Teacher and Leader Development
The Cobb Teaching & Learning System: An Initiative that Advances Educator Collaboration, Transformative Technology, and Real-Time Data Utilization
The Cobb Teaching & Learning System (CTLS) is a digital learning initiative developed for and by the Cobb County School District (CCSD) in Georgia. CTLS became a crucial initiative used by the district to maintain student academic progress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting a mixed-… more →
Teacher Retention in Early College High Schools and Texas STEM Academies: Understanding the Positive Impacts of College and Career Readiness School Models
A stable learning environment is critical to high school reforms aimed at promoting postsecondary educational success. High teacher attrition can disrupt stable learning environments by uprooting student-teacher relationships and harming school climate. Educational leaders need greater… more →
Teachers’ use of class time and student achievement
We study teachers’ choices about how to allocate class time across different instructional activities, for example, lecturing, open discussion, or individual practice. Our data come from secondary schools in England, specifically classes preceding GCSE exams. Students score higher in math when… more →
The Valence of Teacher Performance Feedback and Its Consequences: Examining a Critical Mechanism of Reformed Teacher Evaluation Systems
Districts nationwide have increased the frequency of teacher evaluations. Yet, we know little about the role of evaluator feedback for teacher improvement. Using unique classroom observation-level data, we use evaluator ratings and teacher self-assessments of teacher performance to rigorously… more →
The Effects of High-performing, High-turnover Teachers on Long-run Student Achievement: Evidence from Teach For America
An increasing share of new teachers enter the profession through alternative certification programs. While these programs increase teacher supply in areas facing critical shortages, they also increase instability in local teacher labor markets via high teacher turnover. A fundamental question is… more →
A Framework for Motivating Teacher-Student Relationships
Few question the value of teacher-student relationships (TSRs) for educational outcomes. TSRs are positively associated with students’ achievement and engagement, as well as teachers’ well-being. Building and maintaining these crucial classroom relationships, however, is not easy. Drawing on… more →
Blurred Boundaries: A Day in the Life of a Teacher
The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, even prior to the pandemic relatively little was known about teachers’ time use… more →
Out of the Gate, but Not Necessarily Teaching: A Descriptive Portrait of Early-Career Earnings for Those Who Are Credentialed to Teach
Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state’s public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third… more →
Does Teacher Professional Development Improve Student Learning? Evidence from Leading Educators’ Fellowship Model
Teachers are the most important school-specific factor in student learning. Yet, little evidence exists linking teacher professional development programs and the strategies or activities that comprise them to student achievement. In this paper, we examine a fellowship model for professional… more →
Challenges and Tradeoffs of “Good” Teaching: The Pursuit of Multiple Educational Outcomes
The pursuit of multiple educational outcomes makes teaching a complex craft subject to potential conflicts and competing commitments. Using a dataset in which teachers were randomly assigned to students paired with videotapes of instruction, we both document and unpack such a tradeoff. Upper-… more →
The Effect of Active Learning Professional Development Training on College Students’ Academic Outcomes
Growing literature documents the promise of active learning instruction in engaging students in college classrooms. Accordingly, faculty professional development (PD) programs on active learning have become increasingly popular in postsecondary institutions; yet, quantitative evidence on the… more →
A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence Linking STEM Classroom Interventions to Teacher Knowledge, Classroom Instruction, and Student Achievement
Despite growing evidence that classroom interventions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) can increase student achievement, there is little evidence regarding how these interventions affect teachers themselves and whether these changes predict student learning.
Does Monitoring Change Teacher Pedagogy and Student Outcomes?
In theory, monitoring can improve employee motivation and effort, particularly in settings lacking measurable outputs, but research assessing monitoring as a motivator is limited to laboratory settings. To address this gap, I leverage exogenous variation in the presence and intensity of teacher… more →
Typologizing Teacher Practice: How Teachers Integrate Culturally Responsive, Ambitious, and Traditional Teaching Approaches
As states and districts expand their goals for equitable mathematics instruction to focus on cultural responsiveness and rigor, it is critical to understand how teachers integrate multiple teaching approaches. Drawing on survey data from a larger study of professional learning, we use mixture… more →
Effective teacher professional development: new theory and a meta-analytic test
Multiple meta-analyses have now documented small positive effects of teacher professional development (PD) on pupil test scores. However, the field lacks any validated explanatory account of what differentiates more from less effective in-service training. As a result, researchers have little in… more →
Teachers of Color, Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Student Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from the Random Assignment of Teachers to Classes
Black teachers are critical resources for our children and schools.
Instructional Coaching Personnel and Program Scalability
Instructional coaching is an attractive alternative to one-size-fits-all teacher training and development in part because it is purposefully differentiated: programming is aligned to individual teachers’ needs and implemented by an individual coach. But, how much of the benefit of coaching as an… more →
Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment
Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across… more →
Can Automated Feedback Improve Teachers’ Uptake of Student Ideas? Evidence From a Randomized Controlled Trial In a Large-Scale Online Course
Providing consistent, individualized feedback to teachers is essential for improving instruction but can be prohibitively resource-intensive in most educational contexts. We develop M-Powering Teachers, an automated tool based on natural language processing to give teachers feedback on their… more →
Experimental Evidence on the Robustness of Coaching Supports in Teacher Education
Many novice teachers learn to teach “on-the-job,” leading to burnout and attrition among teachers and negative outcomes for students in the long term. Pre-service teacher education is tasked with optimizing teacher readiness, but there is a lack of causal evidence regarding effective ways for… more →