Instructional leadership has become the dominant paradigm in principal preparation and professional learning. In parallel, teacher evaluation has risen in prominence. Using interviews from 84 principals in 23 districts and three states, we asked how teacher evaluation influenced principals' reported priorities and conceptions of instructional…

There is a defined need to provide accessible and effective professional development for 4-H educators. Lesson study is a Community of Practice-based approach to educator professional development. Prior research has shown lesson study to be effective with 4-H staff, adult volunteers, and teen volunteers. This inquiry, a multisite case study, was…

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, whole-school reforms will continue to be a prominent strategy for improving student outcomes in low-performing schools. As reform models have proliferated, so has research evaluating the impact in reform schools. However, previous evaluations have rarely examined unintended spillover effects in nonreform…

Novice teachers improve substantially in their first years on the job, but we know remarkably little about the nature of this skill development. Using data from Tennessee, we leverage a feature of the classroom observation protocol that asks school administrators to identify an item on which the teacher should focus their improvement efforts. This…

Background: Many studies have shown that ambitious, "student centered" approaches to STEM instruction benefit K-12 student learning. However, relatively little research has systematically investigated the learning processes that support teachers to skillfully enact these challenging pedagogies. In this study, we used a mixed-methods,…

Background: Collaboration among teachers is now considered a marker of effective schools and key to creating successful professional learning opportunities. However, the nature and efficacy of collaboration vary widely, and research suggests that collaborative efforts often fail to promote teacher development. Purpose: This study draws on…

Rigorous college-and-career readiness standards require significant shifts in typical mathematics instruction. Many schools and districts employ coaches to support instructional changes. Although there is evidence that coaching programs can support teaching improvement, research has yet to identify high-leverage coaching practices. In…

Many prior studies have explored average differences in initial levels of teaching effectiveness among graduates from different teacher preparation programs (TPPs) and the features of preparation that predict these differences. We focus on another important dimension of effectiveness--how graduates from different TPPs improve over time. Examining…

Like other public workers, teachers typically receive high and compressed ratings that do little to differentiate them based on performance. Motivated by empirical evidence of substantial variation in effectiveness among teachers, there has been a recent push to develop more informative evaluation systems with greater ratings dispersion. We study…

Attempts to scale up instructional interventions confront implementation challenges that mitigate their ultimate impact on teaching and learning. In this article, we argue that learning about adaptation during the design and implementation phases of reform is critical to the development of interventions that can be implemented with integrity at…

Previous reports suggest that administrators rarely dismiss low-performing teachers despite the changing policy landscape allowing them to do so. This brief uses survey data from Tennessee to investigate the underlying reasons explaining administrators' decisions to retain low-performing teachers. The presented analysis suggests that…

Attempts to scale up instructional interventions confront implementation challenges that mitigate their ultimate impact on teaching and learning. In this article, we argue that learning about adaptation during the design and implementation phases of reform is critical to the development of interventions that can be implemented with integrity at…

Teacher leadership is increasingly recognized as a promising strategy to improve the quality of instruction in U.S. schools. Despite the rising number of teacher leadership programs in the country, there is a paucity of knowledge about the work that teacher leaders (TLs) engage in, how educators experience teacher leadership and the impacts of…

Children with or at risk of disabilities engage in fewer and less complex social interactions (SIs) than their typically developing peers. The playground is an ideal setting for teachers to promote SIs among children. However, few studies have examined practical and meaningful strategies for supporting teachers in effectively facilitating SIs.…

This report explores the premise that there's nothing more powerful than great teachers skillfully using great instructional materials to motivate and engage students in their learning. Three real-world examples illustrate how schools and school systems are working to support teachers to skillfully use high-quality, standards-aligned curricula, by…