This fall, several universities within the US PREP coalition will have access to their own comprehensive data-management systems, complete with tailored, interactive dashboards. Teacher candidate demographics, performance assessment results, perceptions of program effectiveness, graduate impact, along with data from the district partners, teacher candidates, and teacher educators, can be used to visualize progress on key performance measures and support decision-making for continuous improvement. 

Over the next year, US PREP will be working alongside its partners to develop an “out of the box dashboard” that can be available to all current and future US PREP coalition members. The work, led by US PREP Executive Director Sarah Beal and UPD Consulting, is reshaping how teacher preparation programs think about data management and use. 

“When programs are able to easily access data on their teacher candidates’ performance, the result doesn’t just affect the teacher candidates who are being trained,” said Beal. “It also affects the faculty who are training them, the administrators who lead the teacher preparation programs, the school districts where the candidates are trained, and the K-12 students who are being taught by our candidates.”

The data management work is using the Teacher Preparation Data Model (TPDM) to integrate data from teacher preparation programs, local education agencies, and state education agencies, leveraging the Ed-Fi Data Standard. Just recently, Ed-Fi Alliance brought US PREP and several pilot organizations to Austin, Texas to collaborate, discuss obstacles towards implementation, and support the development of interactive dashboards.