To address teacher shortages, school districts and higher education institutions nationwide are investing billions of dollars in teacher preparation programs and on-the-job supports. WestEd can serve as an impartial evaluation partner for such initiatives to help ensure high-quality implementation and determine whether you’re meeting your teacher workforce goals.
How We Help
WestEd’s extensive expertise in teacher preparation evaluation and research can meet a range of needs. For the best results, our team adapts evaluation methods to the development stage of teacher preparation and support programs.
We use a developmental approach for early-stage or pilot programs, tailoring methods to answer pivotal questions that inform the design, testing, and refinement of a program as it’s being developed, piloted, and implemented.
For programs that are newly launched or about to launch, we employ a formative approach, using both new data collection and analysis of extant data to enhance understanding of program performance over time. Our team provides findings at regular intervals to support midcourse corrections and program enhancement.
For mature programs, our summative/impact approach involves rigorous research to ascertain the program’s effects on outcomes.
Service Delivery
- Online and in person
Who Will Benefit
- State leadership
- Technical assistance providers
- Funders
- Districts and county leadership and practitioners
- Higher education institution leadership, faculty, and staff
“WestEd’s evaluation of the Teacher Residency Grant Program has provided unbiased and timely insights, helping us to make informed decisions and adapt implementation to elevate teacher residencies across the state. This work has helped the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and our partners across the state, adapt implementation in response to learnings about enrollment, diversity, affordability, and sustainability. I am optimistic about the expansion of residency pathways informed by the continued evaluation partnership with our colleagues at WestEd.”
— Marquita Grenot-Scheyer
Chair, California Commission on Teacher Credentialing
Featured Experts
Dana Grayson
Reino Makkonen
Jaclyn Jagdish Tejwani
Melissa Eiler White
Kate Hirschboeck
Connecting Research With Practice
Organizations often need in-house research and evaluation capacity to learn and thrive. Equipped with the latest peer-reviewed research on teacher workforce issues and the most up-to-date research methods and data collection strategies and tools, WestEd can help build your capacity to conduct in-house research and evaluation. Our Approach to Research & Evaluation framework illustrates our dual commitment to building the general knowledge base while supporting applied learning in local contexts.
By enhancing your data use and collection capabilities, WestEd’s evaluation partnership can help you eliminate redundant data-collection practices, identify new areas for data collection, and build systems that can remain in place after the evaluation is over.
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