Bringing the transformative change to classrooms that supports student achievement requires a high level of collaboration and leadership. This article describes an innovative model for school improvement that focuses on coaching to elevate educators into true change-makers.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 offers several opportunities for states, districts, and not-for-profit and for-profit entities to invest in high-quality innovative teacher preparation and support new educators as they begin their careers. Title II of ESSA provides formula grants to states and local districts to support the…

Rhode Island, like many other states, wants to better understand teacher mobility and attrition because of the adverse effects teacher turnover can have on student achievement and local education budgets. Leaders at the Rhode Island Department of Education want to understand what factors are related to teacher mobility, retention, and attrition,…

Drawing on nationally representative data from the 1988 to 2018 school years, the authors provide an overview of some of the key changes in the characteristics of first-year teachers in the U.S., including racial/ethnic identity, education levels, subject area, and certification status. The data also show that new teachers have become increasingly…

Systemic challenges for the Texas teacher workforce result from a large yearly demand for new teachers, exacerbated by high and climbing teacher attrition rates. As a result of these challenges, a large majority of new teachers are now hired before they complete preparation. Assigned disproportionately to students from low-income families and…

For teachers, emotional intelligence and emotional resilience are foundational qualities to thriving and staying in the profession. The author asserts that to retain more teachers, we must attend to each teacher's emotional resilience in preparation programs, in the hiring process, and in the ways we support teachers, especially novices.

This article describes how a secondary teacher education program at a midsized university made the turn toward a practice-based program in teacher education. The authors argue that efforts to recenter the program around practices have not only improved opportunities for novice teachers, but also have provided teacher educators a programmatic…

Professors work earnestly to prepare prospective new teachers for independent instruction, however those new teachers will still encounter issues in the classroom that they may be ill-equipped to address. No matter how phenomenal college education professors are, new teachers may feel as though they do not know what they are doing at times.…

The Peer Support Partnership is an intensive, one-year mentorship program in which 11 veteran teachers work with approximately 150 of the 300 to 400 new teachers hired each year by the San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD), Texas. A joint effort of the SAISD and the local union, the program was created three years ago to improve teacher…

Tough teaching conditions affect us. But they don't define us, says teacher Chase Mielke, author of The Burnout Cure (ASCD, 2019). In this heartfelt letter to new teachers, Mielke shares five "Passion Stokers" to keep the teaching fire alive. Some of these he learned from research in positive psychology. Others he learned the hard way,…

There is a long-held but inaccurate belief that new teachers' expertise and talent is mostly innate and that it peaks and plateaus within their first few years of teaching. William Slotnik and Bryan Goodwin explain that school systems need to abandon this conventional wisdom and instead build true talent development systems that support the…

The "Dance Entry Level Teacher Assessment" (DELTA) measures pedagogical content knowledge and subject-specific content knowledge in dance. Created and administered jointly by the National Dance Education Organization and the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education, DELTA represents a first step toward reaching national…

Economic downturns can cause major funding shortfalls for U.S. public schools, often forcing districts to make difficult budget cuts including teacher layoffs. In this brief, we synthesize the empirical literature on the widespread teacher layoffs caused by the Great Recession. Studies find that teacher layoffs harmed student achievement and were…

In the face of yet another crisis in teaching, it's time for a bold and comprehensive plan to revitalize and better support the profession. Education expert Linda Darling-Hammond explains how the current shortage of teachers is not entirely new, but the result of decades of cutting programs, lack of respect for the profession and poor working…

Teachers often start their careers in schools with large populations of English language learners (ELLs), whose enrollment in U.S. public schools reached some 4.4 million in 2012 (Kena et al. 2014). To serve these ELLs, new science teachers must develop skills to not only teach the content and language of science but also academic English. Proper…