Today is one of my favorite days of the year: National Teacher Day. For those of us who work year round to set teachers up for success, it’s a special treat to spotlight their work to do the same for students.
How do great teachers set students up for success?
AACTE has chosen Nel Noddings’ book Education and Democracy in the 21st Century to receive the 2015 AACTE Outstanding Book Award. The award will be presented at the 67th AACTE Annual Meeting Welcoming Session, Friday, February 27, at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis.
Published by Teachers College Press, the book thoughtfully brings John Dewey’s work into the current era, exploring the relationship between schooling and civic polity in the age of “disruptions” in education.
The December 2014/January 2015 issue of Educational Horizons is now available from Pi Lambda Theta.
Thanks to a partnership with Phi Delta Kappa and Pi Lambda Theta, all AACTE members receive free online access to this magazine for future teachers as a benefit of their AACTE membership. Chief Representatives also receive each issue by mail.
The six major forums at AACTE’s 67th Annual Meeting will be stand-alone offerings. In each of three dedicated time slots spanning February 27-March 1, 2015, participants will choose between two cutting-edge topics to explore with leaders in the field.
Preservice preparation in teaching methods and pedagogy has a notably positive effect on new teachers’ likelihood to stay past their first year on the job, according to a new report out of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). Teachers’ routes to licensure, certificate types, degrees, and selectivity of their colleges have much less correlation with attrition, say report authors Richard Ingersoll, Lisa Merrill, and Henry May.
Analyzing data from the national Schools and Staffing Survey and supported by a National Science Foundation grant, the authors studied to what degree various elements of preservice preparation contribute to beginning teachers’ attrition or retention after 1 year in the classroom, particularly in the fields of mathematics and science.
The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Duckworth, whose top-rated Ted Talk on “grit” has received more than 4.6 million views, will be the keynote speaker at the 2014 Fall CAEP Conference (CAEPCon) Tuesday, September 30. The conference is being held in partnership with AACTE.
Duckworth’s research on non-IQ competencies that predict achievement influenced the development of CAEP Standard 3: Recruitment and Selectivity. The topic of Duckworth’s keynote will be “True Grit.”
The Innovations Inventory of AACTE’s Innovation Exchange is an online database highlighting members’ pioneering practices in educator preparation that have shown a positive impact on issues of student learning, preparation program advancement, or educator workforce needs. This blog post is one in a series highlighting entries from the inventory. To request inclusion of your institution’s innovations, contact Kristin McCabe at kmccabe@aacte.org.
Faculty in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University (MA) have built a comprehensive e-portfolio and assessment system to provide data on candidate performance and support continuous improvement processes. The assessment system aligns key formative assignments in initial, professional license, and advanced professional development programs to standards-based program outcomes. Candidates submit all assignments to an e-portfolio system, where faculty score them based on valid and reliable rubrics. The assessment system also contains data on candidate performance on state exams and summative performances from clinical experiences.
The Innovations Inventory of AACTE’s Innovation Exchange is an online database highlighting members’ pioneering practices in educator preparation that have shown a positive impact on issues of student learning, preparation program advancement, or educator workforce needs. This blog post is one in a series highlighting entries from the inventory. To request inclusion of your institution’s innovations, contact Jessica Milton at jmilton@aacte.org.
Beginning in 2009, California State University (CSU) Fullerton has enjoyed a partnership with neighboring Placentia Yorba Linda Unified School District to support science instruction in the classroom. The partnership has served not only to improve the practice of teacher candidates in science instruction, but also to improve K-5 student achievement in science and content literacy. Throughout their time in the classroom, candidates jointly plan, teach, and reflect on their lessons.
Since the partnership began, student achievement scores have experienced double-digit gains, and teacher candidates report greater confidence in their science pedagogy. Proficiency levels in one school increased from 25% to 44% in just 1 year of partnership work. Candidates’ confidence to engage students in science increased from 77.5% to 97.5%, and the percentage reporting confidence in their content knowledge in science increased from 57.5% to 90.0%.
A new effort by the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification (NASDTEC) will attempt to develop a national framework for PK-12 educator ethics.
Beginning with a meeting June 19-21 in Maryland, the Model Code of Educator Ethics Task Force will review existing codes of ethics over the coming year and draft a consensus document that could be adopted by states, which currently have varying guidelines in place. A public review period is planned before the model code is finalized in summer 2015.
The Innovations Inventory of AACTE’s Innovation Exchange is an online database highlighting members’ pioneering practices in educator preparation that have shown a positive impact on issues of student learning, preparation program advancement, or educator workforce needs. This blog post is one in a series highlighting entries from the inventory. To request inclusion of your institution’s innovations, contact Jessica Milton at jmilton@aacte.org.
In response to the call for increased rigor and effectiveness in teacher preparation, one of the largest teacher preparation programs in the country, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University (ASU), implemented iTeachAZ. The program includes changes in teacher preparation that focus on improvements in candidates’ content knowledge mastery, classroom readiness, and assessment literacy. The program provides a senior-year residency experience that extends student teaching from a single semester to a full school year, enabling students to live the “full life” of a teacher. ASU has also integrated performance assessments throughout the teacher preparation program.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s true: After 38 years, Mary Diez is leaving Alverno July 1.
Diez, professor and former dean of the School of Education at Alverno College (WI), was elected last month to a 4-year term as president of the School Sisters of St. Francis (SSSF), an international congregation with 850 sisters in the United States, Europe, India, and Latin America. This full-time commitment will take her to all of those places, although she plans to retain her campus residence at the college where she has lived for nearly 4 decades.
Taking her leadership skills off campus is hardly new for Diez, whether as a consultant in the Milwaukee community, member of standards boards, convener of assessment institutes, champion of dispositions work, or president of AACTE—among countless other roles she has held around the country and internationally. Despite having so much on her plate, Diez generously responded to my questions this week about her career to date and future plans.
Clinically based educator preparation is the focus of the first installment of AACTE’s new Research-to-Practice Spotlight Series, now available on the Innovation Exchange web site.
This series, part of AACTE’s Innovation Exchange, connects research on educator preparation with practice in the field. Each installment in the series contains videos of interviews with researchers, teacher educators, and practitioners on relevant topics in educator preparation, as well as a set of accompanying resources such as research articles and studies and examples of related innovative practices in the field.
AACTE has partnered with Achieve Inc. to provide a series of webinars on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) this spring for teacher preparation programs.
In the summer and fall of 2013, AACTE surveyed its members about the activities programs have undertaken relative to CCSS and what resources AACTE might provide to support members’ understanding and capacity to address the standards. A majority of respondents cited access to CCSS-aligned lesson plans and rubrics as the number-one resource they needed.
AACTE today announced the official launch of an initiative to support innovation in the professional community and speed the pace of change in university-based educator preparation. The Innovation Exchange will serve as a forum for AACTE members, partners, and other constituents to share experiences and findings as they work together to address the most urgent issues of student achievement, curriculum reform, and educator preparation program advancement.
Through this national initiative, AACTE will seek to strengthen educator preparation, demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of educator preparation, and enhance members’ opportunities to collaborate on key issues.
The authors are members of AACTE’s topical action group on Teacher Education as a Moral Community. The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.
A recent National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) report evaluates teacher preparation programs for their attention to an important element of preparation: classroom management. Unfortunately, the report’s few helpful suggestions get lost in the slough of misguided assumptions and questionable claims by the report’s authors.
