29 Jun2015
By Diana Lys
I recently had the pleasure and honor of delivering the keynote address for the 2015 edTPA Mid-Atlantic Implementation Conference in Towson, Maryland. As a longtime supporter and champion of observation- and performance-based educator preparation and assessment, I was eager to share with peers from across the nation who are at different places on their journey with edTPA.
First, I wanted to commend each person for being there. By the virtue of their attendance and leadership, participants were helping shift the negative tone of dialogue around teacher preparation by highlighting innovative practices and committing to positive change. At the core of the narrative is a shared rallying call to ensure each teacher candidate enters tomorrow’s classroom ready to teach.
26 Jun2015
By Jerrica Thurman
AACTE issued a press release June 24 announcing a new Clinical Practice Commission, which has already begun working on an ambitious agenda to better define what constitutes high-quality clinical teacher preparation. Read on to learn more, or contact Vice President Rodrick Lucero, who chairs the commission, for more information.
01 Jun2015
By Linda McKee
Educator preparation faculty at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY, like to meet with faculty in other departments to compare notes about how their teacher candidates are doing and how best to support them across study areas.
“That’s just the environment we work in. They are all of our students, as they major in education and an area of the liberal arts and sciences,” explains Kate DaBoll-Lavoie, professor and immediate past chair of the Department of Inclusive Childhood Education at Nazareth. “We want them to succeed. We support our colleagues.”
For the past 2 years, DaBoll-Lavoie and her colleagues have brought to the table new data that have enriched the conversations and helped to focus them on specific needs of students.
22 May2015
By Zachary VanHouten
The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) continues its data collection efforts for the planned 2016 edition of its Teacher Prep Review. As part of this pursuit, NCTQ is once again utilizing state open-records requests for information from public institutions that have chosen not to comply with NCTQ’s information requests—and at least one state is considering a change to open-records law.
The subject of lawsuits from NCTQ in Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin, several institutions around the country asserted that course syllabi are the intellectual property of their faculty and therefore covered by copyright law – protecting them from NCTQ’s open-records requests.
01 May2015
By Mark Ginsberg
I am honored to assume the role of chair of AACTE’s Board of Directors at such an exciting time for the organization and the profession as a whole. Nine weeks into my yearlong term, I’m eager to share my excitement with you about the work we’re doing together.
Most visible so far is our focus on accreditation, particularly our efforts to initiate a collaborative dialogue with the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). This dialogue aims to address concerns expressed by many AACTE members while continuing our support for CAEP as the field’s unified accrediting body.
Although important—in fact, critical—for our field, our work with CAEP is but one of a large portfolio of topics on AACTE’s agenda.
30 Apr2015
By Linda McKee
What a difference a year makes.
Last spring, Phil Munkvold was in his final months of college at Minnesota State University (MSU) Mankato, finishing his clinical experience and preparing his edTPA portfolio.
Thanks to a strong partnership between the MSU Mankato program and the school where Munkvold student taught, he was exposed to the edTPA process as well as the school’s staff and its students shortly after he moved to Minnesota from another state to continue his teacher preparation.
28 Apr2015
By Yupin Bae
AACTE’s 2015 Professional Education Data System (PEDS) survey is now accessible online. If you have not already done so, please complete the survey by Friday, May 15.
As you know, AACTE members annually access this system to report their program/school data and submit Parts A and B of the PEDS survey for summary tabulations. Because these data are used by many education constituents in a variety of ways, AACTE invites all other educator preparation providers to join in the effort and do the same in order to paint a more complete picture of the field of teacher preparation.
20 Apr2015
By Jerrica Thurman
Do you think educator preparation programs are out of touch with today’s PK-12 schools? See what Ohio’s teacher educators are doing to engage with their partners in this video for AACTE’s Debunking Myths campaign. See how you can participate in the campaign here.
In early March, 60 representatives from Ohio public and private higher education institutions converged for Day on the Square to meet with state legislators, including Senate Education Committee Chair Peggy Lehner and House Education Committee Chair Bill Hayes. Conversations centered on current policies, legislation, and the direction of teacher education in Ohio, focused specifically on the theme “Merging Voice and Vision Through P-16 Partnerships.”
06 Apr2015
By Sharon Robinson
News Flash! The interest of students and their opportunity to learn is not better or even well served by a strategy of constant and high demand of inexperienced teachers. Retention matters, not just to teachers but, most critically, to students.
Recent studies showing that teacher effectiveness continues to develop over time reinforce this imperative to do right by our students. First, in a working paper completed last year for the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, researchers at Duke University found that middle school teachers’ effect on student test scores as well as attendance rates improves over at least several years. A subsequent study out of Brown University found improvement in teacher effectiveness is indeed steepest in the early years in the classroom but continues for many more years, challenging the common perception that teacher quality is a fixed characteristic after just a couple of years of experience.
02 Apr2015
By Zachary VanHouten
The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has re-engaged its data collection efforts in preparation for its 2016 Teacher Prep Review—scheduled for an October 2016 release. In an e-mail message to programs throughout the country, NCTQ has sent both an overview of the changes for the 2016 review and an itemized data request for each program, requesting that institutions notify NCTQ if they plan to comply with the request by April 20.
27 Mar2015
By Deborah Koolbeck
TIME SENSITIVE: Responses due April 24, 2015
The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) seeks input from the higher education community for its work on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA). Your feedback is requested by April 24 in these areas:
- Accreditation in higher education
- Risk sharing in student borrowing
- Data transparency and consumer information
24 Mar2015
By Kristin McCabe
The AACTE Learning Center now includes recordings of all six major forums from the 67th AACTE Annual Meeting in Atlanta. Anyone who was registered for the conference may log in to the Learning Center to view the videos and slides from the forums:
23 Mar2015
By Donna Sacco, Amanda Bush and Christine DeGregory
In the three decades since A Nation at Risk was released, the state of America’s education system relative to other countries’ has been a matter of heated debate. Along the way, public opinion has placed the onus for our schools’ perceived failure on teachers and their preparation, and education policy has echoed this assumption through an array of accountability measures for teachers and preparation programs.
One driver of the continued misconception about U.S. teacher quality is the highly publicized results of international large-scale education assessments (ILSAs) that suggest America’s students are performing far below other nations. At January’s press briefing for the report The Iceberg Effect, lead researcher and report author James Harvey explained that ILSAs have been misused and that the science behind them is highly questionable, akin to comparing apples to oranges.
19 Mar2015
By Michael Feuer
This post originally appeared in Dean Feuer’s blog, “Feuer Consideration,” and is reposted with permission. The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.
The dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia recently wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post that was well meaning but misleading. It was surprising and disappointing to see a distinguished educator miss an opportunity to dispel conventional myths and clarify for the general public what is really going on in the world of teacher preparation and its evaluation.
For those who may have missed Robert Pianta’s short article, here is a summary and rebuttal.
25 Feb2015
By Sharon Robinson
The following letter to the editor was published in the Washington Post February 23, in response to the February 20 commentary by the University of Virginia’s Robert C. Pianta, “Teacher Prep Programs Need to Be Accountable, Too.”
Robert C. Pianta vastly oversimplified the narrative about accountability among those who prepare educators.
Educator preparation programs should indeed be accountable, and the profession has been busy creating data tools and processes for accountability. States such as Louisiana, California, and Georgia are working to determine the best ways to use data collected through existing assessments and surveys to document program impact. These systems rely on access to K-12 student achievement data as one indicator.
