24 Apr2017
By Jerrica Thurman
(April 24, 2017, Washington D.C.) – Today, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) launches its inaugural Quality Support Workshop in Fort Worth, Texas. The workshop, which runs through Wednesday, is the first in a new series of regional events focused on supporting teacher preparation providers to improve program quality. By providing a forum for educators to share experiences about program innovation and construct solutions to shared problems of practice, the Quality Support Workshops aim to meet the present-day needs of teacher educators.
Offered through the Association’s Quality Support Center, these workshops deliver professional development for assessment, accreditation, and documenting quality assurance in convenient sites around the country. Each event connects participants with specialists in facilitated, hands-on sessions where faculty can share strategies and develop customized, actionable plans for use in their home institutions.
18 Apr2017
By Sungti Hsu
AACTE and Westat are partnering with state chapters and education agencies this spring to pilot new surveys of beginning teachers and their supervisors. By developing common instruments to be used across states that can also be customized with state-specific questions, the partners aim to fill the need for both national benchmarks for preparation programs (as called for in accreditation standards) and state-determined priorities.
AACTE staff conducted exploratory work last year, collecting and studying state-level instruments currently used for surveying program completers in 13 states that were willing to share both their instruments and their most recent survey results. We found that all of the instruments align with the InTASC model standards for beginning teachers, although their length and emphasis areas vary. Meanwhile, we began talking with state education agencies (SEAs) and AACTE state chapters and member institutions to gauge their interest in consolidating these state and institution data collection efforts in a national-level instrument.
21 Mar2017
By Jolanda M. Westerhof
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) invites applications by April 21 for the 2017 Christa McAuliffe Excellence in Teacher Education Award. Only public colleges and universities that are members of AASCU are eligible to apply for the award, which honors exemplary teacher preparation and professional development programs.
To win this award, teacher education and professional development programs must –
14 Mar2017
By Sharon Robinson
The colleges and universities that prepare our nation’s educators are deeply committed to program quality, innovation, and accountability, and important progress is under way in each of these areas at the institutional, state, and national levels. While our priorities are unchanged by the presence or absence of federal regulations, the regulations that were voted down by Congress last week would have impeded this progress by redirecting already-tight resources to create an onerous new reporting and rating system for teacher preparation programs. Now, thanks to the robust advocacy efforts of the field, our professional commitments can proceed unhampered by burdensome mandates and prescriptive-yet-unproven methods.
Absent these regulations, educator preparation providers (EPPs) participate in numerous public reporting and quality assurance systems. Both EPPs and states are required by Title II of the Higher Education Act to submit annual reports to the U.S. Department of Education, and states must report at-risk and low-performing programs. Programs also must meet state review standards, and several states have developed data dashboards that display information for all providers to help the public compare program quality. A plurality of EPPs also undergo national examination through the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation – a professional peer-review process using standards that are developed by the field and based on research.
10 Mar2017
By Kristin McCabe
Are you preparing for a CAEP accreditation visit? Wondering how to apply evidence from your candidates’ performance assessments to make sure your program prepares them for key practices? Or perhaps you’re looking for new ideas for recruiting and supporting a more diverse candidate pool? Find the guidance you need at an AACTE Quality Support Workshop!
In just over 6 weeks, AACTE will bring expert facilitators and a selection of workshop sessions to Fort Worth, Texas, April 24-26. We’ve just posted a detailed schedule with descriptions of session choices to help you plan your time effectively (download the PDF here).
21 Feb2017
By Jerrica Thurman
AACTE’s enhanced online professional seminars, offered through the Quality Support Center on the FutureLearn social-learning platform, are well under way! More than 5,000 registrants signed up for the first run of our introductory assessment course, which just concluded, and the second course, Using Data to Improve Student Outcomes, opens March 20. (Please note this start date is a change from the original schedule.)
In this free 3-week course, you will discover how to apply data science to deliver better outcomes for students. Led by Linda McKee, AACTE’s senior director for quality support initiatives, you’ll learn to identify a range of data sources, analyze the data, and present your findings, then select indicators and establish actions to achieve continuous improvement.
02 Feb2017
By Kristin McCabe
AACTE has chosen Transforming Teacher Education for Social Justice, by Eva Zygmunt and Patricia Clark of Ball State University, to receive the 2017 AACTE Outstanding Book Award. The award will be presented at the 69th AACTE Annual Meeting Welcoming Session, Thursday, March 2, at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida.
Published by Teachers College Press in 2015 with a foreword by the late Peter C. Murrell (and with contributions from additional authors Jon Clausen, Wilfridah Mucherah, and Susan Tancock), this volume highlights the award-winning “Schools Within the Context of Community” partnership between Ball State and the Whitely neighborhood of Muncie, Indiana. The authors explain the situated-learning philosophy that undergirds the program and how it meshes with clinical teacher preparation, community engagement, and service-learning to both develop culturally responsive educators and elevate student learning in the partner schools.
30 Jan2017
By Kristin McCabe
Are you looking for assistance in preparing your programs for accreditation or state review? Or maybe you’re in need of guidance on refining your internal quality assurance system, or using performance assessments with your teacher candidates, or just making sense of all the data and other evidence you’re collecting?
AACTE is ready to help you with these and other needs. In fact, you have several options to choose from just this semester, with more being rolled out later in 2017. Whether you prefer to take a convenient online course, hire a trained consultant, or bring your colleagues together for hand-on, facilitated planning, we aim to provide the support you need.
27 Jan2017
By Christine Tambini and Sara Hiller
A preliminary schedule of sessions is now available for AACTE’s regional Quality Support Workshop in Texas. From April 24 through 26, you can engage in your choice of facilitated workshop sessions, plan with your team, take part in roundtable discussions, and connect with peers at the Sheraton Fort Worth Downtown Hotel.
Whether you are an accreditation or assessment coordinator, clinical faculty member, dean or department chair, or even a state agency official, this workshop will offer you valuable resources and custom support for your quality assurance challenges. During the four 90-minute main session blocks, you’ll choose from topics covering both broad and specific aspects of performance measurement, approaches to preparing for accreditation, diversity and equity concerns, program improvement, and more.
24 Jan2017
By Mark LaCelle-Peterson
The demographic diversity of the teachers in America’s classrooms does not reflect that of the students they are teaching. In light of this persistent gap, many teacher preparation programs have bolstered their efforts – or developed new strategies – to recruit, admit, and support teacher candidates from underrepresented groups. Several AACTE member institutions are participating in a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) to boost the number of Black and Latino men in their teacher preparation programs, for example, and many others are at work in other national efforts and local partnerships.
Earlier this month, I was interested to learn of a related research project under way at Educational Testing Service (ETS) to explore efforts to diversify the teacher pipeline. As one part of this research, ETS hopes to identify successful strategies in postsecondary educator preparation programs and to help disseminate information to others. (AACTE is partnering with ETS to help support our members using performance assessments, but this research is not related to our partnership.)
10 Jan2017
By John F. Snyder
AACTE is partnering with the American Association for Employment in Education (AAEE) to increase input from educator preparation providers in the organization’s annual teacher supply and demand survey. The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.
The annual American Association for Employment in Education (AAEE) Educator Supply and Demand Report needs your input! If you have not already done so, please complete this year’s survey by January 27.
10 Jan2017
By Jerrica Thurman
How do you do continuous improvement? Are you looking to make better use of data to move your program forward? Is your institution working toward accreditation or other quality assurance targets?
AACTE’s new Quality Support Workshops provide a forum for educators to address these questions and develop viable solutions with guidance from expert facilitators. These regional events were developed in response to the needs of the field and offer opportunities to share resources and build actionable strategies for program assessment, accreditation, and continuous improvement goals.
This year, AACTE will bring these workshops to three regions: Fort Worth, Texas, April 24-26; Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 10-12; and Seattle, Washington, November 9-11.
15 Dec2016
By Sharon Robinson
I am excited to announce AACTE’s plans to enhance the online professional seminars offered through our Quality Support Center. Thanks to a new partnership with FutureLearn, a global leader in online learning, our short courses on quality assurance topics will relaunch in 2017 with clearer presentations, better graphics, and a broader peer community.
AACTE originally developed the series of six courses in 2015 in response to your request for affordable and widely accessible training on how to use data wisely, build evidence for state and national program reviews, and address other quality concerns. Hundreds of you have already taken at least one of these courses, and your enthusiasm and valuable feedback informed our decision to ramp up the offerings. In short, we are engaging in our own continuous improvement!
06 Dec2016
By Deborah Snyder
AACTE is partnering with the American Association for Employment in Education (AAEE) to increase input from educator preparation providers in the organization’s annual teacher supply and demand survey.
If you haven’t already done so, could you please take 10-15 minutes to complete the 2016-17 AAEE Supply and Demand Survey? You do not need to be a member of AAEE to participate in the survey, and all respondents will receive an executive summary of the results. The survey is open through January 16.
10 Nov2016
By Sungti Hsu and Yupin Bae
To expand the Data Dive blog series on Ed Prep Matters, AACTE invites members to submit brief articles presenting and discussing data related to educator preparation.
Like all blog submissions, Data Dive articles should be approximately 500 words and contain news or commentary relevant to AACTE or to educator preparation generally. Please include tables, charts, or other illustrations of the data and your analysis. Advertising-related posts are not permitted, and the content – including any graphics – must not infringe on any copyright agreements or laws.
