Local school systems have significant control over important policy levers affecting the quality of the teacher workforce: the recruitment and selection of teachers into the workforce. Previous work conducted by our partnership has studied one aspect of this process – the selection of teacher applicants – and we now seek to study another aspect of this process, the important role of student teaching placements in defining the applicant pool for Spokane’s future teacher workforce.

The work proposed here provides greater structure to student teaching placements in Spokane Public Schools (SPS), establishes a framework for collecting better data about student teachers and the cooperating teachers who supervise their internships, and will allow SPS to use data about student teachers to inform hiring decisions.

The project will culminate the development a follow-up proposal to study whether information collected about student teachers is predictive of the future performance of those hired into the workforce. This proposal builds on prior work by our partnership, complements ongoing research about student teaching at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the Center for Education Data and Research (CEDR), and is intended to strengthen our partnership into the future.