During the week of June 9, more than 40 AACTE state chapter leaders convened in Washington, DC, for the 2014 State Leaders Institute (SLI).
An annual professional development event exclusively for state chapter leaders, SLI aims to strengthen participants’ leadership skills, enhance chapters’ advocacy and communication efforts, and build connections among chapter heads from across the country.
AACTE has partnered with Measured Progress to provide a series of three webinars on a new requirement in the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) accreditation standards: facilitating and measuring candidates’ assessment literacy. This webinar series, “Developing the Assessment Literacy of Teacher Candidates,” is free and open to the public.
AACTE’s Leadership Academy in Milwaukee is under way! More than 80 new deans and department chairs from 65 educator preparation institutions across the nation are sharing in 4 days of professional development to sharpen and refine their leadership skills.
The event, which runs through Thursday, is being led by faculty members who together bring over 60 years of education leadership to the academy. In a variety of sessions and other interactions with participants, they are addressing key challenges that face new deans and chairs, such as implementing a vision, developing faculty, crafting budgets, engaging in public relations, and using data.
AACTE President/CEO Sharon P. Robinson announced Friday that Mark LaCelle-Peterson, senior vice president of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), will join AACTE’s staff as vice president for policy and programs July 1.
“We are delighted to welcome Mark to AACTE,” Robinson said. “He knows the work of our membership very well, and we are eager to bring his expertise to the Association’s programs.”
LaCelle-Peterson will provide strategic and operational leadership for AACTE’s Policy and Programs Department. The position is a member of the senior management team that is instrumental in developing and executing the overall strategic goals of the Association. Managing a team consisting of staff and consultants, LaCelle-Peterson will provide program and policy leadership and will develop high-level activities to showcase and support the work of the Association.
The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.
The Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) is pleased to announce the upcoming launch of an exciting new MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Designing for Deeper Learning: How to Develop Performance Assessments for the Common Core.
This 9-week course will build educators’ capacity to develop and use curriculum-embedded performance assessments that fit local contexts. Course activities will guide students through the development and implementation of a performance task that is aligned with a specific curricular unit and performance outcomes integral to the Common Core State Standards. The course will use a learning-centered approach in which assessments are not only of learning, but also for learning.
Yesterday, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its second annual Teacher Prep Review: A Review of the Nation’s Teacher Preparation Programs. Although parts of this report venture a conciliatory tone, as might be expected from NCTQ’s past reports, this review offers largely unhelpful recommendations that are based on questionable methodology.
Public Shaming—Over a Document Review
In an attempt to provide a consumer-friendly guide to teacher preparation programs, NCTQ has moved from rating institutions on a 4-star scale to ranking them numerically—a divisive tactic that mostly serves to pit institutions against one another. Notably, these rankings have as little to do with graduates’ readiness to teach as did last year’s star system.
This summer, two national education organizations will revise the model standards for the preparation, performance, support, and evaluation of school leaders. The work is expected to be completed in October.
With renewed support from the Wallace Foundation, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Policy Board for Education Administration (NPBEA) will convene panels to update the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards, last updated in 2008, and the National Educational Leadership Preparation (NELP) standards, last revised in 2011. The effort also includes drafting new standards for superintendents or other central-office staff who supervise principals.
Nominations for all of the 2015 AACTE awards are now open on AACTE’s online submission site. To read detailed submission information, please refer to the official Call for Entries.
Our awards program recognizes member institutions’ exemplary programs as well as the achievements of individuals who have notably contributed to education preparation.
This year, the former Best Practice Award in Support of Global Diversity will revert to its predecessor components: one award focusing on multicultural education/diversity and another on global/international perspectives. These areas had been combined after the 2006 award cycle, but the AACTE Board of Directors voted last February to honor them separately again in order to provide distinct recognition of key practices.
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.
American teachers touch the American future every day. They do so by producing good citizens, good employers, good workers, and good people. As teacher educators, we prepare these leaders.
In today’s political climate, too many people take a simplistic approach to teaching and learning. It’s not hard to find someone who will argue that to teach, all you need are good intentions. Nearly everyone has been in school, so many people believe this makes them expert on how to teach and even on how to train teachers. Similar logic would lead us to conclude that since everyone has been born, we could all be obstetricians and medical educators. Teaching and teacher training are not simple tasks.
AACTE’s Board of Directors is headed this year by Julie Underwood, dean of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Underwood is a nationally recognized authority on school law and has coauthored several books on the topic. Her background includes work in higher education and at the National School Boards Association, where she served as associate executive director and general counsel from 1998 to 2005.
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 Zachary VanHouten at zvanhouten@aacte.org.
Georgia State University (GSU) is the largest producer of minority educators in the state of Georgia and graduates approximately 500 teachers annually. GSU’s Network for Enhancing Teacher Quality (NET-Q) program aims to increase teacher quality in urban and rural areas in Georgia. The program includes both pre- and postbaccalaureate initiatives for educators serving high-need school districts in these settings.
NET-Q boasts a partnership with at least 15 rural PK-12 schools, local businesses, two historically Black colleges, and the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.
edTPA has been nationally available for nearly a year, and some 520 educator preparation programs in 34 states are already using it. Unfortunately, there are many misunderstandings and misperceptions about this assessment that threaten to compromise its utility. In response, the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) and AACTE have created a new Myths and Facts document to promote accurate and informed conversations on edTPA.
This clarifying document is publicly available and gives faculty, policy makers, PK-12 educators, and others a fuller understanding of edTPA and why support for performance assessment of beginning teachers continues to grow. The educators who have collaborated to develop, use, and share edTPA encourage thoughtful discussion about how edTPA is being implemented to support teacher candidates and preparation programs.
Visit edtpa.aacte.org to learn more about edTPA.
The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.
In partnership with AACTE, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) invites you to attend its 2014 Fall Conference (“CAEPCon”) at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC. This fall’s CAEPCon, “Excellence in Educator Preparation: Building Our Profession on Evidence,” takes place September 29–October 1, 2014. Hundreds of supporters of improving teacher quality will gather together to share innovative ideas about accreditation’s role in ensuring candidate readiness. Registration is now open at http://caepnet.org/events/caepcon/.
People who attend CAEPCon will have the opportunity to learn about excellence in educator preparation, share their best ideas for building the profession, and grow in their understanding of the CAEP accreditation process. CAEP is committed to the role it plays in ensuring all teacher candidates are classroom ready.
AACTE is pleased to announce that three new topical action groups (TAGs) have been established and are accepting new members:
The Research in Teacher Preparation TAG is dedicated to identifying current research gaps in teacher preparation literature to guide collaborative research projects among TAG members.
The Assessment of and for Student Learning TAG is dedicated to determining which national and local assessment standards and tools are most valuable to establish “core assessment principals” and developing a paradigm of PK-12 student performance assessment that is appropriate for the 21st century.
