Contributions from: Elizabeth B. Kozleski, University of Colorado at Denver.
Abstract
Teachers' professional preparation, along with their working conditions, has been identified as fundamental to improving elementary and secondary education for the 21st century. Reforms in special education, including a shift toward inclusive teaching practices, also requires changes in how special educators learn and work in schools. All teachers must learn new ways to organize their schools and classrooms, new student grouping practices, approaches to learning that shift the relations between teachers and students, ways teachers might share responsibility for groups of students, and new procedures for determining and documenting students' learning that meet high standards of achievement.
In order to achieve such educator outcomes, initial and continuing professional development programs must reconceptualize and restructure. We must use teaching and learning practices that are effective, engage teachers in their own study of teaching and learning, and strike a balance between a focus on general instructional skills to a combination of generic and content-specific skills. Learning experiences must increasingly be at least job-linked, and as often as possible, job-embedded. This paper summarizes four trends in teacher education and illustrates each with examples. Finally, the presentation deals with new efforts to establish standards and standards-based assessment practices for both initially licensed and continuing licensed educators. Exploring the benefits and risks of standards-based teacher education forces teachers educators to concretise the impending issues we will all face in the very soon future.
Changing Preparation Demands
Teachers’ professional preparation, along with their working conditions, has been identified as fundamental to improving elementary and secondary education for the 21 st century.(1) A recent report by National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the United States (2) reveals that many teachers are not adequately prepared for their teaching assignments even at initial licensure. If our school reform efforts are to succeed as durable and fundamental changes in the “core of educational practice, (3) institutions of higher education, districts and state educational agencies must create the strategies, incentives and options that will promote educators’ learning of the new practices and perspectives that will genuinely change this core of practice.
By a “core of educational practice” Elmore and others mean “how teachers understand the nature of knowledge and the student’s role in learning, and how these ideas about knowledge and learning are manifested in teaching and classwork. Teachers must be prepared and supported to learn new ways to organize their schools and classrooms, new student grouping practices, approaches to learning that shift the relations between teachers and students, ways teachers might share learning responsibility for groups of students, and new procedures for determining and documenting students’ learning that meet states’ high standards of achievement.
The most recent NCES report revealed that while 54% of responding teachers in the U.S. taught limited English proficient or culturally diverse students, and 71% taught students with disabilities, only 20% felt very well prepared to meet the needs of these students. In addition, only 28% of teachers felt very well prepared to use student performance assessment techniques; 41% reported feeling prepared to implement new teaching methods, and 36% reported confidence in implementing state or district standards. Increasingly, teachers must acquire the capacity and competence to:
Tested Approaches for Initial and Ongoing Professional Development
In order to achieve such educator outcomes, initial and continuing professional development programs must also reconceptualize and restructure. We must use teaching and learning practices that are effective, engage teachers in their own study of teaching and learning, (4) and strike a balance between a focus on general instructional skills to a combination of generic and content-specific skills. (5) Learning experiences must increasingly be at least job-linked, and as often as possible, job-embedded. (6) In sum, research tells us that effective professional development must rely on a clear vision of good teaching, well-defined standards of practice and performance, a rigorous core curriculum, extensive use of problem-based methods, well-supported practice and mentoring, and strong relationships with reform-minded local schools.
Trends in Licensure and Teacher Preparation
Although there are substantial differences across states, I believe there are four general trends that summarize changes in licensure practices that have significant implications for teacher education programs.
From “Seat Time” to Demonstrated Ability: A Renewed Focus on Learning
Traditionally teachers were licensed to teach if they had completed a planned program of study that “covered” specified content (subject matter courses, general methods courses) and offered some practice applying that content (student teaching). If you put in the time, you got the license, almost regardless of what you actually learned. The assumption was that passing the course assured that teachers had mastered the content and skills needed to teach successfully and could transfer that ability to real schools and classrooms
Increasingly, however, states are changing their regulations to focus on the outcomes of preparation programs. The question licensing organizations are asking has shifted from “Did they complete a planned course of study?” to “Regardless of how they acquired their teaching skills, when they teach, do student learn?” This new standard of accomplishing learning for children and youth requires much different documentation practices. In Oregon, for example, the teacher’s “worksample” requires that teachers not only plan learning events, but tailor them to the needs of individual students, adjust their teaching according to student accomplishments, and document exactly what students learned, including what they learned that was not a specific learning target. In order to become licensed to teach in Oregon schools, then, teachers must demonstrate that students actually learn when they teach.
From A Focus on Content to a Focus on Age and Student Diversity
A second broad trend is reflected in the number of states that are creating more discrete age-level licenses. In addition to the familiar elementary and secondary licenses, most states are adding at least early childhood and middle level licenses in order to encourage teachers to specialize in the developmental needs of students at various stages in their learning. At the same time, there is an emphasis on teachers being initially licenses to teach across various content areas and wide student diversity
A related trend in special education licensure is the movement away from large numbers of categorical licenses to fewer, more general categories. Historically, we created a new teaching license for every specific disability category. In Oregon, for example, we have continued the age-level emphasis to create an Early Childhood/Elementary Special Educator and a Middle/Secondary Special Educator. Other states make a two-part distinction between teachers for students with “mild” disabilities and “severe” disabilities.
Another trend in special education licensure is a gradual movement away from reliance on “stand alone” licensing. The “stand alone” license means that individuals can prepare specifically to be a teacher of students with disabilities without first preparing to be a general educator. The “endorsement” approach assumes that teaching special education students first requires a firm grounding in general education. States are gradually moving toward the endorsement approach, either by requiring a general education license first, or by requiring a substantial enough content mastery in general education to encourage a variety of “integrated” “cross categorical”, “dual licensure” or “generic” special education certificates as the first step in special educating licensing.
At the University of Oregon we offer a five year Integrated Teaching option which prepares students to receive the early childhood/elementary general education licenses and the early childhood/elementary special education endorsement. In addition the students also chose an additional specialty in
The underlying logic of all these trends is to prepare teachers initially to work with more diverse groups of students within narrower age spans but to add specialization in either particular subjects or particular kinds of student learning challenges as teachers continue in their careers.
From Preparation to Ongoing Professional Development
Effective teachers must pursue career-long learning. While many states have long required some form of standard or permanent license after an initial period of induction, more are now moving to continuing licensure renewals. In Oregon teachers are initially licenses for 3 years – a license they may renew one time for a total of six years. After this period of induction, teacher must demonstrate that they have acquired advanced proficiency in a set of required standards in order to qualify for a continuing license. The continuing license must then be renewed every five years through the demonstration of continuing professional development.
Continuing professional development requirements challenge colleges and universities to remain involved with teachers through their careers. Many universities are revising their professional development offerings to reflect the needs of practicing teachers and to collaborate with schools in the design and delivery of such offerings. The University of Oregon, for example, has developed an approach to continuing professional development grounded in the following definition and principles:
Continuing Professional Development is an educator-driven, flexible system where educators engage in planning learning experiences over time that result in better and better learning and life experiences for students and educators.
Principle 1: Child & Youth Centered. The purpose of CPD for educators is ultimately to make a difference in the learning and lives of students. Any effective CPD system must keep this point in focus and help participants connect their learning to student outcomes.
Principle 2: Educator/Learner Focused. Effective CPD is about educators learning and exploring new ideas they can then apply in their own practice. The educator/learner must be “in charge” of designing their own CPD experiences in ways that benefit their own learning, application and reflection.
Principle 3: In-depth. Effective CPD creates the opportunity for educators to take the time needed to work extensively with new ideas and information. Only such in-depth learning can be adequately integrated into practice in ways that benefit both educators and students.
Principle 4: Continuous. CPD never ends. Effective educators pursue learning and growth continuously. CPD systems should be structured in a fashion so educators can periodically revisit and redesign those CPD experiences that support their continued growth.
Principle 5: Context Sensitive. Every educator’s professional experiences are unique. CPD experiences should be designed in light of the particular educator’s students, school, and district in order to be most effective and responsive.
Principle 6: Focused on Group Practice. Educators do not work alone. Increasingly, meeting the needs of Oregon’s children and youth require groups of educators and others to design together effective learning. CPD should promote and provide experiences with this kind of interdependent group learning and purpose.
Principle 7: Research Oriented. The knowledge base of teaching and learning continues to grow and change as a result of the efforts of university-based and field-based educators and community members. Effective CPD should draw upon and in turn contributes to, this growing knowledge base.
From Apprenticeships to Proficiency through Partnerships As standards-based reforms sweep K-12 education, higher education and licensing systems are also shifting to a standards-based approach for teachers. Traditionally, we have relied upon some amount of practice teaching to help preparing teachers apply what they learn in university classrooms to teaching in local schools. The assumption was that this “practice” was enough to produce effective teachers. Usually student teachers were assigned to apprenticeships with experienced teachers who took responsibility for monitoring this learning.
Currently, states are requiring teachers to demonstrate proficiency in a variety of specific standards for both initial and continuing licensure. At the University of Oregon, we use a self-assessment/scoring guide system to provide this documentation. In order to generate the evidence of proficiency (for initial licensure) or advanced proficiency, which is required for continuing licensure, universities are working on broader partnerships with schools. Groups of students are placed to work with a variety of teachers and activities within a school. School personnel assist in the teaching of courses, which are sometimes offered on school, instead of university campuses. Teacher candidates contribute not only to the design of curriculum and teaching of students, but get involved in a variety of other school activities, including teacher teams, school-wide inquiry projects, and school improvement initiatives. In this way, preparing teachers acquire a broader proficiency in roles that will be expected of them in America’s changing schools.
The Pros and Cons of Standards: A Cautionary Tale
In America, the trends outlined above are quickly becoming established. Overall, I believe they move us in good directions. Focusing on children and learning is a positive development. The more teachers in preparation understand and experience that teaching is about learning for both teachers and students, the better. Similarly, a closer partnership with schools in preparing teachers will only improve the linkage between their learning and their work, establishing a linkage that should continue to support career long learning.
Features of Standards-Based Teacher Education and Assessment
As all teacher education institutions make the transition to standards-based teacher education, several features are emerging. While details vary as each teacher education program designs its unique response, three features seem to be providing some coherence across programs and reflect the trends outlined above.
1. Reliance on More Authentic Forms of Learning In much the same way that K – 12 education has shifted to a focus on improving the linkage between classroom experiences and use of resultant learning in student’s lives, teacher education is becoming more authentic in a variety of ways. Programs design coursework tasks to link to work in schools and help candidates practice the information collection and decision-making that they will use continuously in their work in schools in order to ensure student learning results. Increasingly, curricula are designed around problems of practice, and learning occurs through inquiry. Group work, shared activities, joint and peer evaluation, are all ways teacher education programs are designing the learning of teacher candidates so that teaching becomes much more than “stand and deliver” exercises. Many exams and term papers are being replaced by a variety of tasks that either build teachers’ skills or enable them to build their students’ skills. Teaching the way we want our graduates to teach has challenged teacher education programs to redesign courses, program sequences, and practica – all in an effort to prepare teachers who can work differently than their predecessors.
2. Leadership of Practicum Experiences One important dimension of the changes in teacher education is an even more focused reliance on practice. In fact, in many of our programs practicum experiences lead much of the learning agenda. Candidates’ experiences in real schools and classrooms become the content of many university-based classes, whether these classes take place on the university campus or in partner schools. Candidates are simultaneously in the field and in classrooms nearly throughout their entire teacher education programs. School personnel collaborate with university faculty through various partnerships to together design, operate and improve teacher education programs. While practicum experiences bring a dimension of authenticity, their importance and centrality are hallmarks of standards-based programs.
3. Focus on Results Completing coursework used to be all that was required of prospective teachers to be considered successful. One aspect of the shift to a standards-based system is a new focus on results. It is not enough that either prospective teachers or children and youth know things, they much also be able to do things, and, even more importantly, accomplish things with that knowledge and skill. This new focus on results requires teacher education programs to take seriously candidates’ abilities to achieve student learning as a condition of the judgment that they are successful and have completed preparation. Given the complexities involved in being confident about such a judgment at the end of a teacher preparation program, we are being further challenged to confirm these initial judgments by following our graduates through their first three or four years of teaching in order to assure ourselves that they can indeed help their students achieve.
Some “Up-Sides” of Standards
This shift towards standards based teacher education has a variety of promising aspects. The features outlined above are generally positive developments, albeit often quite challenging for higher education institutions. There are other positive benefits as well. Efforts to define standards at both national and state levels (e.g., National Board for Professional Teaching Standards) have generated a discussion that is helping to clarify the knowledge and skill base of teaching. Long debated, the translation of the knowledge base into standards and proficiencies is one way to improve the clarity and understanding of the field about what teachers should know, be able to do, and accomplish.
At the same time that standards and proficiencies begin to create a clearer and more coherent articulation of a knowledge base for teaching, the effort is also surfacing the ways in which some aspects of teaching cannot be so captured. Standards and proficiencies define something, but they do not adequately capture the dynamic of teaching and the way in which accomplished teachers have a deeper masters and capacity to negotiate this dynamic to effectively and consistently accomplish leraning and achievement for quite diverse groups of students. The standards conversation is beginning to also define what might be termed the praxis of teaching. Certainly the problem of assessing the proficiencies of either a teacher candidate or an experienced teacher against a set of standards quickly surfaces the need for a clear understanding of the praxis of teaching as well.
A third benefit of the standards-based movement in teacher education is that is also beginning to provide direction, coherence and, perhaps, some beginning consensus among teacher educators. Colleges and universities that prepare teachers have long taken pretty separate and individual approaches to the design, operation, and the definition of satisfactory results of their teacher education programs. Despite the existence of external state, regional, and national accrediting organizations, there remain quite wide differences between programs.
Some differences in programs, of course, are desirable and reflect the distinctiveness of the program and the capacities of the programs’ faculty. But, most accrediting bodies can, at best, periodically assess the fit between the practices a teacher education program chooses to emphasize and the accrediting standards. The external evaluation nature of most accrediting processes encourages programs to “put the best face possible” on their practices. Consequently, wide differences in program quality can also accompany other, more positive program differences.
As standards define more precisely the results teacher education programs must achieve, issues of quality are being surfaced, discussed, and may eventually lead to a more consistent quality across programs while still retaining that which is distinctive about individual programs.
Some “Down-Sides” of Standards
Despite the appeals and alignment offered by standards-based teacher education as they system implements standards-based K-12 schooling, there are some potential disadvantages and risks. One issues is that different parts of the educational community – for example, general and special educators, speech/language professionals, and so on – approach the task of defining standards from different, but not necessarily parallel conceptual schemes. The emphasis on preparing “competent, caring, and qualified” teachers (7) among general educators leads to the articulation of different standards and proficiencies that those articulated, for example, by the Council for Exceptional Children, regarding special educators. One set of standards draws upon a more constructivist approach to teaching and learning, while the other continues to reflect a medical, or at least, a deficit-oriented “needs” approach. (8) Instead of creating a new clarity and coherence, standards that emerge from different conceptual approaches to understanding teaching and learning threaten to further institutionalize the separateness of educational specialties and perhaps reinforce more segregative educational practices. The practical credentialing decision of “how much demonstration of proficiency, and how good a demonstration is good enough becomes impossible to answer with any consistency as long as articulated standards remain grounded in quite different conceptual foundations.
A closely related second issue is the way in which the standards-based movements in special education are surfacing our field’s unresolved debates and further distancing various constituencies. As long as standards can be articulated in quite different ways for teachers preparing to be “general” rather than “special” educators, the ongoing efforts to unify general and special education become compromised. Sarason’s observation from nearly a decade ago, will become more, rather than less descriptive of our teacher education system:
School personnel are graduates of our colleges and universities.It is there that they learn that there are at least two types of human beings, and if you choose to work with one of them you render yourself legally and conceptually incompetent to work with others. (9)
Depending upon how discretely standards for teachers become articulated, there is some risk that the entire standards-based effort could serve as a significant constraint to innovation and change. In the same way that K-12 learning standards, when articulated as so many discrete facts and skills, can foster an uncompromising standardization of learning that is less and less inclusive of students’ learning, cultural, linguistic, and family differences; similarly articulated standards for teachers can limit the fields’ ability to be responsive. Of course, standards can, and do, change over time, and such changes offer the opportunity to update them in light of new developments, policies, and knowledge. Nevertheless, any set of standards, too discretely articulated, can force teacher education toward a preparation of educators that is itself less oriented toward teacher flexibility, ongoing learning, and accommodation of new students, new educational policies, and emerging preferred practices.
Summary
As K-12 schools respond to a variety of national and local reform and restructuring agendas, they are finding a renewed need to also demand that teacher education similarly restructure. Although there is wide variety across states, the trends described above capture the spirit of these changes. Universities no longer hold either the sole responsibility or control over teacher education. We must forge new partnerships with both schools and the teachers we prepare to ensure that teachers effectively prepare our children and youth to high standards of achievement and accomplishment so they can contribute to our changing world society.
At the same time these trends offer opportunities to align with broader educational changes and better prepare teachers to meet these new demands, there are also risks. If we respond as teacher educators to demands for restructuring by adjusting our practices, but failing to explore the “fundamental core” of our educational practices, like schools, we will fail to change enough that matters and we will have missed the opportunity to resolve long-held debates and position the field for the future.
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