On April 26, a TERI Work Day was dedicated to creating a shared culture of evidence in teaching and ongoing program improvement. This requires understanding and using education data, which our higher-education partners are discovering is a powerful tool for developing informed approaches to improving student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Over 90 people were in attendance, including university faculty and staff and representatives from our school partners. We heard from a team of University researchers about four ongoing research projects in TERI related to teacher identity development, developing partnerships between universities and schools, the design of feedback in supervisory relationships, and capturing the professional cultures of schools. We also saw data related to the CEHD teacher candidate admission and enrollment over the past three years and engaged in conversations about how this data will help drive ongoing recruitment efforts within the TERI Partnership Network.
Special guests in the room were a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who, as part of the Bush Foundation’s Educational Achievement Initiative, have been working with school districts from across North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota to tie student performance to teachers, and to our higher-education partner universities where they received their training. They are experts in working with value-added methods, which are a way to use student assessment data and other factors to measure the contributions teachers and schools make toward student achievement.
To read more about this event, please see this article on the Bush Foundation website:
http://www.bushfoundation.org/blog/value-added-visit
TERI_Work_Day_4-26-2012_final_agenda[1].docx