Teacher appraisal is never an easy task, especially of teachers experiencing difficulties and failures. Nevertheless it is a requirement for good management, in our schools no less than our corporations. Forty elementary school principals in Israel described the informal methods they use to appraise teachers who are performing poorly. Most…

This study investigates the notion of "inspiring" teaching. The research was commissioned by CfBT as part of a collaborative professional development initiative involving its schools. It arose from headteachers' suggestions that schools nominate a number of "inspiring" teachers so that their practice could be studied and the…

This latest brief updates education leaders on the key policies the 13 (Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia) Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states plan to implement under federal waivers to No Child Left Behind. It details,…

The National Research Council's most recent report "Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8," (2007) has suggested a redefinition of science proficiency. "This framework rests on a view of science as both a body of knowledge and an evidence-based, model building enterprise that continually extends,…

According to Sergiovanni and Starratt (2007), the evaluation process plays a powerful role in developing and nurturing a teacher's instructional capacity, which, in turn, contributes to students' academic successes. School districts in South Carolina utilize the Assisting, Developing and Evaluating Professional Teaching (ADEPT) system. A component…

Growing concerns over the achievement of U.S. students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize (or fire) bad ones. The leading method for assessing teacher quality is "value added" modeling (VAM), which decomposes students' test scores into components attributed to student heterogeneity and to teacher quality. Implicit…

This book explains how busy elementary school principals can support effective literacy instruction in their schools. Chapters outline the fundamental components of a successful literacy program and describe specific practices that can instill a culture of literacy in a school. Strategies are provided for initiating a professional development…

This "Stated Briefly" report is a companion piece that summarizes the results of another report of the same name. REL Northeast and Islands, in collaboration with the Northeast Educator Effectiveness Research Alliance and the New Hampshire Department of Education conducted a study of the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems…

REL Northeast and Islands, in collaboration with the Northeast Educator Effectiveness Research Alliance and the New Hampshire Department of Education, conducted a study of the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems in New Hampshire's School Improvement Grant (SIG) schools. While the basic system features are similar across district…

This study investigated the relationship of teachers' reading knowledge with students' reading achievement using a direct teacher knowledge assessment rather than indirect proxies (e.g., certification). To address the inequitable distribution of teachers' knowledge resulting from differences in teachers' backgrounds and the disparities in how…

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education has called for strengthening teacher preparation by incorporating more fieldwork. Supervision with effective instructional feedback is an essential component of meaningful fieldwork, and immediate feedback has proven more efficacious than delayed feedback. Rock and her colleagues have…

In this article, Thomas Deering addresses possibly the most written about component of teacher preparation: "student teaching." Deering states that a cursory examination of literature databases identified some 4000 articles on this topic, spanning the last three decades. An issue often related to Professional Development Schools (PDSs)…

This paper argues that Educational Effectiveness Research (EER) should establish closer links with research on teacher professional development. A dynamic integrated approach (DIA) to teacher professional development is proposed. The methods and results of a study comparing the impact of the DIA and the Holistic Approach (HA) to teacher…

This study examined whether having a teacher who chose an alternate route to certification (AC) rather than a teacher who chose a traditional certification route (TC) affects the reading and math achievement of elementary school students. The study included about 2,600 kindergarten through fifth-grade students and their 174 teachers. These…

This policy brief, a quick look at some aspects of the debate, illustrates the differences in New York City public schools that would result when layoffs are determined by seniority in comparison to a measure of teacher effectiveness. Due to data limitations and an interest in simplicity, this analysis employs the value added of teachers using the…