About Us

The TeachingWorks Resource Library is a free, open collection of teacher education resources based on of research and partnerships with outstanding educators and education researchers across the U.S. and globally. It is designed for use by teacher educators in their work with novice teachers.

We believe that teachers and teacher educators must learn to actively disrupt inequity because teaching and teacher education are not neutral. We offer the resources on this site in support of that work, and will continue to add resources as we develop new ones in partnership with students, teachers and teacher educators. To learn more about how we understand justice, teaching, and teacher education, visit Our Perspective.

We invite you to explore the site by clicking around, or start out by watching this brief orientation video.

We gratefully acknowledge the following faculty, staff, and doctoral students for their work developing and supporting this site.

Working group: Heather Beasley, Martha Curren-Preis, Laura Jones and Adina Lopatin

Advisory group: Deborah Ball, Alyssa Brandon, Nicole Cirino, Brianne Dotson, Francesca Forzani, Nicole Garcia and Monique Cherry-McDaniel

Editorial support: Marta Marczuk, Sharonda Chaney, and Jenessa Young

Operations: LaTisha Ballard, Cheryl McPherson, and Kyana Taylor

Multimedia and design: Alyssa Brandon, Derrell Chapman, Jason Murri, Stephen Ratkovich, and Antoinette Wade

English Language Arts: Led by Monique Cherry-McDaniel, Francesca Forzani, and Kristine Schutz and including Karen Ahn, Susan Atkins, Annie Blais, Alistair Bomphray, Andrea Cisneros, Janine Cody, Martha Curren-Preis, Sarah Scott Frank, Rebecca Gadd, Stefanie Iwashyna, Laura Jones, Jason Moore, Blake Noel, Carla Shalaby, Alexandra Sherman, and Alexis Yowell

Foundations: Simona Goldin and Hannah Mullman

Mathematics: Led by Nicole Cirino and Nicole Garcia and including Deborah Ball, Heather Beasley, Jason Brasel, Melissa Kemmerle, Julie McNamara, Michaela Krug O’Neill, Karen Reinhardt, Darrius Robinson, Sabrina Salazar, Sarah Kate Selling, Meghan Shaughnessy, Emily Theriault-Kimmey, Charles Wilkes, and Amber Willis

Science: Led by Betsy Davis and Sylvie Kademian and including Adam Bennion, Jacquie Handley, John-Carlos Marino and Amber Sizemore Davis

Social studies: Led by Chauncey Monte-Sano and including Jared Aumen, Peter Cipparone, Adina Lopatin, Christine Quince, Anita Ravi, and William Waychunas

We engage in our work alongside, in collaboration with, and sometimes running parallel to a number of organizations with similar goals and approaches. Several of them have helped shape our thinking or influenced the content and design of this site.

The Center to Support Excellence in Teaching (CSET) is part of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. CSET bridges research and practice by designing practice-based professional learning experiences and researching the effects of those experiences on changes in teacher practice, the development of teacher leadership, and more equitable student learning. CSET has developed, among other things, Reading to Learn in Science, which assists teachers in improving students’ learning of science content by improving their ability to interpret science texts, as well as the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO), which is used by researchers to analyze classroom video based on specific core instructional practices in English Language Arts.

The Core Practice Consortium is a group of teacher educators from numerous institutions and disciplines whose work together began in 2012 and has, over time, included many of the organizations and individuals listed here. The research that has grown out of the consortium has been published in numerous journal articles as well as in the 2018 volume Teaching Core Practices in Teacher Education. Our thinking about high-leverage practices was influenced and advanced by this collaboration.

Learning  In, From and for Teaching Practice was a collaboration funded by the Spencer Foundation from 2010 to 2013. Mathematics education faculty Magdalene Lampert, Megan Franke, and Elham Kazemi; then-postdocs Angela Chan Turrou and Hala Ghousseini; and graduate students Heather Beasley and Adrian Cunard designed an approach to teacher education that took into account the complementary needs for novices to both acquire knowledge and skills and learn to use them in classroom contexts. They examined how prospective teachers could learn the practices, knowledge, and commitments that undergird the work of ambitious mathematics teaching. Cycles of enactment and investigation—an early version of the learning cycle—supported collective inquiry and included coached rehearsals.

Teacher Education by Design hosts an open access digital library of resources for teacher educators organized around a framework for teacher education: a learning cycle, instructional activities, and principles for teaching and learning to teach. The learning cycle featured in the Teaching Works Resource Library is adapted from TEDD.org with one distinction between the two websites being our use of high-leverage practices, rather than instructional activities, to organize teacher learning. Teacher Education by Design is a project of the University of Washington’s College of Education and hosts materials developed by multiple organizations, individuals, and research projects within and outside the university.

Other organizations that have developed similar approaches and tools include:

Ambitious Science Teaching, a project of the University of Washington, centers on four sets of core practices for teaching science and offers a suite of tools to support science educators to enact those practices.

The Assessing Teaching Practice (@Practice) project develops and studies teaching simulations as a way to assess and support the learning of high-leverage teaching practices and mathematical knowledge for teaching. It is currently funded by the National Science Foundation.

Center for STEM Education’s Core Science Teaching Practices project identified a set of core instructional practices for science, and continues to develop and study instruments and tools for professional development.

All materials on the site are free to users. Users are invited to download, share, and adapt materials for non-commercial purposes with attribution to the TeachingWorks team unless otherwise specified. They are licensed to that effect under Creative Commons. If you have altered the materials, please make a note of it in the attribution.

We recommend using the following citations:

If you are using it without modification:
This work by The TeachingWorks team [and/or author(s) named in document footer] is used under CC BY-NC 3.0. For more information visit www.library.teachingworks.org or contact twresourcelibrary@umich.edu.

If you made changes to the original:
This work was modified by [your name or organization] from the original by The TeachingWorks team under CC BY-NC 3.0. For more information visit www.library.teachingworks.org or contact twresourcelibrary@umich.edu.

In APA format, you can cite materials from the pages of this site listing “TeachingWorks” as the author. For example, if you wanted to cite our page on the practice of eliciting and interpreting student thinking, you could use the following reference:

TeachingWorks (2020). Eliciting and Interpreting Student Thinking. TeachingWorks Resource Library. https://library.teachingworks.org/curriculum-resources/teaching-practices/eliciting-and-interpreting/

To view the TeachingWorks Resource Library user agreement and affirmation, click here.

Who we are

We are teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and administrators committed to the right of every student to skillful teaching. Every day, thousands of children—especially Black, Latinx, and Native American children, and children living in historically marginalized and underserved communities—miss out on educational opportunities because of their teachers’ unequal access to high-quality preparation and support. TeachingWorks is dedicated to improving teachers’ preparation and to creating a professional threshold for entry to teaching.

What we believe

Beginning teachers should enter the classroom safe to practice. Skillful teaching is a complex practice that requires specialized knowledge, insight, and capability. Our country must commit to a professional standard for entry-level teaching. The learning, development, and growth of our nation’s young people cannot be left to chance. The active disruption of inequity cannot wait. Building the capacity and the will to develop teaching that advances justice is our imperative. More than 1.5 million new teachers will be hired over the next decade. Children, and our society, depend on these educators to be great teachers, teachers who are adequately prepared to teach skillfully, to strive actively to disrupt inequities, and to work toward the dream of public education. Achieving this depends on high-quality professional training that is comparable to that of other high stakes occupations.

We believe that GREAT TEACHERS AREN’T BORN; THEY’RE TAUGHT.

Our approach

Our goal is to create a system for teacher preparation and support that will make commonplace skillful teaching that disrupts inequity. We know that establishing such a system can only happen if we work collectively. Thus, we have partnered strategically with researchers, scholars, practitioners, policy makers, school districts, alternative and traditional teacher preparation programs, and teacher preparation centers from across the country. Through these various partnerships, we have supported efforts to identify and learn practices of teaching that are particularly “high-leverage” for children to flourish. We have offered professional development, training, seminars, and consultations to support teacher educators in learning practice-based methods to prepare teachers. We also develop resources and tools to support the work of professionals who support teachers to develop their practice. Through this collective work, we aim to contribute to achieving the vision of a just and equitable public education system, one that makes possible a better tomorrow for children and young people everywhere.

For more information, visit www.teachingworks.org