A Partnership Built for Shared Learning: Teach For America × RPPL

Great teaching changes lives, but it doesn't happen in isolation. It takes sustained, high-quality professional learning (PL) that respects educators' expertise, addresses the realities of their classrooms, and continually improves as we learn more about what works.

That is why Teach For America (TFA) and the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL) are excited to share more about our growing partnership to strengthen the evidence base for educator professional learning (PL) and translate that learning into practice alongside the broader field.

What this partnership makes possible

In 2024, Teach For America became a RPPL member, formalizing a relationship centered on shared learning, shared tools, and credible evidence about professional learning at scale. RPPL is a national collaborative uniting PL organizations, researchers, districts, and funders to advance research-backed professional learning that is grounded in educational equity and both rigorous and usable by practitioners.

This partnership is generative because of the infrastructure and commitment behind it: regular working sessions, in-person collaboration, shared data systems, and a genuine orientation toward mutual learning. We believe this is a model worth naming explicitly. When organizations invest in the connective tissue of partnership — not just shared goals, but also shared tools, shared time, and shared accountability — generating evidence that is rigorous enough to be credible and grounded enough to be useful becomes possible.

That kind of evidence changes practice, which ultimately improves outcomes for the educators and students we both serve.

Our partnership is already yielding actionable insights that are changing practice at Teach For America. Based on causal research conducted in partnership with RPPL and researchers at the University of Virginia and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, TFA is shifting the way in which it delivers observation feedback to teachers this coming school year.

What this looks like in practice

Three strands of work give concrete shape to our partnership and illustrate the kind of learning that shared infrastructure enables.

Studying coaching feedback at scale

We are partnering on a RPPL-funded randomized controlled trial to examine how the format of coaching feedback provided to early-career teachers relates to outcomes for educators and students. The study is being conducted across TFA regions with research partners including Julie Cohen of the University of Virginia and John Papay at Brown University's Annenberg Institute.

We're invested in this study not just because of its causal design, but because of what it represents: a move from good instincts to clearer answers. The field has long held beliefs about what effective coaching looks like. This work gives us a way to test those beliefs rigorously — and to share what we learn in ways that can inform practice beyond TFA.

Building shared measures for professional learning

If we want the field to learn faster, organizations need to be able to study PL in ways that are practical, equity-minded, and comparable across contexts. As part of our RPPL membership, we are aligning on shared measures related to educators' experiences of coaching, including how well support is tailored, the quality and concreteness of feedback, opportunities for reflection, and educators' comfort engaging authentically in improvement-focused conversations.

This measurement work is foundational. Shared measures are how we build cumulative knowledge rather than isolated results and how findings from one organization's work can meaningfully inform another's.

Place-based learning in Chicago: studying teacher leadership from the inside

This partnership is also about learning in real places with real people over time. In Chicago Public Schools (CPS), we are participating in a multi-year initiative examining how teacher leaders are developed, supported, and positioned to drive impact for their colleagues and students.

This work has three connected strands:

A landscape analysis maps the range of organizations and approaches that support teacher leadership across CPS, grounded in the district's own framework for teacher leadership roles and anchored in a comprehensive logic model developed collaboratively with our community of practice partners.
A community of practice (CoP) brings together organizations across the CPS ecosystem to build shared understanding and tools. To date, we have developed shared measurement instruments focused on the enabling conditions for high-quality PL for teacher leaders, including the role of supportive school administration.
Longer-term impact analysis draws on district administrative data to examine how teacher leadership support relates to outcomes for teachers and students. Members of the community of practice have all committed to continuing through years two and three, a signal of the trust and shared investment this work has already generated.

The Chicago initiative illustrates what a research-practice partnership can look like at its best: not a study conducted on a community, but a sustained inquiry developed with one.

What we're building and why it matters

While the work described here is unfolding, we're already looking ahead to what comes next. In the coming months, we're expanding our partnership to focus on data infrastructure and AI in PL, one of the most consequential areas of inquiry for the field right now.

We think it's worth naming, even now, what we believe this partnership represents and what we hope it points toward. The field of educator PL serves a critical role, but for too long has lacked the connective tissue to build cumulative knowledge: shared constructs, shared data, and shared accountability for learning and improvement over time. TFA and RPPL are committed to building a genuine research-practice partnership to meet this need.

We are excited about the progress to come and believe this is a model worth spreading. If you're a professional learning organization, researcher, district, or funder who shares this commitment, we'd love to be in conversation.

If you’re interested in learning more about RPPL, subscribe to receive updates on the latest in teacher professional learning research https://rpplpartnership.org/subscribe/.

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