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High School Teacher Quality and Professional Development
Recruiting and Retaining High Quality Teachers | Instructional Leadership
Highly qualified teachers exert a strong influence on student success and, for this reason, remain a top priority for high schools. In light of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) goal of every student having a "highly qualified" teacher, more high school students stand to learn from the best-prepared instructors.
To best meet their students' needs, even the most talented high school teachers benefit from ongoing professional development opportunities offered within the context of explicit standards and vetted goals. The National High School Center offers a variety of resources and services to help states enhance teacher quality, by helping them reach and maintain standards for what teachers should know and be able to do.
The National High School Center is committed to helping to ensure that high school teachers are dedicated to students and their learning, knowledgeable in the subjects they teach and instructional methods, responsible for monitoring student achievement, reflective of their professional experiences, and active in their own learning communities.1
Available resources through the National High School Center related to teacher quality and professional development include supporting networking with and the development of learning communities, sharing information to promote and share best practices, and advancing the available research base.
Recruiting and Retaining High Quality Teachers
Lessons Learned: New Teachers Talk About Their Jobs, Challenges and Long-Range Plans
A report by Public Agenda and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality finds that new high school and middle school teachers are more concerned about administrative support, more frustrated by student motivation and behavior, less likely to see teaching as a lifelong career choice, and less likely to believe that all students can achieve in school, as compared to new elementary school teachers.
Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools
In an effort to bring teachers’ voices to the center of the national discussion around education, Scholastic, Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation conducted a survey of more than 40,000 teachers to gain their perspective on school reform.
Qualified Teachers for At-risk Schools: A National Imperative
This report outlines reasons why there are relatively few effective or highly qualified teachers teaching in at-risk urban and rural high schools when compared to their suburban counterparts. It suggests research-based solutions on how to attract and retain these highly skilled teachers to at-risk high schools.
Removing Chronically Ineffective Teachers: Barriers and Opportunities
This report, produced by the Center for American Progress, focuses on the challenges in dismissing chronically ineffective teachers, those who are persistently ineffective and don’t improve with additional professional development or other types of supports.
Supporting Effective Teaching through Teacher Evaluation: A Study of Teacher Evaluation in Five Charter Schools
This report, produced by the Center for American Progress, examines teacher evaluation practices in five charter schools affiliated with three well-established charter management organizations
Tapping the Potential: Retaining and Developing High-Quality New Teachers
This report, published by the Alliance for Excellent Education, advocates an increase in teacher induction programs to better prepare educators in their first years of service and also provides many follow-up resources.
Teaching for a New World: Preparing High School Educators to Deliver College- and Career-Ready Instruction
This policy brief identifies how secondary teacher preparation programs should be improved and strengthened to ensure that teachers are prepared to meet the needs of diverse student populations.
1 "About NBPTS." 1 December 2005. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. http://www.nbpts.org/about_us
