What comprises high-quality teacher education?

In this section, we provide resources on what comprises high-quality teacher education programs. Using these research findings, case studies, and descriptions of exemplary programs, campus leaders can identify models and methods to help them improve the quality of their institutions' teacher education programs.

Research on Teacher Preparation

Accreditation Standards

Characteristics of High Quality Programs

Alternative Certification Programs

Community College Programs

Research on teacher preparation

Dale P. Scannell writes about the various structural approaches that exist to prepare teachers in our nation's teacher education programs for the Presidents' Network for the Education of Teachers (PRESNET) at the American Council on Education, entitled Models of Teacher Education.

This report provides an overview of traditional and alternative structural models for teacher education programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as a review of the research literature on the effectiveness of teacher education programs.

Calvin M. Frazier writes another report for the PRESNET - Quality Control and Quality Assurance Issues - to address the issues affecting the quality of teacher education programs, as well as a set of general recommendations for campus leaders.

Finally, Suzanne M. Wilson, Robert E. Floden, and Joan Ferrini-Mundi co-write a comprehensive report entitled Teacher Preparation Research: Current Knowledge, Gaps, and Recommendations. This report summarizes research on five key issues in teacher preparation: subject matter preparation, pedagogical preparation, clinical training, preservice teacher education policies, and alternative certification.

Accreditation Standards

One distinctive mark of a high-quality teacher education program is accreditation by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Many states require their teacher education programs to be accredited by NCATE, while other teacher preparation programs have voluntarily chosen to meet NCATE's standards.

Characteristics of High Quality Programs

Doing What Matters Most: Investing in Quality Teaching (1997) featured case studies of seven outstanding teacher preparation programs to compile a list of characteristics of high-quality teacher education programs. The characteristics that were common to these programs include:

• a common, clear vision of good teaching that is apparent in all coursework and clinical experiences;
• a curriculum grounded in substantial knowledge of child and adolescent development, learning theory, cognition, motivation, and subject matter pedagogy, taught in the context of practice;
• extended connected clinical experiences (at least 30 weeks) which are carefully chosen to support the ideas and practices presented in simultaneous, closely interwoven coursework;
• well-defined standards of practice and performance that are used to guide and evaluate coursework and clinical work;
• strong relationships, common knowledge, and shared beliefs among school- and university-based faculty; and
• extensive use of case study methods, teacher research, performance assessments, and portfolio evaluation to ensure that learning is applied to real problems of practice.

In 1998, the US Department of Education published a report entitled Promising Practices: New Ways to Improve Teacher Quality. This report focuses on improvement strategies in a range of domains, including recruitment, standards, induction, professional development, accountability, and teacher preparation. The section on teacher preparation includes an analysis of characteristics that were common to "promising" programs, which include the following:

• The president and board of a college or university give status and support to teacher education programs and emphasize quality through rigorous accreditation.
• The programs involve subject matter disciplines in the preparation of teachers.
• The teacher preparation program recruits teacher candidates of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities who have the potential to be excellent teachers.
• The teacher education program is coherent in its sequential offerings and emphasizes content knowledge as well as pedagogy relevant to teaching a specific subject (known as content-specific pedagogy).
• Ideally, it provides a final fifth year of practical, supervised experience combined with class work or substantial student teaching experience far beyond the too-usual month or two in a loosely supervised assignment.
• The program encourages close two-way links between campuses and schools. These links provide status to practicing teachers and rich environments for preparation of pre-service students. They give prospective teachers positive opportunities to work with parents and community, civic, business and youth organizations that support children and families.
• The program incorporates assessments of future teachers that reveal how well they know their content and how well they can teach it to students.
• These assessments emphasize understanding the ways that children learn and the latest models of curriculum and student evaluations.
  The program prepares candidates to work in multicultural settings and with diverse learners.

Finally, a third report on characteristics of strong teacher preparation programs, alled Teaching the Teachers: Different Settings, Different Results (2000), by Harold Wenglinsky, focuses primarily on the Southeastern US to "examine the links between the characteristics of teacher education institutions, their programs, and teacher effectiveness as measured by scores on teacher licensure examinations." Written for the Educational Testing Service.

Alternative Certification Programs

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of alternative teacher certification programs nationwide. Most of these programs are designed to attract people to the teaching profession - often mid-career professionals from other fields - without having to undergo the kind of subject matter and pedagogical training associated with "traditional" teacher education programs. What Matters Most (1996) states that the most successful alternative routes "offer a streamlined, carefully constructed curriculum that integrates courses on learning theory, development, teaching methods, and subject matter with an intensely supervised internship prior to entry" (p. 53), with elements such as:

• strong academic and pedagogical coursework that provides teachers with the subject matter and teaching knowledge needed to help students reach the state's curriculum teaching standards;
• intensive field experience in the form of an internship or student teaching under the direct daily supervision of an expert teacher;
• a requirement that candidates meet all of the state's standards for subject matter and teaching knowledge for a standard certificate before becoming a teacher of record; and
• a guarantee that new teachers meet all of the state's teacher quality standards, including passing the same assessments given to their traditionally prepared counterparts.

Community college programs

Improving the quality of teacher preparation program is not only the responsibility of state and private colleges and universities; it also extends to campus leaders of community colleges across the nation. Many of the efforts these leaders have made to improve the connections between their community colleges and other teacher education programs are described in a recent report that was published by SERVE, entitled Community College and K-12 Teacher Preparation. More general information about community colleges is available at the web site of the Center for Community College Policy.