Teacher Education
Developing students into quality teachers requires a university-based teacher preparation program, grounded in disciplinary knowledge and research, that is committed to the following principles: students must know the subject matter they wish to teach; students must understand the context in which teaching and learning take place; students must understand and effectively use good teaching practices; and students must have sustained opportunities to teach children in classroom settings. Teacher preparation must be embraced as an institution-wide responsibility, with appropriate resources including high caliber faculty in the arts and sciences as well as in education.
Quality teacher preparation programs prepare students to teach by providing a thorough foundation in the disciplines they wish to teach. Quality teaching, however, requires more than subject knowledge. Teachers must be able to help children learn subject matter. This requires that students preparing to teach are sensitive to cultural and linguistic diversity, understand how children learn, are educated on the subject of child and adolescent development, and are knowledgeable about classroom management techniques. To this end, providing students with teaching experiences in actual classroom settings is essential. A graduated sequence of clinical experiences, developed through robust partnerships with P-12 schools, should begin early and extend throughout the preparation program. Faculty with experience in P-12 schools should guide and supervise students in clinical experiences, and should evaluate student performance relative to teaching standards.
Quality teacher preparation programs reflect an understanding that novice teachers need mentoring and support through professional development that is sustained, intensive, classroom-based and directly related to helping a wide range of diverse learners meet achievement standards. Quality programs also create local partnerships with P-12 schools to offer ongoing professional development that assists individual teachers to improve their practice, and supports district and state content and achievement standards while being responsive to community needs.
Quality teacher preparation programs evaluate their graduates’ teaching proficiency and effectiveness in promotion P-12 student learning, and use results to improve local programs and the profession. Graduates and their employers are contacted regularly to gather information for program improvement. They utilize best practices developed locally and nationally to provide students with the most current and credible professional preparation possible.
Christa McAuliffe Award for 2010
The Christa McAuliffe Award honors innovative teacher education programs that can document the success of their graduates in improving P-12 pupil learning outcomes.
The 2010 selection criteria for the Christa McAuliffe Excellence in Teacher Education Award have been revised. The focus of the award will continue to be on programs that demonstrate learning in both teacher candidates and the P-12 students they teach. However, the award will now honor programs that are also innovative or distinctive.
In this age of accountability, teacher preparation programs must be able to document their effectiveness in preparing teachers who can produce learning gains in their students. The Christa McAuliffe Award will recognize programs that not only exemplify superior learning outcomes but also programs that provide models for other AASCU member institutions seeking to improve their programs.
Perspectives (Published Monograph in Fall 2007)
University-based teacher education programs and all of their components, including the content disciplines such as mathematics and science, are undergoing an unprecedented degree of scrutiny and challenge. Teacher preparation programs always have drawn critics, but for many years most of those critics came from within higher education itself, especially from faculty in traditional liberal arts disciplines. Today, the entire concept of university-based teacher preparation is being questioned, mostly by critics outside the academy. Educators in university-based programs must provide credible and persuasive evidence of the effectiveness of their programs or risk losing out to a host of existing and emerging competitors providing alternative routes to teacher licensure.
Grant funds project to improve preparation of mathematics and science teachers
AASCU, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin System, has received a $591,825 grant over the next three years to create common accountability measures in preparing future mathematics and science teachers.Wisconsin’s Grassroots Teacher Quality Assessment (TQA) Model project is designed to create reliable performance assessment tools used during student teaching. The assessments will document how well prospective teachers attain relevant math and science knowledge and skills, and information gathered will serve as a guide for ongoing changes in teacher preparation and professional development.
Mona Wineburg, AASCU’s former director of teacher education, and a project director says, “This project will assist universities in the University of Wisconsin System build scientific rigor into teacher performance assessments so that program improvement and accountability efforts will stand on a strong foundation of evidence.”
Wineburg notes that “This project follows the work AASCU began with the Christa McAuliffe Excellence in Teacher Education Awards in 2002, the survey project, Credible and Persuasive Evidence: Creating a Dialogue and Design for Evidence in Teacher Education Programs, and the Wingspread Conference, Preparing, Retaining and Supporting a High Quality Teacher Workforce. It will result in a set of tool and processes that can be implemented across all Wisconsin teacher preparation programs with the potential for national replication.”
The grant was awarded through the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE).
Teacher Education: Scan of Issues, Roles, Activities and Resources
AASCU developed this report to promote greater understanding of underlying teacher education issues, in connection with continuing state-level activity and the pending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
Delivering the Promise: Teaching Excellence in America
This monograph describes both the need and the opportunity to harness the technology of the information age sufficiently to gather, codify and analyze significant amounts of data that can close the evidence gap between university attestations of their graduates’ competencies and the public’s confidence in those claims. This opportunity is increasingly revealed in an arena of profound public importance, the preparation of future teachers. An endeavor of longstanding importance to AASCU institutions, closing the evidence gap on the preparation of quality teachers, is now underway in several states.