From Developing New Teachers to Developing All Teachers

In our last post, we shared how our approach to teacher preparation evolved as we began looking at data on how the teachers we trained actually performed with students. That led us to consider not just how we could improve our training for new teachers, but also how we could improve the support we give teachers over time.

We set out to study teacher improvement at a much larger scale, by looking at development efforts across three large school districts and one charter network.

This summer, we published our findings in a new report, The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development. What we found was surprising — even to us. Despite huge investments of time and money across their districts, most teachers stop growing after their first few years in the classroom — and well before they’ve mastered the skills that are critical to student outcomes. Just three in 10 of the teachers we studied made substantial improvements to their performance over time — and two in 10 actually declined over time.

All of this leads us back to a bigger question about our own training:

How can we improve our efforts to prepare new teachers, so that if their growth slows down over time, the teachers we’ve trained are already performing at a level that delivers the instruction students need to succeed? And how do we support teacher development beyond the first year, to capitalize on those early years when we know teachers do their most rapid growing?

These are the questions we’re grappling with as we look to the future of our teacher development work. Sure, we’re developing better teachers than we did a decade ago. But we’re also learning more about where we’re still falling short. Preparing teachers to teach rigorous content, for example, is a tough nut to crack; tougher than preparing teachers to manage classrooms effectively and establish strong classroom environments. And while we wrestle with these challenges, we also believe we need to experiment with other approaches that look beyond training and developing to improve teaching — like changing how a teacher’s job is structured in the first place.

The good news is, with tools to measure our teachers’ performance over time, and data to help us understand what’s working in our training programs and what needs to improve, we’re able to make changes in real-time. We can test a new strategy for improving instruction, measure its effectiveness, and adjust as needed. We know there’s no silver bullet that’s going to fix teacher preparation overnight and ensure that every teacher is great from the get-go — and we’ll have to approach teacher improvement from multiple angles and not put all our eggs in the teacher preparation and development baskets if we want to truly raise the quality of classroom instruction at scale. But we think having concrete data on how our teachers are doing is indispensable to helping us improve their practice. Using that data to inform how we support and develop them is a critical piece of how we approach this incredibly complex work.