Education Week

The Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA) is a relatively young research-practice partnership between Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE). Although we build on an earlier policy research group at Vanderbilt, the alliance in its current form debuted less than a year ago with an expanded scope and a more ambitious mission to work more closely with researchers as well as practitioners and policymakers at TDOE. As the merger between a top-flight institution of education research and a state education agency with the will and capacity to place a premium on empirically-driven improvement, the TERA partnership has access to one of the nation's richest education datasets and the potential to lead on some of K-12 education's most pressing policy fronts.

One such front is educators' professional learning, where the gear-teeth of research-practice continuous improvement cycles have struggled to find traction. Despite research that consistently reaffirms the importance of teacher quality and the malleability of teacher quality over time, the specific mechanisms by which teachers learn and improve, as well as the conditions in which such learning and improvement can be fostered or accelerated, remain elusive. Because the TDOE believes a better understanding of how to support professional learning will be necessary to meet its goals for student college and career readiness, one of the first priorities of the researchers and state leaders behind the TERA partnership has been to shatter this black box...