Blog

UTRU is a data-driven organization and we routinely meet to discuss the latest research, news and reports on teacher preparation.  This week, we’ve all been reading and digesting the latest important piece from TNTP, Leap Year: Assessing and Supporting Effective First-Year Teachers.  The report’s insight and recommendations based on their research and implementation of ACE offers a wealth of lessons for all teacher preparation and support providers. 

We want to use this blog entry to echo a

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) final report on measuring teacher effectiveness last week. The MET project sought to answer three key questions: Can measures of effective teaching identify teachers who better help students learn? How much weight should be placed on each measure of effective teaching when combining classroom observations, student surveys, and student achievement gains? And, how can teachers be assured trustworthy results from

A recent Washington Post blog surfaces a question that has been troubling teacher preparation programs for years: can anyone be made into a teacher, or are certain dispositions or characteristics necessarily inherent? Robert Bligh, the blog’s author, past general counsel of the Nebraska Association of School Boards, and college professor, argues that “the most important thing [teacher preparation programs] do to produce effective teachers is deciding (a) who they let into the program and (b)

The Tennessee Higher Education Commission released the 2012 Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs today, showing the Memphis Teacher Residency (MTR) as the most effective teacher preparation program in the state. Sixty-four percent of MTR graduates show statistically significant positive results in teacher effectiveness. The next highest program reported that 25 percent of their completers provide statistically significant positive results in the classroom.

An excerpt

Two UTRU partners have been in the national media in recent weeks. The Aspire Teacher Residency was featured in this Hechinger Report article focused on the intensive classroom apprenticeship and the use of strong teachers to train newcomers. The Seattle Teacher Residency, a participant in UTRU’s Residency for Residencies Program, is highlighted in this Seattle Times article. The Seattle Teacher Residency will launch in 2013, preparing 25 teachers in its first cohort. Anissa Listak, UTRU

Harvard professor Roland Fryer recently published a paper titled Learning from the Successes and Failures of Charter Schools. Dr. Fryer studied 35 charter schools in New York and then looked at how Houston and Denver implemented five top practices from these charters in some of their low-performing schools, yielding very promising results. We at UTRU have read the policy brief and discussion paper and found the following takeaways to be most relevant for teacher preparation.

Focus on human