RedesignPD Resources
Resources
Explore the resources below for useful tools, information, and perspectives.
Partner resources
| AASA: The Superintendents Association | Return to Top |
Closing the Gap: Turning Data into Action
Educators will find the resources they need to review, purchase, and deploy SIS and LMS solutions to maximize data use to strengthen teaching and learning.
| AFT | Return to Top |
Raising the Bar: Aligning and Elevating Teacher Preparation and the Teaching Profession
This report calls for a systemic approach and more rigorous standards to prepare teachers for successful careers, including establishing a professional bar that all teacher candidates must clear to enter the profession.
Share My Lesson is a place where educators can come together to create and share their very best teaching resources.
| American Association of School Administrators | Return to Top |
Education Cuts Have Yet to Heal: How the Economic Recession Continues to Impact Our Nation’s Schools
This report stems from a Fall 2015 survey of AASA’s members and is the 16th in a series conducted by AASA on the impact of the economic recession and related fiscal policies on the nation’s schools.
| Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation | Return to Top |
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is sharing highlights from a trip of the foundation’s co-chairs to Betsy Layne High School in eastern Kentucky, which sits in a rural community devastated by the decline of the coal industry. However, this school is getting results and building a bridge from its industrial past to the bright futures ahead for its students:
- How the Tough Got Going in Kentucky
- “I’ll be the first one in my family to go to college”
- Cocoa Puffs, Bonobos, and Sandra Bullock
| Center for American Progress | Return to Top |
Implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act: Toward a Coherent, Aligned Assessment System
At this event, archived in the link above, featured panelists addressed the problems with today’s testing systems and schools and highlighted opportunities with implementation of ESSA.
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Dramatic Action, Dramatic Improvement: The Research on School Turnaround
Dramatic school improvement efforts are key to turning around underperforming schools and successfully increasing student achievement, according to the available body of research, and powerful examples from schools demonstrate that school turnaround is most effective when districts take aggressive steps to rescue failing schools.
Fostering School Success with Standards for Nonacademic Skills
This report addresses how states around the country are establishing continuity across the standards that scaffold a child’s early learning experience and his/her K-12 school career.
Next-Generation Accountability Systems: An Overview of Current State Policies and Practices
Building upon the positive aspects of NCLB, the Center for American Progress and CCSSO set a vision for the future of accountability systems, grounded in College and Career Readiness standards, and collecting and using data to better provide support to schools and districts, with a focus on the lowest performing. This paper provides examples of next-generation accountability concepts being implemented by states.
Smart, Skilled, and Striving: Transforming and Elevating the Teaching Profession
This report focuses on the need for systemic changes to all aspects of the teaching profession in order to improve teaching and learning, while keeping up with changing demands on students, teachers, schools, policymakers and education officials.
Forty education organizations have united to launch TeachStrong, a campaign which champions the teaching profession and focuses on creating systems to attract and retain great teachers, ensuring success for all students. TeachStrong’s nine principles provide the foundation to modernizing and professionalizing the teaching profession, including its call for residency programs, career pathways, teacher leadership programs, higher salaries and giving teachers the latitude to teach.
The Changing Role of the Principal: How High-Achieving Districts Are Recalibrating School Leadership
This report examines the changing landscape of school leadership, most notably as a result of increased expectations around instructional improvement and teacher development.
A Look at the Education Crisis: Tests, Standards, and the Future of American Education
This report looks more deeply at the state of our education system and the state of standards-based-reform. The authors of this report analyzed the latest data from NAEP and the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) proficiency rates for several student groups, including students of color and students with disabilities. These rates were used to estimate the total number of student in each group that were performing at the proficient or advanced levels.
| Center for Educational Leadership | Return to Top |
Federally Funded Study Will Refine and Validate Tool to Measure Instructional Leadership Skills
This online tool will measure school leaders' capacity to observe and analyze the quality of classroom instruction, provide feedback to teachers, and plan professional development for teaching staff.
How to Create a Results-focused Learning Environment
This institute will work with central office and school leaders to help them take critical actions that drive results for all students.
Large-Scale Study to Evaluate the Impact of Principal Professional Development
Beginning in 2015, a coalition of research and education institutions will launch a large-scale, randomized controlled trial evaluation of principal professional development funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. The rigorous evaluation will provide evidence on the effectiveness of principal professional development and practical guidance to policymakers, states and school districts.
Central Office Leaders Discuss How to Support Teaching and Principal Effectiveness at Scale
Central Office Leaders Discuss How to Support Teaching and Principal Effectiveness at Scale reflects CEL’s recent “Leading Effective Teaching Fall District Leadership Summit” held in Scottsdale, AZ, which included 70 office leaders representing fifteen school systems. The summit focused on assisting central offices in better supporting principals as instructional leaders.
| Center for Great Teachers and Leaders | Return to Top |
Expanding Our Thinking About Recruiting and Retaining Effective Educators for Rural Areas
This blog reflects Battelle for Kids’ (BFK) Rural Education National Forum held this Fall in Columbus, Ohio. Its focus on gaining a better understanding of the rural context, including strategies that can be employed to ensure rural students have equitable access to quality teachers and leaders, were highlighted at the forum.
This resource provides a brief overview of the current state policy landscape, a discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with new evaluation systems, and a deeper analysis of the legal principles that should be considered if a state is incorporating student growth into education evaluation.
| Center for Teaching Quality | Return to Top |
If teachers know best about professional learning… let's follow their lead.
Center for Teaching Quality Founder, Partner, and CEO Barnett Berry shares his latest take on the BCG study.
The Center for Teaching Quality Collaboratory is an incubator for teachers' bold ideas and innovative solutions. The Collaboratory also welcomes all who value teachers as leaders in the classroom and beyond. The Collaboratory is a place for teachers to meet other forward-thinking teachers around the globe; share insights in a learning community; and get involved in education issues that matter. Membership is free.
The Dynamic Duo of Professional Learning = Collaboration and Technology
This article reflects Barnett Berry’s optimism about the future of the teaching profession based upon three related trends: The proliferation of empirical evidence of how teachers learn; increased visibility of teacher learning in top-performing nations; and the emergence of teacher networking and collaboration.
Case Study: Oak Park Elementary, Brevard County, FL
Watch this video case study about work CTQ has supported for a team of emerging teacher leaders (and their administrators and union) in Brevard Co., FL. Changing student demographics and reshuffled teaching assignments made it harder to create and sustain school improvement, so the district reached out to CTQ for support.
| Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) | Return to Top |
Investment to Advance Career Readiness Pathways for Students
CCSSO has created a $75 million, five-year initiative to help states pursue bold plans to redesign and advance career pathways for students across the country. CCSSO is partnering with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEC) to support states as they elevate career education by collaborating with educators, business, higher education, and community members to align career pathways with high-skill, high-demand jobs.
Educator Competencies for Personalized, Learner-Centered Teaching
These competencies describe ways educators can best assess and address individual student needs and help all reach rigorous proficiency standards.
Professional Standards for Educational Leaders
These revised standards aim to ensure district and school leaders are able to improve student achievement and meet new, higher expectations.
Model Principal Supervisor Professional Standards 2015
The standards for supervisors of school principals provide a clear, practical definition of what the supervisors of school principals should know and be able to do to improve the effectiveness of principals.
| Digital Promise | Return to Top |
Developing a System of Micro-credentials: Supporting Deeper Learning in the Classroom
Explore the Deeper Learning Framework and the skills students must master to succeed in college and careers, along with a set of 40 micro-credentials to recognize that educators have developed the competencies to support this learning.
Making Learning Count: Recognizing Educators’ Skills with Micro-credentials
This study explores the attitudes of a national sample of K-12 teachers towards professional development and competency-based micro-credentials.
Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning: Competency-Based Teacher Preparation and Development
Learn about a professional development approach that balances educator and district goals and that allows teachers to take ownership and demonstrate their learning through micro-credentialing.
Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools is a network of superintendents and district leaders leveraging technology to improve student outcomes and is a testbed for new approaches to teaching and learning.
| Education Counsel | Return to Top |
Summary Analysis of the Every Student Succeeds Act
The Education Counsel has provided a summary analysis of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law on Dec. 10, 2015, replacing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This document provides a brief summary based upon the Counsel’s legal and policy judgment of some of the Act’s key provisions.
The Right Trajectory: State Teachers of the Year Compare Former and New State Assessments
This post reflects the Counsel’s support of the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) to study what excellent teachers think about assessments, given the opportunity to perform a close, side-by-side analysis of the new and old tests. Twenty-three former state teachers of the year and finalists from 12 states and DC participated on two different review panels for fifth grade reading and math assessments.
| Florida Department of Education | Return to Top |
PD Redesign Committee
The Florida Department of Education has formed a PD Redesign Committee comprised of educators and other stakeholders to make recommendations to the Commissioner of Education to dramatically improve adult learning in all of Florida’s schools.
Teacher Prep Programs in Florida -- Resources
The Florida Department of Education released an annual report on teacher preparation programs in Florida in December. For the first time, the report includes how Florida’s state-approved teacher preparation programs measure up according to key performance standards that were developed by a statewide committee of educators, approved by the Florida Legislature and signed into law by Governor Scott in 2013.
| Hope Street Group | Return to Top |
Leaders of Change: An Overview of Hope Street Group’s 2014 National Teacher Fellow Policy Projects
This report focuses on the impact these teacher leaders have had on three policy projects: college and career-ready standards, educator evaluation, and professional development.
| Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida | Return to Top |
Algebra Nation
To help teachers and students succeed in algebra 1, explore this free online resource aligned with state standards. This free set of resources includes video tutorials, interactive discussion areas, and exam practice tools.
Secrets of Successful Teaching
This effort to capture the practical wisdom of selected highly effective teachers is intended to add to the conversation about teacher inquiry and improving practices.
Evaluation of Florida’s Early Childhood Professional Development System
This study, commissioned by the Florida Office of Early Learning, examines the state’s professional development system for early childhood learning and makes actionable recommendations for improvement.
| Learning Forward | Return to Top |
Moving from Compliance to Agency: What Teachers Need to Make Professional Learning Work
Published in partnership with NCTAF, this whitepaper explores teacher agency in effective professional learning. The report emphasizes the importance of teacher agency and pinpoints strategies that education leaders and policymakers can use to leverage agency in designing more effective professional learning.
| National Center on Time & Learning | Return to Top |
Giving English Language Learners the Time They Need to Succeed
This report profiles three expanded-time elementary schools, providing both the framework and compelling examples for understanding how the strategies and effective practices aimed at helping ELL students blend together to produce a high-quality education.
Redesigning and Expanding School Time to Support Common Core Implementation
Expanded-time schools give teachers more time for the ongoing professional development and collaboration needed to implement the Common Core standards.
Supporting Student Success Through Time and Technology
A guide for district leaders and school practitioners interested in implementing a blended learning strategy in their schools. The guide details the current blended learning approaches at six expanded learning time schools across the country, and highlights their lessons learned. Additionally, it outlines seven design and implementation steps for practitioners interested in using technology to personalize student learning.
The Case for Improving and Expanding Time in School
Learn how expanded learning time schools implement blended learning approaches and find design and implementation steps to use technology to personalize student learning.
Time for Teachers: Leveraging Time To Strengthen Instruction & Empower Teachers
This report examines 17 high-performing and fast-improving schools around the country that have taken advantage of expanded school schedules to provide students with more time for engaging academic and enrichment classes and teachers with more time to collaborate with colleagues, analyze students data, create new lesson plans, and develop new skills.
| National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future | Return to Top |
What it Takes to Shift the Professional Learning Paradigm
Written by Melinda George, NCTAF President,this blog outlines the work of the PD Redesign Partnership and identifies her learning from November's meeting of the Partnership members. George’s takeaway includes how the Partnership serves as a catalyst to instill courage and spark change.
| National Education Association (NEA) | Return to Top |
Earlier this year, the National Education Association (NEA) issued its annual Legislative Report Card for the 114th U.S. Congress, 1st session, which tallies notes and other relevant legislative actions from January through December 2015. The Report Card tracks members’ of Congress overall support for public education, students and educators, with each member receiving a letter grade of A through F.
| New America | Return to Top |
Beyond Ratings: Re-envisioning State Teacher Evaluation Systems as Tools for Professional Growth
Building from the National Council on Teacher Quality’s recent finding that 31 states require evaluation to inform teacher development, the report authors examine these states’ efforts to help local education agencies (LEAs) make good on that policy. The authors identify three key strategies—including two-way communication, data-driven support, and ongoing monitoring—that states must employ in order to move further towards this goal.
| Public Impact | Return to Top |
Digital Learning + Teacher Leadership: Two New School Models
How can teacher leaders and their teams collaborate and learn together in order to provide students with personalized instruction that impacts high growth? This article focuses on how these can be accomplished through the combination of blended learning with teacher leadership.
Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture is extending the reach of excellent teachers in 5 districts (including the Texas Education Agency and Opportunity Culture’s Charter School Network) through collaborative teaching teams, higher compensation, re-allocation of funding streams – all within a district’s budget. In its second year of implementation, Opportunity Culture is now in 30 schools, providing 150 teachers with higher pay, giving 300 teachers with on-the-job development, while impacting 16,000 students.
Teacher-led Professional Learning
The Teacher-Led Professional Learning goal is to help teachers, their schools, unions, and districts implement collaborative, job-embedded professional learning that leads to better student learning by developing and using the skills of involved teacher-leaders.
Reaching All Students with Excellent STEM Teachers
This brief summarizes the grim facts about STEM employment and learning in the U.S. today, emerging efforts to stem the shortage of skilled teachers, and how an Opportunity Culture can help.
| RTI International | Return to Top |
Using Performance-Based Funding to Incentivize Change
This paper describes how performance-based funding systems can be incorporated into state education resource distribution formulas to incentivize improvements in educational services, and presents a seven-step process that RTI has developed to build stakeholder support for system adoption.
| Southern Education Foundation | Return to Top |
A New Majority Research Bulletin: Low Income Students Now a Majority in the Nation’s Public Schools
The latest data collected from the states by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), show that 51 percent of the students across the nation’s public schools were low income in 2013. This defining moment in America’s public education has been developing over several decades, and SEF has documented the trends and implications.
These maps and short overview provide context on education and demographic trends in the South and Nation.
| TNTP | Return to Top |
The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America's Urban Schools
The best and worst teachers leave urban schools at strikingly similar rates. To combat the retention crisis and create the profession teachers deserve, this report recommends making the retention of "'irreplaceables," teachers so successful that they are nearly impossible to replace, a top priority.The report also recommends strengthening the teaching profession with higher expectations.
The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About the Quest for Teacher Development
This study recommends that we re-envision professional learning by asking fundamentally different questions about what better teaching means and how to achieve it.
This report examines our pervasive and longstanding failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of our teachers. At the heart of the matter are teacher evaluation systems, which in theory should serve as the primary mechanism for assessing such variations, but in practice tell us little about how one teacher differs from any other, except teachers whose performance is so egregiously poor as to warrant dismissal.
TNTP Core Teaching Rubric: A Tool for Conducting Common Core-aligned Classroom Observations
This tool streamlines today’s complicated rubrics to bring the same focus and coherence to classroom observations that the Common Core brings to academic standards.
DCPS Bridges the Gap Between Communities and Classrooms
This recent blog post focuses on authentic community engagement being critical to student success – by collaborating with and learning from all stakeholders, including district leaders, teachers, families, civic leaders, students, and others. The District of Columbia Public Schools has positioned teachers to partner with families in order to advance student learning and build community partnerships.
Other useful readings
| Asia Society | Return to Top |
Teacher Professional Development: International Practices
This article discusses key elements of effective professional development systems for teachers. In particular, it highlights the efficacy of professional development that responds specifically to teachers’ needs, as opposed to a broad menu of options, and is developed at the local level.
| British Columbia Ministry of Education | Return to Top |
BC’s Education Plan: Focus on Learning
The focus for this transformation is the movement to increasingly personalized learning, which is enabled and supported by quality teaching and learning, flexibility and choice, and high standards.
A new partnership and strategy will ensure B.C. teachers have greater latitude, support and encouragement to try new, innovative teaching practices, Education Minister Peter Fassbender announced in early 2015 at the B.C. Focus on Learning forum at the Wosk Center for Dialogue.
| Delaware | Return to Top |
This blueprint articulates the need for professional development opportunities for teachers that are personalized and relevant to their needs. The blueprint offers policy recommendations for decision makers in the Department of Education, district administrators, and for teachers themselves.
| National Council on Teacher Quality | Return to Top |
State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading and Learning
This report is a comprehensive analysis of states’ policies requiring student growth and achievement as part of educator evaluation. The report also examines how states are utilizing evaluation results to better inform practice, including decisions of consequence that may impact an educator’s status, such as tenure.
Teacher Evaluation Policy: Where Each State Is in Implementing Teacher Effectiveness Policies?
These set of briefs provide a primer on each state's evaluation requirements and timeline for implementation.
Teacher Quality Roadmap: Improving Policies and Practices in Pittsburgh Public Schools
This report examines teacher quality policies and practices in Pittsburgh Public Schools and provides Pittsburgh with a tailored analysis of the teacher policy areas most in need of critical attention, as well as areas of strength for the district.
Training Our Future Teachers: Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them
Using evidence from more than 500 colleges and universities producing nearly half of the nation's new teachers annually, this report answers two questions that go to the heart of whether the demands of teacher preparation are well matched to the demands of the classroom: Are teacher candidates graded too easily, misleading them about their readiness to teach? Are teacher preparation programs providing sufficiently rigorous training, or does the approach to training drive higher grades?
| Educational Researcher | Return to Top |
Rethinking Scale: Moving Beyond Numbers to Deep and Lasting Change
This article draws on a review of theoretical and empirical literature on scale, relevant research on reform implementation, and original research to synthesize and articulate a more multidimensional conceptualization.
| EdSurge | Return to Top |
How Teachers Are Learning: Professional Development Remix
This guide from EdSurge provides information on a range of approaches and tools that facilitate personalized professional development for teachers. The guide includes field reports, a professional development framework, and profiles of 28 tools that support personalized learning for teachers.
| EdWeek | Return to Top |
Long Beach District Sets Course to Personalize Teacher PD
The Long Beach District, the first school district visited by the Partnership, has invested in an online PD platform that provides its own curriculum and personalized professional development support for its educators. MYPD, which provides a personalized system that aligns with teachers’ own needs, also connects to student performance records.
| Expeditionary Learning | Return to Top |
The Learning Our Teachers Deserve
Scott Hartl of Expeditionary Learning lays out a framework for powerful and effective professional development for teachers.
| Ideo | Return to Top |
Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes -- and even strategy.
Shaping a School System, From the Ground Up
In starting a new educational network in Peru, a businessman turned to Ideo, a design company, to help devise everything from classrooms to business models.
| KnowledgeWorks | Return to Top |
Certifying Skills and Knowledge: Four Scenarios on the Future of Credentials
This paper considers trends in the education and employment sectors to explore four possible scenarios reflecting how credentials might reflect individuals’ knowledge and skills in ten years’ time.
Three Essential Steps Connect Your Learning to Student Outcomes
Learning teams are key to ensuring success with Common Core implementation.
| MDRC | Return to Top |
An Introduction to MDRC’s Evaluation of the Innovative Professional Development Challenge
This Issue Focus introduces the iPD Challenge and presents some early findings from MDRC’s study of it.
| National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education Certification | Return to Top |
NASDTEC’s Annual Report (2014)
This report reflects changes states have made in certification and licensure renewal. Georgia now no longer requires use of Professional Learning Units (PLUs) to renew certificates, while Washington now requires Professional Growth Plans, which replace traditional clock hour credits in order to be issued a Tier 2 license. Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, and Vermont have also made relicensure policy changes.
| National Council on Teacher Quality | Return to Top |
State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading and Learning
This report is a comprehensive analysis of states’ policies requiring student growth and achievement as part of educator evaluation. The report also examines how states are utilizing evaluation results to better inform practice, including decisions of consequence that may impact an educator’s status, such as tenure.
Teacher Evaluation Policy: Where Each State Is in Implementing Teacher Effectiveness Policies?
These set of briefs provide a primer on each state's evaluation requirements and timeline for implementation.
Teacher Quality Roadmap: Improving Policies and Practices in Pittsburgh Public Schools
This report examines teacher quality policies and practices in Pittsburgh Public Schools and provides Pittsburgh with a tailored analysis of the teacher policy areas most in need of critical attention, as well as areas of strength for the district.
Training Our Future Teachers: Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them
Using evidence from more than 500 colleges and universities producing nearly half of the nation's new teachers annually, this report answers two questions that go to the heart of whether the demands of teacher preparation are well matched to the demands of the classroom: Are teacher candidates graded too easily, misleading them about their readiness to teach? Are teacher preparation programs providing sufficiently rigorous training, or does the approach to training drive higher grades?
| The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching | Return to Top |
Building and Supporting Improvers
This is one of a blog in a series designed to explore and bring to life the framework for initiating networked improvement communities (NICs). This post spotlights one of the five essential domains in the framework for the initiation of a viable NIC: learning and using improvement research methods.
| Redesign Challenge | Return to Top |
The Redesign Challenge offers educators a place to share experiences, exchange ideas and refine new approaches to old problems.
| Rodel Foundation of Arizona | Return to Top |
This initiative takes a systems approach to transforming teaching and learning of mathematics based upon Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards for mathematics. It is a unique combination of grade-level professional learning for teachers, teacher leaders and administrators.
Rodel Announces 2016 Rodel Exemplary Principal Finalists
The Rodel Foundation of Arizona has announced its 15 Exemplary Principals finalists for 2016. These outstanding school leaders will mentor aspiring principals, better preparing them to lead their own high-needs schools.
| Stanford Social Innovation Review | Return to Top |
Social entrepreneurs not only must understand the broad environment in which they work, but also must shape those environments to support their goals, when feasible. Borrowing insights from the field of ecology, the authors offer an ecosystems framework to help social entrepreneurs create long-lasting and significant social change.
A conversation with communications expert Jonah Berger on how to build support for ideas and gain momentum on social change.
| The New Yorker | Return to Top |
James Surowiecki on the mainstreaming of performance excellence.
