Developing new partnerships with school districts and expanding our work with teacher educators
TeachingWorks is committed to ensuring that every child in the United States has access to skillful teaching. Over the next year, in addition to continuing the partnerships and projects described in this report, we will concentrate our efforts on the following:
Developing a strategy for partnering with school districts
Through our partnerships with the Montgomery County Public Schools and Grand Rapids area schools, we’ve seen evidence of the powerful role our collaboration with school districts can play in advancing skillful teaching that disrupts inequity. As such, we plan to spend the next year developing a strategic plan for partnerships with school districts across the country, building out new types of support we can offer to schools, school leaders, teachers, and district administrators.
Scaling our work with teacher educators
TeachingWorks offers a range of support and services to professionals responsible for preparing entry-level teachers before they enter the classroom. In an effort to refine the services we provide, TeachingWorks is now offering a new line of customized professional learning opportunities for teacher educators focused on understanding, designing, and implementing practice-based teacher education.
These services include introductory programs for those new to practice-based teacher education; coaching and skill-building opportunities for teacher educators implementing practice-based teacher education; and long-term program improvement partnerships for teacher educators and program administrators looking to implement practice-based teacher education at the programmatic level. With this new line of services, we hope to pursue new partnerships with teacher educators across the country, while exploring the effectiveness of the different levels of engagement we have with teacher educators toward improving teacher preparation.
Tracking our impact
TeachingWorks recognizes that, as our collective work continues to expand, we must become more deliberate and proactive about how we measure our organizational impact. This year we’ve partnered with the Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL), an organization housed at Columbia Law School that offers consulting services to education sector leaders and organizations. Our collaboration with CPRL focuses on the construction of a comprehensive framework for tracking our organizational impact. In multiple virtual and in-person sessions, CPRL helped us identify key indicators critical to demonstrating how teachers and teacher educators are taking up and applying the high-leverage practices and practice-based teacher education. CPRL also supported us in prototyping measurement frameworks for tracking these indicators. Over the next year, TeachingWorks aims to finish building these measurement frameworks and begin tracking the success of our organizational work and mission.