Innovation in education is vital for responding to emerging challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and for building progress on longstanding challenges in schools. The infusion of substantial, highly flexible pots of federal relief dollars created an opportunity to pilot new programs and initiatives. Many states and districts opted to invest…

This resource, released in collaboration with the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness, explains the importance of developmental education, its current challenges and how policymakers can contribute to improving outcomes.

This Special Issues Brief from the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform (CEEDAR Center) and the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders (GTL Center) outlines essential features for providing high-quality, structured, and sequenced opportunities to practice within teacher preparation programs. This brief is…

This paper focuses on engaging and enabling educators to play new roles and take new leadership in the paradigm shift between traditional and competency-based education: a system of learning designed to ensure that all learners are prepared with the knowledge, skills and dispositions to be successful lifelong learners. The paper re-envisions…

Over the past decade, educators and policymakers have sought to increase the number of students pursuing and completing postsecondary credentials. Community colleges play an important role in efforts to increase the percentage of Americans with postsecondary education. Community colleges play an important role in educating the early childhood…

This paper offers a case history of one university academic department's experience with the pressure to create online scholarship opportunities for professional educators. As tertiary education transforms its course delivery to Web-based learning management platforms, instructors are challenged to transform career-long practice suddenly and…

To assist school systems in establishing computer competencies for inservice teacher training and personnel hiring guidelines, the North Carolina State Board of Education in 1985 approved the recommendations of a state task force, and identified three levels of computer competencies for teachers (K-12), i.e., competencies needed by all educators,…

The purpose of this document is to assist members of the North Carolina Professional Practices Commission in the development of guidelines for teacher evaluation. The paper reviews the historical development of teacher performance appraisal and the implementation of the Teacher Performance Appraisal Instrument (TPAI) starting in the mid-1980s.…

This report describes current practice regarding requirements for teaching nationally and in North Carolina, and summarizes research comparing traditionally prepared (TP) teachers and those who enter teaching through alternative routes (ALT). These comparisons revealed that alternative programs attracted a large number of candidates, including…

This annual report defines three broad areas in which the Southern Education Foundation supports research. The first looks to what kinds of teachers will be needed in the future; the second asks how our best thinking can be translated into effective action; and the third asks how seamless education can be. Programs subsumed under education and…