more open positions the following year.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis will undoubtedly have dire consequences
for all sectors of public education. The rapid transition to remote modes of instruction in the
spring of 2020 and the subsequent anxiety about the start of the 2020–21 academic year
have highlighted the critical need for well-prepared educators.

In trying to improve American public schools, educators, policymakers, and philanthropists are overselling the role of the highly skilled individual teacher and undervaluing the benefits that come from teacher collaborations that strengthen skills, competence, and a school’s overall social capital.

In this paper we examine social capital and its relationship with performance at the organizational level.

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 paper draws on intensive case studies of teacher knowledge, practice, and learning among teachers of mathematics and English in two high schools to take up the problem of how classroom teaching practice comes to be known, shared, and developed among teachers through their out-of-classroom interactions.

Teacher professional development (PD) is seen as a promising intervention to improve teacher knowledge, instructional practice, and ultimately student learning. While research finds instances of significant program effects on teacher knowledge, little is known about how long these effects last.

In this paper, the authors use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school’s effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development and retention of its teachers.

In the past 3 decades, the concept of professional community has gained considerable
momentum in the theoretical and empirical studies in this field. At the same time, the concept
has faced conceptual and methodological difficulties in that as yet no universal definition
has been formulated and that its operationalization differs in the various empirical studies
conducted on the subject.

This paper reports findings of a study that is grounded in the assumption that the ways in which teachers interact outside their classrooms may be critical to the future of school restructuring and the effects of restructuring on students.

This study investigated the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards'(NBPTS)
assessment process in order to identify, quantify, and substantiate learning outcomes from
the participants.

This paper examines teacher induction through the lens of scientific evidence.

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

The authors show school and district-level administrators how to set the priorities and support the practices that will help all teachers become expert teachers. Their five-part framework is based on what research tells us about how expertise develops. 

How does classroom management affect student achievement? What techniques do 
teachers find most effective? How important are schoolwide policies and practices in setting 
the tone for individual classroom management? In this follow-up to What Works in Schools, 
Robert J. Marzano analyzes research from more than 100 studies on classroom 
management to discover the answers to these questions and more. He then applies these 
findings to a series of" Action Steps"--specific strategies.

This is a study of classroom management on student engagement and achievement.

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.

Implementing evidence-based practices requires not only knowledge of various interventions and practices but also professional judgment in selecting and applying an intervention that best meets the needs of the child and the family.  Previous work on decision-making in evidence-based practices has focused on describing evidence-based practices, how the identification of evidence-based practices has affected the field of education (and, specifically, special education), and strategies for implementing evidence-based practices

McKeachie's Teaching Tips is a handbook designed to provide helpful strategies for dealing with both the everyday problems of teaching at the university level, and those that pop up in trying to maximize learning for every student. The suggested strategies are supported by research and are grounded in enough theory to enable teachers to adapt them to their own situations.

This study documents the implementation of research-based strategies to minimize the occurrence of reading difficulties in a first-grade population. Three strategies were implemented. 

This paper examines the costs associated with teacher professional development. This paper conducts a literature review of professional development expenditures, includes an analysis from four districts, and conclusions from this research.

Less than 1 in 5 general education teachers feel “very well prepared” to teach students with mild to moderate learning disabilities, including ADHD and dyslexia, according to a new survey from two national advocacy groups.

Th is publication is an eff ort to answer basic questions and to inform and engage more people in strengthening the quality and improving the results of professional development.

Many urban schools today look to instructional teams as a means to decrease professional isolation, promote teachers' ongoing development, and substantially reduce well-documented variation in teachers' effectiveness across classrooms. Recent research finds that teams can contribute to teachers' development and increased student achievement.

The current study examined methods for training teachers to use functional analysis methods.

This report presents the results of the 2000-01 Status of the American Public School Teacher survey. This survey has been conducted every 5 years since 1956

The book recommends that federal and state policy makers take on the responsibility of promoting equal access to technology while the federal government and foundations play an important role by supporting the development, evaluation, and revision of OTPD.

This study examines the impact of 2 forms of professional development on prekindergarten teachers' early language and literacy practice: coursework and coaching. 

NTC's most recent report explores: 1) The impact on teacher retention rates, 2) Expected months of additional learning for students and potential of lifetime earnings, 3) Districts' expected savings on this investment. 4) Long-term economic impact of students and in their communities.

Soft skills complement hard skills and have a significant impact on the ability of teachers to do their job and on their employability. Soft skill components acquired by future holistic human capital are communicative skills, critical thinking and problem solving skills, team work skill, life-long learning and management of information, entrepreneurship skill, ethics, moral and professional skill, and leadership skill.

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ESEA Reauthorization

The number of English language learners (ELL) students in the US is increasing dramatically. Teachers were interviewed regarding their perceptions of their preparedness to teach English language learners in the mainstream classrooms. Findings revealed that teacher training programs have not prepared these individuals for the student population they face today regardless of the year in which they received their teaching licenses.

This paper examines school costs in relationship to student outcomes.

In this article, implementation is proposed as the link between evidence-based practices and positive outcomes. Strategies for promoting implementation through “enlightened professional development” are proposed.

This paper posits that teacher education should emphasize both content knowledge and communication skills. It follows up the contention by conceptualizing communication, exploring teacher communication competence, and finally suggesting the introduction of Teacher Communication Skills (TCS) course in the curricula of teacher education across levels.

Under the 1998 reauthorization of Title II of the Higher Education Act, the secretary of education is required to issue annual reports to Congress on the state of teacher quality nationwide. "Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge" is the inaugural report on this important issue.

This article focuses on the response of one urban middle school to a major school reform initiative.

This article examines the salary trajectory of teachers as they move up the career ladder into leadership positions.

This study examined the influence of three year-long cohorts of elementary school teachers' participating in a learner-centered mathematics professional development program.

While teachers continue to learn and grow as they gain experience, the foundation for their skills is provided by their initial teacher education program. And of all the parts of teacher education, none is more important than clinical practice. In general, the field of education has long recognized and championed the importance of practice.

For many students, school this year looks very different from the way it did in the past. 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.

Effects of a 1-semester professional development (PD) intervention that included expert coaching with Head Start teachers were investigated in a randomized controlled trial with 88 teachers and 759 children. 

This report looks at the evidence behind the proposition that some teachers are more effective than other teachers.

Describes a Sonoma County (California) school district's peer coaching program designed to meet the needs of new, probationary, and experienced teachers. The program succeeded because participation was voluntary, the training empowered teachers and improved their coaching skills, and teachers continued to meet as a group and learn from each other.

This report examines the career paths of beginning public school teachers and how these career paths vary by characteristics during the teachers' first year of teaching and most recent year of teaching. 

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.

This study evaluted the impact of coaching on the implementation of an intervention.  Coaching with higher rates of performance feedback resulted in the highest level of treatment integrity.

In this study, using mixed methods, we investigated the longer term effects of eCoaching through advanced online bug-in-ear (BIE) technology.

Student teaching has long been considered a cornerstone of teacher preparation. One dimension thought to affect student teacher learning is the kinds of schools in which these experiences occur. Results suggest that better functioning school organizations with positive work environments make desirable settings for teacher learning and that preparation programs, and the districts they supply, would benefit from more strategically using these kinds of schools to prepare future teachers.

Drawing from data on over 1000 prospective teachers in a large urban district including pre and post-student teaching survey data, this study investigates whether lengthening student teaching improves teachers’ perceptions of instructional preparedness, efficacy, and career plans. The findings suggest that the duration of student teaching has little effect on teacher outcomes; however, the quality of student teaching has significant and positive effects.

This study draws upon survey and administrative data on over 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade County public schools over 2 years to investigate the kinds of collaborations that exist in instructional teams across the district and whether these collaborations predict student achievement. While different kinds of teachers and schools report different collaboration quality, we find average collaboration quality is related to student achievement.

The authors use research-based "impact modeling" to show how a strategic approach to recruiting and supporting rookie teachers could yield as much as 4.2 extra months of student learning. We provide 5 recommendations for school systems to leverage their investment in structures that provide rookie teachers with both shelter and development.

This Statistics in Brief provides a snapshot of the state of teacher professional development activities among U.S. public school teachers using data collected through the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) Public School Teacher Questionnaire. This report relies on data provided by public school teachers about their professional development activities during the 2011-12 school year.

This Statistics in Brief provides a snapshot of the state of teacher professional development activities among U.S. public school teachers using data collected through the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) Public School Teacher Questionnaire.

Most children with autism rely on schools as their primary source of intervention, yet research has suggested that teachers rarely use evidence-based practices. To address the need for improved educational outcomes, a previously tested consultation intervention called the Collaborative Model for Promoting Competence and Success was evaluated in a 2nd randomized controlled trial, with the addition of a web-based group. 

Improving Performance has been a pivotal book in the creation of the performance management movement by showing how to bridge the gap between organization strategy and the individual. It can be used as guide for principals to link planning to action, implementation of organization change, and offering ways to redesign processes to overcome obstacles that impede implementation.

In this article, we describe and report on the results of a study in Texas that tested 2 models of professional development for classroom teachers as a way of improving their practices and increasing the reading achievement of their students. 

In this article, we describe and report on the results of a study in Texas that tested 2 models of professional development for classroom teachers as a way of improving their practices and increasing the reading achievement of their students. This study demonstrates the potential of coaching as a viable model of the professional development of reading teachers.

The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System determines the effectiveness of school systems, schools, and teachers based on student academic growth over time. Research conducted utilizing data from the TVAAS database has shown that race, socioeconomic level, class size, and classroom heterogeneity are poor predictors of student academic growth. Rather, the effectiveness of the teacher is the major determinant of student academic progress.

This study examines how mathematics and science teachers' classroom assessment
practices were affected by the National Board Certification process.

This article discuss how "Micro-Credentialing" offer an opportunity to shift away from credit-hour and continuing-education requirements that dominate the PD apparatus in most states, toward a system based on evidence of progress in specific instructional skills.

A greater emphasis on measuring the outputs of teacher preparation programs such as practice-based evaluations has increased the need for teacher educators to examine “best practice” for developing the skill-based competencies of teacher candidates. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of practice and feedback on teacher candidates’ knowledge and skill acquisition of a specific evidence-based practice, the provision of opportunities to respond.

This study looks at four factors for effective generalization a newly acquired teaching skills across time and settings.

This paper evaluated a program for training 4 support staff to embed instruction within the existing activities of 5 children with disabilities in an inclusive preschool. 

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of multilevel support on first-grade teachers' accurate use of research-based strategies during beginning reading instruction and the extent to which teachers maintained use of these strategies. 

Twenty-eight investigations were identified in which general education teachers were surveyed regarding their perceptions of including students with disabilities in their classes. Research synthesis procedures were employed to summarize responses and examine the consistency of responses across time, geographical location, and item type.

In our day-to-day roles as a school system leader and the CEO of the nonprofit curriculum publisher Zearn, we focus on the moments of learning that occur between students and teachers—and on how personalized learning can make those moments richer and more frequent. 

Lack of communication between cooperating teachers and preservice teachers is one of the most commonly reported problems during field experiences. To provide more opportunity for feedback during preservice teachers' clinical experiences, a large elementary education program in a midwestern university implemented the use of peer feedback practices during an early clinical field experience with junior-level students placed in K-8 classrooms.

This article describe teachers coaching teaching including the purpose, process, who should coach, and the effects of the coaching. 

Effective classroom management is critical for student and teacher success. Because teachers receive limited preservice preparation and in-service support in classroom management, educational leaders (e.g., school psychologists, behavior coaches, mentor teachers, and administrators) need efficient and effective tools to identify teachers’ strengths and needs and to guide professional development.

This study examines brief, targeted professional development (brief training, email prompting, and self-management) to improve teacher classroom management skills. The training focused on increasing the effective use of prompting, increased active student responding, and delivery of praise. 

Reflection is a high impact practice that develops teacher candidates’ learning. Critical reflection requires teacher candidates to continually examine their own thoughts, perspectives, biases, and actions. Reflective practice facilitates the development of new knowledge, skills, and dispositions in teacher candidates by fostering critical contemplation of actions in a real-world environment.

This study examines whether such programs - collectively known as induction - have a positive effect on the retention of beginning teachers.

Given the numbers, it is clear that general education teachers should possess the tools necessary to help students with disabilities succeed. Teacher preparation programs can be a powerful and critical lever for ensuring this support; however, most teacher preparation programs do not center students with disabilities in their curriculum for general education teachers.

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.

High teacher turnover imposes numerous burdens on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. Some of these burdens are explicit and take the form of recruiting, hiring, and training costs. Others are more hidden and take the form of changes to the composition and quality of the teaching staff. This study focuses on the latter. 

The authors surveyed student teachers in a yearlong internship and their peers in a traditional semester-long internship to compare perceptions across different practice teaching experiences. The authors discuss the outcomes regarding continuing challenges professional development programs face when building and sustaining effective clinical experiences.

This overview examines the available research on the topic of soft skills (personal competencies) commonly linked to effective teacher-student relationships.

This analysis examines the available research on effective teaching, how to impart these skills, and how to best transition teachers from pre-service to classroom with an emphasis on improving student achievement. It reviews current preparation practices and examine the research evidence on how well they are preparing teachers

This 3-year study examined the dynamics of school culture in 3 elementary schools that
have beaten the odds in improving low-income and minority student achievement.

This paper reviews the research literature on new teacher mentoring, focusing on issues of definition, why teachers quit, and the effects of mentoring on retention. 

This paper reviews the research literature on new teacher mentoring, focusing on issues of definition, why teachers quit, and the effects of mentoring on retention. 

In this article, the authors describe key features of the multi-tiered support (MTS) continuum of intervention and assessment and present a case study to illustrate implementation of some components of the framework with four middle school teachers.

This study examines how high-quality professional development can promote the diffusion of effective teaching strategies among teachers through collaboration. Drawing on longitudinal and socio-metric data from a study of writing professional development in 39 schools, this study shows that teachers’ participation in professional development is associated with providing more help to colleagues on instructional matters.

There are many rationales for group, rather than individual, decision making. Theorized advantages include more information to contribute to the decision, more diverse perspectives to inform deliberation, and greater efficiency for implementation.

The purpose of this study was to examine changes in teacher self–efficacy from the student teaching experience to the third year of teaching. The population was the entire cohort of student teachers from The Ohio State University.

This study explored the effects of visual performance feedback (VPF) delivered in real-time using screen sharing technology on a discrete teacher practice (i.e., positive feedback) for four general education teachers in a middle school using a multiple baseline across teachers design.

This study examined the effectiveness of a classroom teacher intervention, the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), in helping struggling readers in kindergarten and first grade. This intervention used biweekly literacy coaching in the general education classroom to help classroom teachers use diagnostic strategies with struggling readers in one-on-one 15-min sessions.  

Teachers make a difference. The success of any plan for improving educational outcomes depends on the teachers who carry it out and thus on the abilities of those attracted to the field and their preparation. Yet there are many questions about how teachers are being prepared and how they ought to be prepared.

"The Mirage" describes the widely held perception among education leaders that they already know how to help teachers improve, and that they could achieve their goal of great teaching in far more classrooms if they just applied what they knew more widely.

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 theoretical and empirical underpinnings of teacher efficacy are examined to bring coherence to the construct and its measurement. First, we explore the correlates of teacher efficacy revealed using various instruments and search for patterns that suggest a better understanding of the construct. 

Of Edward Tufte’s books, this is the most design oriented. It provides examples using maps, charts, scientific presentations, diagrams, computer interfaces, statistical graphics and tables, stereo photographs, guidebooks, courtroom exhibits, timetables, use of color, and a pop-up to illustrate his points on the effective use of visual mediums to communicate the meaning of data and impart important messages.

This is the first book from Edward Tufte and it lays out his theories and rules that are the basis for the effective display of information and data to maximize communication.

This third book by Edward Tufte is a guide on how to more effectively communicate information visually. It offers examples of poorly presented information and the dire consequences that can result from mediocre and inadequately thought out presentations. It provides concrete samples of effective ways to present statistics and tips one can use to avoid many of the pitfalls of powerpoint presentations.

The U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology published this report that details the results of exploratory research on how to design and manage online communities of practice for educators.

A year-long researcher-teacher professional development group with a next-year followup was conducted with seven general education teachers from two elementary schools in a large urban school district in the southeastern United States. The components of successful professional development programs are discussed and implications for teacher education are offered. 

In this study, the results of five training studies evaluating the effects of a coaching program for use in Dutch primary and secondary schools are described.

After an overview of the characteristics of professional learning communities (PLCs), this manuscript presents a review of 10 American studies and one English study on the impact of PLCs on teaching practices and student learning.

This study describes a benefit-cost analysis of a comprehensive mentoring program for beginning teachers conducted in a medium-sized California school district.

Research suggests effective professional learning communities (PLCs) enhance teacher collaboration and student achievement. Some studies indicate that these communities also predict greater collective efficacy, while others suggest teacher efficacy is predictive of teachers working together.

This literature review examines the impact of various instructional methods

This report synthesizes what research says works in improving teacher skills and knowledge, what nations that outperform the United States in education are doing, and provides an analysis of newly available data from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey and other sources to indicate where the nation stands in building the capacity of educators to help students reach high standards. It includes newly analyzed data from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey and other data sources.

This report synthesizes what research says works in improving teacher skills and knowledge, what nations that outperform the United States in education are doing, and provides an analysis of newly available data from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey and other sources to indicate where the nation stands in building the capacity of educators to help students reach high standards. It includes newly analyzed data from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey and other data sources.

U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question -- Will the policy work? -- too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is an evidence-based policy--a rigorous approach that draws on careful data collection, experimentation, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what the problem is, which ways it can be addressed, and the probable impacts of each of these ways. 

If teachers are to have a significant impact on student learning it is necessary for them to be well trained and prepared for the role of teacher.  This report examined the effectiveness of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and My TeachingPartner Pre-K.  The NBPTS is a professional certification program for teachers that have taught at least three years and can meet the NBPTS standards.  My TeachingPartner Pre-K incorporates multiple media and coaching to prepare early education teachers.  The results of the What Works Clearinghouse review of NBPTS is that it had mixed effects in mathematics in grades 3-8 and no discernable effect on English language arts achievement.  There were no studies that met WWC standards for review so no judgment can be made about its effectiveness.  The results of this review highlight the necessity of evaluating the effectiveness of teacher training programs.  The stakes are very high for the students and families being served by teachers and nationally very large amount of money is spent on training teachers.  It would be nice to know which approaches to teacher professional development are effective and which have no beneficial effect.

Studies of the effectiveness of Direct Instruction programs with special education students 
were examined in a meta-analysis comparison. To be included, the outcomes had to be 
compared with outcomes for some other treatment to which students were assigned prior to 
any interventions. Not one of 25 studies showed results favoring the comparison groups. 
Fifty-three percent of the outcomes significantly favored DI with an average magnitude of 
effect of. 84 standard deviation units. The effects were not restricted to a particular handicapping condition, age group or skill area. 

This book is a practical resource that educators from regular and special classrooms can use with children of any age who exhibit behavioral problems. 

Effective feedback from cooperating teachers is a critical component of a successful student teaching experience. Unfortunately, few cooperating teachers are trained to provide specific feedback to their student teachers, and the lack of such communication is one of the most commonly reported problems among field experience students.

For many decades, teacher educators were divided into two camps: those who favored whole language, characterized by the idea that reading is a natural process gained through exposure to authentic texts, and those who believed in systematic phonics instruction, which is the explicit teaching of sound-letter relationships.

 Due to the increased need to support teachers' use of evidence-based practices in multi-tiered systems of support such as RTI [Response to Intervention] and PBIS [Positive Behavior Interventions and Support], coaching can extend and strengthen professional development. This paper describes a multi-level approach to coaching and provides implications for practice and research.

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine and document developmental concerns of participants in a paired peer placement peer coaching program. Research participants were 26 elementary education majors who were randomly paired for their first teaching experience. Data were collected from students' observations, feedback from each other, and participants' reflections on their teaching experiences. 

This study compares the effect size and return on investment for rapid assessment, between, increased spending, voucher programs, charter schools, and increased accountability.

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.

The purpose of this study is to examine research to answer the question, What is the impact of teacher professional development on student achievement.

The purpose of this study is to examine research to answer the question, What is the impact of teacher professional development on student achievement.

The purpose of this study was to synthesize the literature in support of training teachers to use behavior-specific praise, which is a strategy used to reduce students’ disruptive and off-task behavior as well as prevent students’ problem behaviors from occurring.