17 Feb2015
By Kabba Colley, Kathryn C. McGinn and Anthony Pittman
Editor’s Note: AACTE’s two Research Fellowship teams will present a joint session at the Association’s Annual Meeting, Saturday, February 28, at 1:30 p.m. in Room A704 of the Atlanta Marriott Marquis. This post provides background on the fellowship based in New Jersey at Kean University, Rowan University, and William Paterson University.
Is there a difference in teacher persistence in urban districts attributable to specific pathways? Why do teachers say they persist in urban districts? Researchers from Kean University, Rowan University, and William Paterson University came together to explore these and other related questions as part of the AACTE Research Fellowship.
16 Feb2015
By Amy Johnson and Cathie Fallona
Editor’s Note: AACTE’s two Research Fellowship teams will present a joint session at the Association’s Annual Meeting, Saturday, February 28, at 1:30 p.m. in Room A704 of the Atlanta Marriott Marquis. This post provides background on the fellowship at the University of Southern Maine.
The recent release of proposed federal reporting requirements for educator preparation programs stirred up intense interest in the methods and metrics used to evaluate programs. As many people noted in their letters of comment to the U.S. Department of Education earlier this month, several of the proposed new measures are unprecedented and would require investment of significant time and money to collect, analyze, and report data on an annual basis.
13 Jan2015
By Cap Peck
Academic leaders in teacher education are currently faced with unprecedented policy pressures related to collecting, reporting, and acting on an intensifying array of program outcome measures. Moreover, many of the state and federal policies driving these pressures are saturated with paradox, attempting to address multiple and often contradictory goals. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is related to the essential tension between policy goals related to identifying and eliminating “low-performing programs,” and those related to “program improvement.” Coping with contradictory discourses and policies related to accountability, program improvement, and “data use” has become one of the facts of life experienced by virtually all contemporary teacher educators.
25 Nov2014
By Kristin McCabe
A study of 30 teacher residency programs funded through the federal Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) Program finds that graduates of the residencies feel more prepared at the start of their careers and more supported during their time in the classroom than their same-district peers from other pathways.
25 Nov2014
By Kristin McCabe
As teacher educators wait to see the U.S. government’s latest proposal for rating their programs, a new report commissioned by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) attempts to lay out a useful framework of “key effectiveness indicators” to answer the fundamental question: How do we identify high-performing preparation programs that routinely produce effective teachers (as well as programs that do not)?
17 Nov2014
By Donald E. Heller
Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and is reposted with permission. The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE. See also AACTE’s statement about the Easy A’s report.
The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based think tank, has issued a number of reports in recent years on teacher preparation around the country. Its flagship effort since 2013, the Teacher Prep Review, is an annual report released in June that rates programs on how well they are preparing new teachers. In order to keep its name in front of the media between those major annual releases, the council has issued a series of studies on other aspects of teacher preparation. The latest one, Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them, came out this week. As with the organization’s other studies, this one has fatal flaws that undermine most of the conclusions articulated in it.
12 Nov2014
By AACTE
AACTE Members Leading Efforts to Develop and Rigorously Assess Teacher Candidates
In its latest effort to cast the nation’s schools of education in a negative light, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) today released a report claiming that vague, “criterion-deficient” assignments in educator preparation programs result in too many high grades among teacher candidates, compared with students in other majors at the same institutions. The report, Training Our Future Teachers: Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them, rests on the same meager evidence—mere document reviews—as NCTQ has used in past reports. One of its underlying tenets, however, is important, if not new: that teacher candidates and their readiness to practice must be developed and assessed fully and accurately, an area that is already the subject of intense focus and innovation led by the educator preparation community.
26 Aug2014
By Cap Peck and Gail Bozeman
This summer, Chief Representatives at 400 randomly selected AACTE member institutions are participating in a survey on data use in their teacher preparation programs. If your institution has been invited but has not yet participated, please complete the survey to inform our future technical assistance and other member services around data use.
Each survey respondent receives an Amazon gift card as a token of appreciation. What’s more, some participants report a benefit from the survey itself. One dean said the survey “posed so many great, thoughtful questions and really forced me to think through our programs and how we are/are not using data effectively.
05 Aug2014
By Julie Underwood
Accountability is a core value of AACTE and its membership. Although the current trend toward measuring teacher preparation programs’ outcomes rather than inputs is a clear step in the right direction, it is often difficult to produce meaningful evidence of program impact amid the wide-ranging ideas of what such evidence might be. Still, our profession is ahead of the game in dealing with the performance expectations and reporting demands that now face higher education in general.
17 Jun2014
By Saroja Barnes
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.
03 Jun2014
By Alicia Ardila-Rey and Cap Peck
In the next few days, Chief Representatives at 400 randomly selected AACTE member institutions will receive an invitation from the Association to complete a survey on data use in their teacher preparation programs.
As readers of this blog know, teacher preparation institutions are under increasing pressure to provide data on the effectiveness of their programs and to use these data to make decisions about ongoing program improvement. However, a growing body of research shows that using data to make decisions about policy and practice involves much more than collecting, aggregating, and analyzing information. In order to understand what it takes to go from collecting to effectively using data, AACTE and the University of Washington have been collaborating over the last 2 years on a Spencer Foundation-sponsored project focused on describing how teacher education programs are learning to use new sources of outcome data for the purposes of program improvement.
20 May2014
By Saroja Barnes
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.
28 Apr2014
By Jane E. West
On Friday at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and White House Domestic Policy Council Director Cecilia Muñoz announced movement on long-overdue teacher preparation regulations. These regulations are the successor to the spring 2012 negotiated rule making held by the Department of Education, which failed to reach consensus after several tumultuous sessions.
Joined on a panel at Friday’s event by Jim Cibulka (Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation), Camilla Benbow (Vanderbilt University, TN), Chris Minnich (Council of Chief State School Officers), Kaya Henderson (District of Columbia Public Schools), Elisa Villanueva Beard (Teach For America), and Secretary Duncan, Muñoz said the regulations are “something that the president has a real sense of urgency about.”
11 Mar2014
By Tim Finklea
The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) has released draft evidence guides along with an application for educator preparation providers (EPPs). The evidence guides are designed to provide practical advice for EPPs as they structure their self-study under the CAEP standards and prepare for a site visit.
The following drafts are available:
17 Jan2014
By Deborah Schussler and Lisa Johnson
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.
