Exploring the Link Between Professional Environment and Teacher Development: A Statewide Investigation

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Leading for Learning: Partnering With Teachers for Professional Development and Growth

Abstract

Kraft and Papay (2014) finds evidence that a supportive professional environment increases the academic returns to teacher experience in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC. The current study duplicates their primary modeling across all school districts in North Carolina using more recent years of data. Our study also seeks to, where possible, utilize newly available data to strengthen the analysis, including a strengthened measure of teachers’ professional environment.
We replicate Kraft and Papay’s original finding within a standard error, but also find strong evidence that this moderating effect varies across the state and that district-level context variables are unable to account for more than 10% of this variation in most models.
School/Teacher Effectiveness; Teaching Context; School Culture

Authors

• Alexander Berg Jacobson, WestEd

• Sean Tanner, University of California - Berkeley

• Ryan Lewis, WestEd

• Karina Jaquet, WestEd