In my contribution I give an account of my teaching based on my own memories and those of former students. I rely on reports from my present students, remarks by colleagues and my own reflections. My memories as well as my present reflections are doubtlessly coloured by my growing awareness of the relationships between micro and macro levels of…

In this paper, we explore the notion of school improvement through the lens of praxis as it relates to equity, inclusion, and transformation, with a particular focus on inquiry-based school and teacher development. We argue that authentic improvement is a consequence of praxis, and highlight, through examples, key ways that authentic school…

Beginning with the 2010-2011 school year the North Carolina State Board of Education (SBE) mandated the use of the North Carolina Teacher Evaluation Process (Evaluation Process) for use in all public school systems in the state to conduct teacher observations and evaluations. The Evaluation Process replaced the Teacher Performance Appraisal…

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…

It is now more than 10 years after the publication of the monograph, "The Activist Teaching Profession," which, at the time, could be described as a call to action for the teaching profession. I reflect here on how far has the profession progressed in responding to that call to action. The idea of a "call to action" could be…

Susana Velasco always thought she designed lessons for her kindergarten students to help them meet the academic standards for their grade. But now she feels better equipped to adapt instruction to meet the needs of all the children in her class--a skill she has developed through her school's participation in the Literacy Design Collaborative…

Despite the growing descriptions of effective teacher community--and lessons about the conditions needed for them to survive--more research has been done on exemplars of strong professional community than on efforts to produce professional community where it doesn't already exist. Building professional community is important to school improvement…

The Chinese province of Shanghai has gained international recognition as a high performing education system with strong teaching and learning outcomes. One accountability mechanism in Shanghai's education reform strategy is statewide performance-based compensation (PBC), also known as performance- or merit pay. Providing a first time account of…

In the state of New Jersey and nationally, teacher evaluation is a current focus of education reform efforts (Hallinger et al., 2014; Schulman, 2014). A well-executed teacher evaluation system produces data regarding educator effectiveness. It is the intention of the 2012 AchieveNJ teacher evaluation reform law that teacher evaluation data be used…

Regional and national interest in reforming teaching in Indonesia has seen governments, NGOs and education specialists combine to drive pedagogical changes among school teachers there. Results of these programs have been indifferent at best. This paper reports on teacher reform programs in Provinsi Papua, one of the most marginal societies in…

Looking across the papers of this special issue, Volume 48, Number 2 and Volume 49, Number 1, this commentary paper suggests that by attempting to set stages of teacher effectiveness, collectively these five papers contribute toward making a step from exploring if teachers matter for student learning to understanding how teachers could be…

In 2002 Michael Bloomberg took office as Mayor of New York City and, over the next 12 years of his administration, oversaw a series of sweeping reforms in order to "fix" the broken education system which he believed he had inherited. This paper details the key policy reforms in New York City's public school system during this period,…

This article is excerpted from Marshall Project staff writer and author, Dana Goldstein's 2014 book, "The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession." It begins by describing Goldstein's experience traveling as an education reporter in the late 2000s and the incredible amount of political scrutiny under which the…

Over the last decade, Denver Public Schools (DPS) became one of the fastest-improving large districts in the country--achieving significant improvement across all student subgroups. Unlike many city districts, DPS included charter and innovation schools as integral parts of their system and improvement strategy. DPS' journey demonstrates how much…

Students' rating of teaching is widely used by university administrators to manage and evaluate teaching in China today. However, it is worthwhile to discuss and rethink carefully how to use this tool. Fifty students majoring in seven-year clinical medicine were asked to rate the class teaching of an integrated course for which the teaching reform…