WestEd had the highest scoring 2018 Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant proposal and won a multi-year award to improve teacher effectiveness. Awarded to projects with a strong evidence base, the grant enables significant expansion of Reading Apprenticeship service and will also support development of new open-source materials and resources for science and engineering.

This four-year effort will improve teacher effectiveness and student learning at the secondary level by providing evidence-based professional learning to 1,500 teachers and reaching more than 100,000 students in 7 states (AZ, CA, MI, NY, TX, WA, WI). Educators are participating in online and in-person professional learning, as well as local school team meetings. Teacher Leaders from each participating school engage in additional professional learning to build local capacity and the future leaders of this work.

Additionally, a STEM Inquiry Design Group is developing new resources for the field that deepen teaching and learning for science and engineering: topically aligned text-sets and tasks coupled with inquiry teaching guides that are open sourced. These resources will enable teachers to orchestrate science and engineering tasks with authentic forms of texts – including graphs, diagrams, visual models, and explanations characteristic of these disciplines – to support the development of discipline-specific reading and reasoning practices for their students.