In states that have adopted the national Common Core Standards teaching to the standards is required, it is just not clear what that means. The standards enumerate skill goals, but not curriculum, not specific lesson plans, and not approaches to...
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Education First and Public Impact are supporting a mid-sized urban district with a school turnaround model that puts excellent teaching and new teacher career pathways at the center of school redesign.
Education First helped design and launch EdReports.org, a new national nonprofit organization that is the “Consumer Reports” for K-12 education, starting with instructional materials.
Measuring what students know and can do is an essential part of teaching, and like many teaching practices, designing assessments is sophisticated work. In this toolkit, produced under contract as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Reform Support Network...
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This report provides our findings on how district and state leaders can improve feedback and support for teachers. Based on interviews with five school districts spanning urban, suburban and rural areas, we identified five essential practices: (1) Promoting a culture...
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Classroom observations give teachers the opportunity to receive meaningful and direct feedback about their practice. But many observers still struggle to give teachers the kind of feedback that would help them improve instruction. In this publication we summarize research, lessons...
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If states and districts want new evaluation systems to improve teaching and raise student achievement, they will need to provide the right resources and supports to guide implementation. This brief introduces and sums up the series, in which we provide practical advice to help leaders develop or refine their teacher evaluation and support systems.
Classroom observations are an essential component of all rigorous teacher evaluation systems. But in far too many schools, observations are treated as a compliance exercise rather than an opportunity to improve teacher practices. In this brief, we provide state and...
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Students recognize effective teaching when they experience it, and they spend more time observing their teachers than anyone else. But only a handful of states and districts use student surveys in educator evaluations, mostly because of opposition from teachers and...
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Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) are a way to measure student growth and reinforce effective teaching practices, but they can also be resource-intensive and challenging to implement. In this brief, we explain how state and district leaders can overcome these challenges...
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