Leader

This report by the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) includes insights from effective teachers on how teacher leadership affects their practice. It explores how teacher-leaders can contribute to instructional improvements in their schools, and offers policy recommendations to support teacher leadership at the local and state levels.

This report from the New Teacher Center (NTC) reviews state policies designed to support new teachers and the mentors working alongside them in their first years in the classroom. Based on findings from a similar report published in 2012, NTC concludes that limited progress has been made by states in the intervening period. 

This brief highlights an analysis of the Boston Public Schools Human Capital Initiative (HCI), launched in 2014 to improve teacher quality in city schools. The brief concludes that HCI has enabled schools to recruit a more diverse, highly effective teaching pool, but identifies several areas where change is still needed, including reform of the state tenure law, and greater use of alternative pathways to teacher certification.

This series of vignettes, with accompanying video from Public Impact, focuses on principals at three Opportunity Culture schools, profiling their use of the Multi-Classroom Leadership model that enabled them to create and lead teams of teacher leaders in their schools in Nashville, Tennessee, and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Based on the premise that distributing responsibility for developing teachers across a group of talented teachers yields improvements in teaching and learning, this report identifies successful “distributed leadership” models and the five key principles that distributed leadership models share, and outlines best practices for phasing in a successful distributed leadership model. 

This report presents an analysis of teacher characteristics and learning experiences and describes how they can affect English language learner (ELL) student outcomes in mathematics. Teachers with prior experience teaching ELL students and teachers who pursued specific training in ELL instructional strategies achieved positive gains with their ELL mathematics students when compared with non-ELL students. Teachers with years of generic teaching experience did not achieve similar gains.

This report examines key findings from a 2014 California teacher survey. Slightly more than 500 teachers with varying levels of experience responded to the survey, which found that California teachers favor a system of tenure founded on a performance-based professional benchmark and believe that more support is needed to help struggling teachers improve.

In 2010, the New York City Department of Education created an Office of Innovation, or iZone, to introduce personalized learning and blended learning programs in district schools. This report presents lessons learned from implementation from 2012 to 2014 and lays out steps districts can follow to successfully implement innovative practices and reshape procurement processes necessary to develop new instructional tools and instructional practices.

This case study focuses on Talledega School District, a high-poverty, rural district in Alabama, and its transition from a traditional school curriculum to a project-based curriculum integrating technology. The case study outlines how the district prepared for the new model: retraining teachers, redesigning school facilities, and engaging with the community. Performance results and graduation rates in the district have continued to improve following implementation of the new system.

Fourth in a series of reports by Wallace Foundation on principalship, this report examines the progress districts participating in the Principal Pipeline Initiative have made in implementing systems to evaluate and support principals using clear standards. The districts worked on refining their evaluation processes to focus on helping principals improve as instructional leaders by identifying areas of weakness and providing tools to support growth.