Last week, members of the Teacher Leader program at the College of Charleston’s School of Education, Health, and Human Performance (SC) visited Washington, DC, and met with government and nonprofit agencies and associations, including AACTE, as well as leaders from educational think tanks and policy makers.
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.
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.
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.
A new report from the National Education Association (NEA) is the latest in a recent flood of attention to the lack of diversity among the nation’s teaching workforce.
Earlier this week, NEA released Time for a Change: Diversity in Teaching Revisited, which explores the need to recruit and retain teachers of color and the political context that has diminished interest in and initiatives toward meeting the goal. According to Segun Eubanks, director of NEA’s Teacher Quality Department, “This is not a new concern.” The paper examines the progress—or lack of progress—made to address diversity of the teaching workforce and uses the findings as a basis for recommending change.
Last week, the Northwest Evaluation Association, in cooperation with Grunwald Associates, released a new report, Make Assessment Matter. The report follows up on a study done by the group 2 years ago of assessment perceptions held by parents, teachers, and district administrators.
In the current landscape where standards, accountability assessments, and use of student value-added measures to evaluate teachers prevail, the researchers expanded survey respondents to include students to better understand their awareness and what value—if any—they perceive in educational testing.
Based on survey data collected from more than 1,000 students in grades 4-12, more than 1,000 PK-12 classroom teachers, and 200 district administrators, the report highlights six key findings:
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 selected 10 institutions to participate in the Association’s first Networked Improvement Community (NIC), aimed at increasing the diversity of our nation’s teacher candidate pool by focusing on recruitment of more Black and Hispanic men into teacher preparation programs.
More than 50 AACTE member institutions in 25 states applied to be a part of this NIC, known as Changing the Demographic Makeup of the Teaching Workforce. Following a rigorous review by the AACTE Committee on Professional Preparation and Accountabilty, AACTE congratulates the following institutions on their selection:
edTPA™ passed a critical milestone this summer when the final assessments were submitted and scored as part of an ambitious two-year edTPA field-test period. Completion of this extensive field testing gives new momentum to edTPA, which is scheduled to be fully operational and available to all states and teacher candidates beginning September 18.
During the 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years, more than 12,000 teacher candidates in 26 states participated in the edTPA process. The candidates came from some 250 institutions. Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Tennessee and Washington were among the states with the highest number of teacher candidates participating in the field test.
