When different programs come together to share knowledge and tackle a common challenge, learning accelerates and the work advances faster. That’s the…

Alignment is the cornerstone of teacher preparation, my colleagues Benjamin Riley and Valerie Sakimura wrote in Educational Leadership last year. Last…

This post is the third in a three-part series by Common Indicators System Network participants, who are sharing their experiences with the Network and…

This post is the second in a three-part series by Common Indicators System Network participants, who are sharing their experiences with the Network…

For years, Temple University’s College of Education has collected comprehensive and accurate information about what’s working and what could improve. Participation in the Common Indicators System Network is a way to amplify and extend its previous work, offering new and deeper ways to explore the pressing questions that we, and the field more broadly, need to answer.

Years ago, as a relatively new mentor teacher, I planned and implemented a Think-Pair-Share activity as part of a second-grade science lesson. Because two teacher-candidates were observing me, I was extra intentional about how I implemented this strategy. I carefully paired students; I chose an open-ended question to push thinking; and I gave students time to think and try out their ideas in a low-stakes way before participating in a whole-class discussion. The activity went well, and I felt pretty good about my demonstration of effective teaching.

Ask any teacher-educator about the class she’s teaching tomorrow, and you’re likely to get a detailed rundown of her lesson — but not necessarily how that class fits into the broader picture of a candidate’s learning trajectory. This makes total sense, because teacher-educators are asked to focus on their own piece of the puzzle. Yet learning science tells us that we learn new ideas by reference to ideas we already know. Teacher-educators need to understand a candidate’s macro learning trajectory in order to maximize teacher-candidate learning within their portion of that trajectory. In other words, it’s important to help stakeholders see the bigger picture.

If you’re a mentor teacher hosting a student teacher in your classroom, you might have questions about how to help those pre-service teachers get ready.

Two weeks ago, Deans for Impact released Building Blocks, our digital publication summarizing our research visits to 18 educator-preparation programs over the past two years. One of our goals was to make the hard work of teacher preparation more visible to the broader education community, and the early wave of enthusiasm and warm feedback suggests we may have hit our target.

Today marks a major milestone in the journey of Deans for Impact.

A little over two years ago, we set out to visit the educator-preparation…