"Teacher's Helper" is what you could call one of the centers at the University of California, Davis. For almost 10 years, Cooperative Research and Extension Services for Schools has helped improve the quality of elementary- and secondary-school education in California and beyond by supporting education research, offering professional development opportunities for teachers and publishing resource materials for educators. The center, which has developed model programs and materials for instruction and staff development, has itself been emulated as a model for how universities and schools can work together to strengthen K-12 education and the teaching profession. "The center's activities touch the lives of thousands of elementary- and secondary-school teachers and their students each year," says Jill Wilson, its executive director. The center's programs and activities may involve its educational extension specialists, UC Davis faculty and graduate students, and K-12 teachers and administrators. Since 1997, the center's Subject Matter Projects, designed to improve the teaching of writing, mathematics, science and the arts, have provided discipline-based professional development for more than 4,400 K-12 teachers. Each year, for example, the center's Area 3 Writing Project, which helps teachers improve the teaching of writing, serves 3,500 to 6,500 teachers, administrators, students and others in Northern California. The center awards grants of up to $15,000 each for research designed and conducted jointly by teachers and UC Davis faculty. Since 1991, it has awarded 50 grants totaling $282,000 to projects on topics ranging from minority-student views on education as a career choice to phonics instruction in literature-based reading programs. The center also sponsors a program in support of teachers who design and conduct research studies of their students' learning and their own development as teachers. In the past two years, more than 200 teachers have participated. And each spring, the center sponsors a statewide conference on teacher research.