Transforming Teacher Preparation: A Long Road Ahead

Schools of education have been under fire in recent years for not preparing teachers adequately for today’s schools. A new report, Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice, offers a number of recommendations to turn teacher education on its head.

The recommendations are supported by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) along with several other groups. But, while, many have praised the recommendation for more classroom-based experiences, questions about implementation and political will remain.

The recommendations come from the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning, which was convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). The panel specifically calls for making clinical practice (classroom-based experiences) the core of teacher preparation. This diverges from the current norm where the emphasis is on academic preparation and coursework. The rationale is that like medical students’ residency experiences, prospective teachers need multiple and diverse classroom experiences coupled with rich content and pedagogical coursework.

The panel offers 10 “design principles” to guide the creation of clinically based preparation programs:

• P-12 student learning is the focal point for design and implementation
• Content and pedagogy are woven around clinical experiences throughout preparation in coursework, laboratory-based experiences, and in school-embedded practice
• Data is used to judge every element of their preparation program
• Candidates are prepared to be content experts, to know how to teach it, and to be innovators, collaborators and problem solvers
• Candidates are provided extensive feedback
• Mentors and supervising teachers are rigorously selected and should be effective practitioners
• Specific sites are designated and funded to provide classroom-based experiences
• Technology is used to share best practices and facilitate on-going professional development
• Research is conducted on teacher effectiveness, best practices and preparation program performance to support continuous improvement
• Partnerships among schools districts, teachers unions, state policymakers and preparation programs are in place

These principles will not be easy to implement. There are multiple barriers to implementation, including, in many cases the key stakeholders themselves. The Institutes of Higher Education that house education schools have been criticized for relying on them as “cash cows.” Some states have regulations in place that could impede the development of clinically based teacher preparation programs. And what about the existing faculty members in schools of education that more often than not lack the extensive practical experience that would be needed to shift to a clinically based preparation program. Where would they go? Many professors are part of teachers’ unions themselves.

The panel concedes that to make the recommendations a reality state and federal policymakers “must create new incentives and funding for desired actions and, equally importantly, they must remove regulatory and programmatic barriers to change.” Considering our gloomy economic situation, more funding is unlikely. On the sunnier side, though, teacher effectiveness is where many states are concentrating their reform efforts.  

Early Ed Watch agrees that states should be an integral player in encouraging a teacher preparation overhaul. One incentive could be for states to make clinically based preparation a requirement for state licensure or for teacher preparation program approval. Additionally, making clinically based preparation a requirement for accreditation could also support the proposed teacher preparation transformation.

(NCATE is one of two bodies that accredit schools of teacher education. The other is the Teacher Education Accreditation Council. Earlier this month, the two organizations announced their merger, which will result in a single new accreditation body: the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation.)

The report highlights promising practices across the country including the Boston Teacher Residency Program, Teacher U and a long-standing partnership in Long Beach, California. During an event to release the report, more than one panelist repeated “the nation needs an entire system of excellent programs, not a cottage industry of path-breaking initiatives.” But they are an important first step and should be studied closely to understand which models and practices are most effective.

As for next steps, eight states (California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee) have stepped up to implement the Blue Ribbon panel’s recommendations and serve as learning laboratories, so to speak. We are interested to see what happens in these states, especially with regard to its impact on early childhood education and whether the changes provide an opportunity for field experiences with different age groups (0-3, 3-5, and 5-8) and in diverse settings and including community childcare centers, Head Start programs, and public schools.

We are also curious about how these ideas can be woven together with recommendations from a separate NCATE report, The Road Less Traveled: How the Developmental Sciences Can Prepare Educators to Improve Student Achievement, that calls for more attention to children’s cognitive, social and emotional development in education schools.