Rhode Island Teacher Pipeline
We have built a unique state-district-research partnership with the Rhode Island Department of Education and Providence Public School District focused on teacher staffing. Many attempts to understand and improve staffing challenges work only at the state or district level. However, both the data and the levers to shift workforce policy are divided across multiple levels in ways that often frustrate improvement efforts. The goal of this partnership is threefold: (1) to leverage the unique data facilitated by a state-district partnership to conduct high-quality research that explores these issues in new, more interconnected ways than past studies; (2) to support local policymaking efforts by diagnosing specific challenges and identifying opportunities for intervention to meet these challenges; and (3) to develop a model for a new type of partnership that brings together key stakeholders at the state and district levels to promote better evidence-based policymaking.
Research Partnership for Professional Learning
Annenberg is partnering with six leading professional learning organizations to create the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL). Partners include Teaching Lab, Instruction Partners, Leading Educators, TNTP, Achievement Network, and Unbound Ed. Rather than studying whether individual PL models are effective or not, our goal is to transform professional learning research by studying more generalizable design principles across organizations and contexts. We will conduct a series of randomized experiments in order to test key questions related to the design of professional learning. These experiments will inform organizational decisions and build a broader knowledge base about “what works” in professional development for the field.
Teacher Education Research Lab
In partnership with scholars at Boston University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Maryland, we are creating a lab to study best practices in teacher education. This lab will focus on addressing a core challenge in the field, namely teacher education has traditionally sidestepped causal research. We aim to increase the footprint of effectiveness research in teacher education, developing a set of studies that use common measures to causally identify the success of innovative teacher education practices (i.e., specific activities, pedagogies, or processes within a course) and innovative program elements (e.g., requiring a course in equity, diversity, and inclusion or a module on preventing early reading difficulties). In other words, we are less interested in knowing whether specific programs are effective or not, but digging into the underlying practices and elements involved in effective teacher education