The number of people displaced by war, persecution, or violence has reached its highest point since World War II—more than 70 million refugees and internally displaced people. Understanding the needs of teachers in refugee settings is critical to providing stability and continuity for children affected by displacement. ...
When teachers learn, students learn. For decades, AIR has conducted studies of teacher professional learning and helped practitioners use evidence to develop, implement, test, and scale professional learning programs.
The CompuPower program was developed by Kimberly Scott and her colleagues at Arizona State University to address a need for culturally responsive computing courses. AIR served as the project’s external evaluator to evaluate the CompuPower program’s impact on students’ social-emotional skills and academic achievement, as well as examine whether the ...
What do teachers themselves think of policies that address identifying and retaining effective teachers? What conclusions should reformers draw from teachers’ perceptions? This report suggests that what teachers think are good indicators of effectiveness—and what they think will make them more effective—are not always aligned with what policymakers or researchers ...
As the COVID-19 pandemic turns into a longer-term crisis with no end in sight, planning for the fall raises even more questions for teachers about school policies and their own futures. In this final installment of a series, Gretchen Weber discusses how the pandemic could be the force that finally ...
On Wednesday, December 7, 2016, join AIR for a free webinar on resources to assist professional learning communities in building their knowledge of evidence-based strategies to support English learners.
The webinar will provide an overview of the Professional Learning Communities Facilitator’s Guide developed for use with the Teaching Academic Content and Literacy ...
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 ...
In order to improve instruction for ELLs, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has recently an initiative under which all core academic teachers in the state are required to complete comprehensive professional development in Sheltered English Instruction methods by July 2016. AIR has evaluated the pilot professional development ...
Emerging research suggests some promising features of educator performance evaluation measures, such as additional observations of the same teacher and providing more frequent, specific feedback on classroom practice. This report, which discusses first year results of an evaluation of three performance measures for evaluating teachers and principals, found that the ...
Research shows that the most powerful, in-school influence on learning is the quality of instruction that teachers bring to their students. In the next decade, more than 1.5 million new teachers will be hired for our schools; unfortunately, teacher preparation programs may not be up to the task of delivering ...