Research shows that effective teachers are one of the most important in-school contributors to student learning. To improve low-income minority students' access to effective teaching, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative in the 2009-2010 school year. The program was…

In 2018, The RAND Corporation and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) published an evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative, which was designed to improve achievement among low-income minority (LIM) students. The initiative provided support for several reforms that…

In this article, Joellen Killion highlights the methodology, analysis, findings, and limitations of Ronfeldt, M., Farmer, S., McQueen, K., & Grissom, J. (2015), "Teacher collaboration in instructional teams and student achievement," "American Educational Research Journal," 52(3), 475-514. Using sophisticated statistical…

The Teacher Data Use Survey can be used to query teachers, administrators, and instructional support staff about how teachers use data to support instruction, their attitudes toward data, and the supports that help teachers use data. This guide provides step-by-step instructions to help district and school planners implement the survey. The…

The state of Florida has taken an unprecedented approach to teacher professional development in its Race to the Top (RTTT) Program application by proposing to promote an international innovation that originates in Japan, "lesson study," as a statewide teacher professional development model. Since winning the US$700 million RTTT funding…

This paper traces the history and impact of communities of practice (CoPs) in supporting early-career academics, although the primary focus here in the United States is on the faculty learning community (FLC) model, a special type of CoP in higher education. The initial development of this model, beginning in 1979, takes place over two decades at…

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…

Lesson study, a teaching and learning strategy used in Japan, is a new area of consideration for teacher professional development in the United States. An important component of the lesson study process is the role of the facilitator. The intent of this study was to investigate the role of the facilitator in the lesson study process relative to…

Pay-for-performance plans have become popular as school districts search for ways to improve teacher quality and student academic achievement. There is a need to develop systems that are sensitive to the market and are performance based whereby higher performing teachers receive greater financial compensation and recognition. The sense of…

Describes one approach to teacher leadership that views teaching, learning, and leading as synonymous, supporting this view with data from a Florida school improvement project. The Lockheed Martin/University of Central Florida Academy for Mathematics and Science is a school-university-business partnership which creates a network of school-based…