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Research
That Matters
Dear Colleagues:
The field of teacher education has always sparked impassioned debate, from criticism of the first teacher preparation schools in the 1800s to cries over the “miseducation” of U.S. teachers arising in the 1960s. At no time has the scrutiny of formal teacher preparation been as intense, however, as it is today.
The wave of high-stakes accountability that earlier swept through U.S. elementary and secondary education is now hitting college teacher education programs like a tsunami. Newspaper articles talk about “out-dated” methods taught in college coursework. Reporters quote superintendents and principals who complain that novice teachers arrive in their districts utterly unprepared for the complicated task at hand. Critics question the relevance of “Ivory Tower” teacher preparation programs at universities and push for alternative routes for credentialing. Writing about teacher education in The New Yorker magazine last year, Malcolm Gladwell, author of several best-sellers, questioned the value of teaching certification and master’s degrees, suggesting that “neither makes a difference in the classroom.”
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is calling to match teacher pay to student performance, saying “we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.” New Education Secretary Arne Duncan is proposing identifying the “best and brightest” teachers using a range of metrics that includes student achievement.
The federal push to put a “qualified teacher” in every classroom has turned up the volume on the teacher education debate – and lent new life to old myths. One camp claims good teachers are born, not made. For them, it’s about personality, temperament. Another camp argues the real learning begins when novice teachers first step inside their own classroom — and not before. Neither camp recognizes the potential impact of powerful teacher preparation in an era of unprecedented educational challenges.
We’re committed to that powerful preparation here at the University of Washington’s College of Education, where faculty in both Arts and Sciences and Education are deeply involved in preparing teachers to excel in the hardest to serve schools. We have created a network of school-university partnerships supported by the Ginger and Barry Ackerley Foundation. Together, we are working with our school partners to debunk the myths, devise measures of accountability in teacher education, and address questions of relevance in our teacher education program. This work is based not on pedagogical fads or fashions, but on a stream of evidence generated through our systematic research — research boosted with a five-year grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, part of their Teachers for a New Era program.
Our faculty digs deep to fill in missing links in statewide data systems. What is the best measure of “quality” in a teacher? How do we make the link between a public school student’s learning and a higher-education instructor’s teaching? Are our graduates ready to tackle the challenges of a diverse classroom?
Statistics paint a troubling picture. In Washington state, children entering public schools are increasingly poorer, ethnically and linguistically more diverse, and face more disadvantages that can affect learning. Data show our classrooms have become more complex. New teachers’ skill sets must accordingly become more complex. Yet our studies of graduates from institutions in the Washington Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (WACTE) show that only a quarter of the state’s novice teachers feel “very prepared” to manage increasingly diverse learning needs in their classrooms. We cannot address questions of educational equity without taking a hard look at these numbers — and at ourselves as teacher educators.
To collect and analyze data, our faculty have followed our students from their first pre-service days on campus into their first years of teaching, assessing the efficacy of our own instruction on our graduates and, most importantly, of our graduates’ instruction with their students. What do UW graduates take with them from campus to classroom? How do they use it? How effective is it? What is the educational outcome? Where do we succeed, where do we fail in shaping our program to be in synch with the needs of our partner schools?
The answers haven’t always been comfortable for us, as you’ll discover in this edition of Research That Matters. Our longitudinal research shows that beginning teachers often pick and choose what to learn based on their experiences, goals, and conceptions of themselves as teachers. The result can be abandonment or misinterpretation of methods and practices learned in coursework. Even teachers in their first and second years, schooled in sophisticated inquiry methods, may revert back to simple pre-constructed lesson plans when faced with the complexity of actual classrooms.
We cannot address these problems if we don’t recognize them, and we cannot recognize them unless we methodically study and analyze our own practices. At the College of Education, this investigative process has prompted the sweeping changes you’ll read about in the accompanying articles. Based on incoming data, we’re addressing the often glaring gap between campus theory and classroom practice. We’ve created new support systems for our graduates. We’ve redirected our placements of student interns into the communities where our most vulnerable students live.
Digging for weak spots hasn’t always been a priority in our teacher education program. The College consistently places in the top dozen of national schools of education in the U.S. News & World Report. Surveys of how satisfied recent UW teacher education graduates are with their experiences here show a consistently positive assessment. Our hiring rates are also tops: in most typical years 90 percent of our students walk off campus and into jobs.
Yet, at a time when teacher education programs across the country are open to attack, we believe it is the University of Washington’s duty as a leading public research institution to advance knowledge, inform public policy, and create a body of data in a field that for too long has suffered from a lack of it. At this time of intense scrutiny — with a new president calling for widespread educational reform — our faculty wants to set an example of how a teacher preparation program can turn a scientific eye on itself, systematically collect and analyze data, and turn that data into meaningful action.
In the process, we intend to debunk another long-standing myth in the field — the myth that departments of education are stodgy places that never change. We have changed, profoundly. We will continue to change. And we will feed that change with real-world evidence generated through rigorous research as we work to ensure that the teachers we prepare positively impact the academic achievement of all the students we serve.
Patricia A. Wasley, Dean and Professor
