In this commentary published in the Hill, Dan Goldhaber, AIR vice president and director of CALDER, and John C. White, Louisiana state superintendent of education, discuss the importance of formal mentoring for teachers during their career training.
Teachers' use of education technology in their classrooms and schools report examines the availability of this technology in their classrooms and schools, their training and preparation for using it, and the barriers to technology use they encounter.
For years, education leaders have sought to pinpoint how teachers become effective in order to better leverage teachers’ impact on student learning and improve student outcomes. This report describes the characteristics of teacher leaders, the roles teacher leaders take in improving teacher practice, and the supports and barriers to teacher ...
State teacher evaluation policies have undergone sweeping changes since 2008, spurred forward heavily by federal competitive funding opportunities like Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation. All 49 states and the District of Columbia have changed legislation or regulations to improve the consistency and quality of teacher evaluation. After ...
The Iowa Teacher Leadership and Compensation (TLC) system was designed to provide career pathways and compensation structures to attract, retain and reward effective teachers; to promote continuous improvement in Iowa’s teaching workforce; and to increase student academic achievement. This report updates the Year 1 implementation and outcome findings based on ...
Two efforts that have impacted teachers across the country in recent years are state-mandated teacher evaluation and support systems and statewide adoption of new, more rigorous and focused student learning standards based on the Common Core State Standards. In this brief, AIR explores the level of alignment that exists between ...
Federal School Improvement Grants support turnaround efforts in the nation’s lowest-performing schools, including many that serve a large number of English Language Learner Students. This brief focuses on 11 of these schools with high proportions of ELLs, describing their efforts to improve teachers' capacity for serving ELLs through staffing strategies ...
Nature-based youth programming combines the benefits of being outside and active with opportunities for deeper learning through authentic, hands-on, real-world projects. This interactive brief features three nature-based youth programs and highlights examples of how these programs are bringing the project-based approach to life. ...
States and school districts have made significant investments in systems to measure teacher performance, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. In this report, AIR experts share their findings from the two-year Beyond Accountability project, in which four school districts identified a specific problem of practice and used plan-do-study-act ...
The Iowa Teacher Leadership and Compensation (TLC) system was designed to provide career pathways and compensation structures to attract, retain, and reward effective teachers; to promote continuous improvement in Iowa’s teaching workforce; and to increase student academic achievement. As part of an independent evaluation, AIR conducted these case studies of ...