Teacher

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 investigates why professional development strategies are failing in their goal to effectively support teachers and promote growth. After conducting extensive discussions with educators, researchers determined that teacher agency is a crucial ingredient of any professional development strategy because it motivates teachers to pursue continued development and provides an environment of continuous learning.

This report seeks to identify the components of a sustainable, effective teacher career continuum by studying eight varied school districts—high-poverty, low-poverty, urban, suburban, and rural—across the United States during a three-year period. The report describes and analyzes key elements of a viable teacher career continuum in sections on design features and enabling conditions.

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.

This report analyzes professional learning policies and practices in four school systems where students consistently score well on the Programme for International Student Assessment: Shanghai, British Columbia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Findings illustrate how professional learning is a part of daily school life and is reinforced by school organization and policies.

Minxuan Zhang played a key role in developing Shanghai's education system; in this report, he shares his insights on teacher development, a key element of the system, which he illustrates in terms of a triangle with each side—the career ladder, inservice training and development, and performance evaluation—reinforcing the others.