This chapter focuses on ways to examine impact on P-12 students with particular attention to student learning and how to gain insight about learning at the local, classroom level with beginning teachers. Five approaches are presented with newly developed protocols and rubrics to guide the process.
Purpose of investigating impact on P-12 students
All educators must continually and authentically learn from and connect their practices to their students’ learning. The research-based approaches offered here are intended to be collaboratively applied between beginning P-12 teachers and teacher educators. Reviewing and analyzing student work samples with other professionals cultivates data-informed practices to complement perceptual data such as surveys, observations, and self-reports. These approaches and tools have the following four goals:
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Enable P-12 teachers to analyze their students’ learning and evaluate strategies for increasing the growth of current and future students.
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Accelerate the professional growth of beginning P-12 teachers, particularly their use of data-informed assessment practices.
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Support teacher educators in the continual improvement of their programs.
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Provide resources aligned with CAEP Standard 4.2, Indicators of Teaching Effectiveness and provide appropriate evidence for CAEP or state accreditation reviews.
Approaches to investigating impact on P-12 students
NExT teacher educators selected five research-based approaches that P-12 teachers and teacher educators can use collaboratively to investigate impact on student learning
(see list below). Each of these approaches can be used independently. These approaches support early career teachers’ ongoing development, while simultaneously allowing teacher educators to collect evidence of student learning within that teacher’s practice. To report data systematically from these qualitative approaches, a Student Impact Rubric is provided to allow consistent evaluation of early career teacher performance using these various approaches.
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Student Work Sample Interviews
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Focus Groups on Student Impact
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Case Studies of Impact on Student Learning
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P-12 student engagement data
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Impact on student learning and action research projects
