Ila Deshmukh Towery

What do you like most about TNTP?

I love that TNTP is at the nexus of research, policy, and practice: we take big ideas, turn them into action, and constantly test and revise them to make sure we’re moving ourselves and the field towards answers.

What path led you to your current role?

My interest in education goes back a long way – the first job I had was as a teaching assistant at a pre-school when I was in the 10th grade. I went on to study education in college and after that took on several teaching-related roles in schools in Massachusetts. I left teaching to go to graduate school because I wanted to dig deeper into theory and research and while I was in graduate school, became interested in program evaluation as a way of applying research to the real world to produce actionable results and motivate change.

What do you hope to accomplish this year at TNTP?

In the next year, I hope we can begin to learn more about what it takes to make a great teacher and about what great teachers truly care about. Right now, there’s a lot of attention being paid to identifying the right metrics for supporting and evaluating teachers, but we still don’t know much about what works in promoting true professional growth and what the greatest teachers out there hope for in their work, for their careers, and for their students.