The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing every child with competent, caring, qualified teachers in schools organized for success.
Links
Create strong learning communities in schools.
Close the gap between teacher preparation and practice.
Support professionally rewarding teaching careers.
Develop authentic teaching standards and learning assesments.
After last week’s historic election, Washington is switching gears to focus on President-elect Obama’s transition to power and his plans once he is sworn in as the 44th president. The major issue on everyone’s minds these days is, of course, the economy. In this morning’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes about the importance of focusing on education, even in these tough economic times. While we at NCTAF and Mr. Kristof may quibble about what exactly should be done to improve education, we could not agree more that education must be a high priority in the Obama administration. Improving the education of our nation’s youth will create adults who are college- and work-ready and able to compete in the global economy.
We hope that President Obama will focus on education as the way to bring sustainable, systemic change and to strengthen our nation’s workforce. Here are a few initiatives that Senator Obama has mentioned during his presidential campaign that we hope he will make a priority as president:
Improving math and science education: Recruiting more college graduates with math and science degrees to teaching will strengthen the teaching force and deepen the content knowledge of our secondary teachers. In addition, we must strengthen our K-12 math and science curricula to ensure that students graduate from high school with the 21st century skills they will need in a rapidly changing workforce.
Recruiting teachers: Creating incentives for teachers to teach in high-need schools and subjects will broaden the pool of teachers. Innovative compensation systems will also attract more people to the field and encourage them to grow as teachers. This is especially important in high-need urban and rural schools that struggle to attract the best teachers and whose students need the most support.
Supporting Teacher Residency Programs: Teacher Residency programs in places like Boston and Chicago have shown strong promise as a way to prepare teachers. With retention rates in the 90% range (while the average 5-year teacher retention rate hovers around 50%), these programs provide teacher candidates with deep clinical experiences that allow them to become successful teachers.
Supporting mentoring and collaboration: Expanding mentoring time and offering incentives to schools and districts to give common planning time to teachers will create stronger professional learning communities that are able to collaborate to improve education outcomes for students.
Expanding the role of service and service learning: Creating a way for retirees to engage in service projects will create a cadre of experienced individuals who will bring expertise in their respective fields to improving their communities. An increased emphasis on service learning will allow K-12 students to apply their classroom knowledge in practical applications that also benefit their communities.
As NCTAF blog readers, do you agree that these are the most pressing education issues for President Obama in January? If not, what issues do you think should be his primary focus?
Social Networking: It's Not Just for the Students!
Everyone’s doing it. Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter, LinkedIn. Social networking has consumed our society. And while many of us think of social networking as a way to share photos or tell all of our 585902 friends what we ate for lunch, for the education community, it’s becoming so much more than that.
Online teacher networks are becoming increasingly popular. Education Week’s recent article on TLINC (Teachers Learning in Network Communities) highlights just one way NCTAF is trying to promote a culture of collaboration in education. With sites in Denver, Memphis and Seattle, TLINC is providing future teachers and their peers with ways to connect at anytime – much like they do it their personal lives with texting, emailing and social networking. In states like Colorado where wilderness is vast and your colleagues may be miles away, it provides the instant support that so many teachers wish they had. But a teacher in an urban Seattle school may be just as isolated in her own classroom and an online community provides a chance to connect when she might not have the opportunity in her own school.
Programs like TLINC represent a major systemic change from the standard practice of preparing teachers in isolation from the schools where they will serve, and then placing them as stand-alone teachers in self-contained classrooms. TLINC provides a professional learning community that expands and enhances face-to-face mentoring. The online community capitalizes on the expertise of people with a variety of skill levels: pre-service teachers can collaborate with their university faculty as well offer insight to their peers. Providing teachers and teacher candidates with the support they need, whether it be in problem-solving, classroom management or curriculum design, is one of the keys to moving our education system into the 21st century.
How are you using social networking as a tool for educators, and how can we embrace this online culture of collaboration rather than hide behind a firewall?
This is a kind of peer pressure that is good to feel. So come on, get online. Everyone’s doing it.
Listen to Cindy Gutierrez, the director of initial professional teacher education at the Univeristy of Colorado at Denver, discuss TLINC!
While American athletes may outperform those from countries such as Finland, South Korea, and Japan in the Beijing Olympics, students from these nations consistently rank near or at the top of international rankings such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In the latest PISA results, our students ranked 15th in reading, 21st in science and an abysmal 25th in mathematics. So, how can we improve the achievement of students so they are at the top of their game in the classroom? One place to start is in the preparation of our teachers.
In Finland, teacher prep programs strongly emphasize collaborative learning. Teachers regularly plan and observe together. They also take leadership roles in curriculum development and researching and implementing promising practices. These ideas are embedded in teacher preparation programs and lead to a stronger, more cohesive teacher workforce.
Programs with similar emphases are emerging across the U.S. as well. In Indiana State University (ISU)’s Project PRE, faculty work with pre-service teachers to research and explore best practices. Future teachers are immersed in a clinical experience that emphasizes the strength of collaboration and learning communities. ISU’s pilot program, TOTAL (Teachers of Tomorrow Advancing Learning) Semester, gives future teachers an additional semester in the classroom with a master teacher prior to student teaching. The program allows future teachers to take on more responsibility, culminating in a teaching experience that prepares them for classroom challenges.
At the 2008 NCTAF Symposium, Ronni Mann, regional director at the New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shared with attendees the value of a mentor-based model. At NTC, teacher candidates are engaged in a systematic, mentor-based teacher induction model that helps novices to survive their early years and emerge as confident, skilled professionals.
Initiatives like these will go a long way towards developing teachers who will be ready to teach, learn and prepare students to participate in a global-economy. Wouldn’t it be great to celebrate the United States’ strength on both the Olympic stage and in our nation’s classrooms? What’s being done to provide world-class educators for every child?
What innovative teacher preparation programs are underway in your state? How do you think we can improve teacher preparation programs to impact student learning and achievement? Is PISA a good measuring stick for student achievement?
Last week Congress approved the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. What exactly does that mean for teacher preparation programs and new teachers? How can the combined grant programs improve teacher quality? One Education Week article suggests:
“It could be used to develop teacher residency programs, which would allow students pursuing master’s degrees in education to work alongside mentor teachers…teacher education programs could also use the grants to bolster field experiences for undergraduates and provide support to new teachers during their first years in the classroom, including helping them develop relationships with mentor-educators.”
NCTAF supports teacher residency programs and new teacher induction as a way to prepare, retain, and support effective teachers and keep the best and brightest in the classroom. While new teachers cite many reasons for leaving the profession, the top of that list continues to be school culture and professional working conditions. New teachers feel unsupported and isolated. While the rest of the world operates in teamwork-type model, our schools have yet to make that transition.
States like Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey and South Carolina require and finance mentoring for new teachers, while Boston, D.C. and Chicago have developed teaching residency models to better prepare new teachers for classroom challenges.
Do the provisions of HEA provide an effective answer to teacher preparation problems? What kind of teacher prep initiatives are going on in your state? What do you think the key components are to successful residency and mentoring models?
