The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) approved the first nationally registered K-12 teacher apprenticeship program in Tennessee in January 2022, opening the door to a rapidly growing pathway for prospective teachers. Since then, DOL has approved registered teacher apprenticeships in more than 30 states. The Tennessee Grow Your Own (GYO) model became…

The Mentors Matter Recruitment initiative leveraged state administrative data to recommend and successfully recruit more instructionally effective and experienced teachers to serve as clinical mentors, which, in turn, increased pre-service teachers' readiness to teach. Prior results, however, focus on self-reported outcomes and stem from a single…

Making sure all key stakeholders are included in community-engaged partnership projects is a difficult but important task. A systematic methodology for identifying partners would help avoid this problem. The double rainbow model is a systematic approach designed to identify all potential partners that can contribute to or might be affected by the…

The purpose of this article is to examine a 'grow your own' model of leadership preparation and placement of educational administrators in the state of Tennessee. The growing need for school and district administrators in the rural counties of Tennessee mirrors a nationwide issue, and state policymakers and practitioners must respond appropriately…

Dual-credit courses expose high school students to college-level content and provide the opportunity to earn college credits, in part to smooth the transition to college. With the Tennessee Department of Education, we conduct the first randomized controlled trial of the effects of dual-credit math coursework on a range of high school and college…

Prior work suggests that recent graduates from teacher education programs feel better prepared to teach and are more instructionally effective when they learned to teach with more instructionally effective cooperating teachers. However, we do not know if these relationships are causal. Even if they are, we do not know if it is possible to recruit…

"Career Pathways in Action", a companion to "Learning for Careers" by Nancy Hoffman and Robert B. Schwartz, offers a detailed, on-the-ground exploration of the Pathways to Prosperity Network's efforts at state, regional, and local levels. This new book describes a strikingly wide range of systems and efforts that the Pathways…

A critical component of environmental education is to ensure student understanding and use of available technologies to better experience and analyze spatially distributed features of the environment. Combining mobile technologies with geographic information systems in field data collection may provide a unique opportunity for students to feel…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a detrimental impact on many facets of students' successful transitions from secondary into postsecondary education, particularly for students who depend on in-person delivery of content and experience. For many young people, paid work-based learning has historically provided a needed source of income, and its…

District leaders often feel that working with researchers is not mutually beneficial. Researchers do not provide enough practical guidance, and they are often unable to present their findings in time to inform district decision making. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are a potential new strategy for addressing these challenges. RPPs are…

This paper contends that, although there is much to commend in the remediation reform movement, it is unlikely to attain its goals. These goals include the Lumina Foundation's target of having 60% of Americans attain a degree or certificate, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's goal of doubling the number of low income students who earn a…

STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is the fifth-fastest-growing occupational cluster in the South and the seventh-largest employer with projected employment of 2.6 million workers by 2020. In order to prepare students to take advantage of the vast opportunities in this field, educators must equip students with the knowledge and…

With the national spotlight on community colleges, the sector has a unique opportunity to seize the moment and collaborate with K-12 to increase student success. Efforts to increase community college access and open doors to more students must include a complementary focus on improving readiness. Otherwise, remediation rates will remain…

Jobs for the Future (JFF) set out a little over a year ago to create such models for bridging the secondary-postsecondary divide, developing strategies for high schools and colleges to build paths from the 12th grade through critical milestones of success in the first year of college. These partnerships of school districts and community colleges…

This paper describes the development of a regional psychology teaching organisation, Psychology Educators of Tennessee (PET). PET is designed to enhance collaboration among teachers from local colleges, universities, and high schools. We discuss the history of PET, the themes and pragmatics associated with our annual conference, plans for…