Works in Progress


What CTP Offers:

Practicing Educators, Leaders, and Policymakers

Scholars

Future of Education

The Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, a consortium of several major universities, focuses on the system-wide improvement of learning and teaching and the development of a highly capable, committed teaching force. Center researchers study ways that leaders, policymakers, and others seek to renew the quality of teaching and the teacher force through strategies and initiatives enacted at the local and state level, in school systems and teacher education institutions, and through the engagement of supportive groups in the community. The Center investigates these strategies or initiatives, and the conditions that enable or frustrate them, in diverse settings across the country, especially settings serving students from low-income backgrounds.

This view of improvement as a highly interactive venture distinguishes the Center and directs the design of its studies so that they may help educators and policymakers anticipate both the course and outcomes of improvement strategies. The view prompts questions such as:

  • How do state initiatives, local conditions, and preparation institutions work together to build the pool of qualified teachers and equip them for the demands of the classroom in a standards-based environment?
  • How does the district's approach to personnel functions, curricular guidance, and mentoring create conditions that support the improvement of teaching?
  • In what ways do provisions for supporting teachers' professional learning reinforce—or contradict—state standards and curriculum, or its assessment and accountability systems, and vice versa?
  • Under what conditions—both in schools and district-wide—do district actions create strong professional communities in schools? What are effects on student learning?

These are important questions, questions CTP researchers are asking and working diligently to answer. The studies CTP undertakes and the frameworks and findings it generates will help educators and policymakers as they work together to develop sound and cohesive improvement strategies, that when enacted work synergistically to renew teaching and learning in our nation's schools.

CTP Offers:

Practicing Educators, Leaders, and Policymakers

For these audiences, CTP provides frameworks, findings, and tools for understanding and anticipating how different improvement strategies can help to renew education for young people. Center research offers these ideas through rich and varied pictures of system-wide attempts to improve learning, teaching, and teacher development in different kinds of settings.

Scholars

The Center advances the development of theory and a cumulative base of evidence pertaining to:

  • The ways teachers' instructional practice and careers are shaped by the professional, organizational, and policy environments in which they work.
  • The implementation and consequences of strategic, coherent approaches to the renewal of teaching and student learning.
  • The dynamics of teacher development and support in educational systems.

In studying these topics, the Center mounts investigations that join the perspectives and findings of research at the "micro" level on teaching and teacher learning with research at the "macro" level on renewal initiatives, leadership, and policy environments.

The Future of Education

CTP's work is squarely centered on issues of national importance that simultaneously have pressing immediacy and enduring significance. By attending to the quality of teachers and teaching, and related issues across the public education system from classroom to higher levels of government, the work provides new ways for seeing and strategizing about our nation's educational future.

 

 

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Modified Date:5/22/2002 Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, University of Washington, 2001