TNTP says Teachers’ First Year is Crucial

Posted on April 22, 2013 by coreeducation

TNTP, a national nonprofit committed to ending the injustice of educational inequality, has released a new report that seeks to help first year teachers become better teachers. TNTP was created by teachers in 1997, so the TNTP team has a vested interested in creating cohorts of new teachers who have the critical dispositions that they need to succeed.

Over the last two years, TNTP has radically evolved the way it trains and evaluates new teachers, becoming an organization that certifies teachers based mainly on their actual performance in the classroom. The experience gained during those two years means that TNTP can now share what it has learned in its latest report entitled, “Leap Year: Assessing and Supporting Effective First-Year Teachers.”

Leap Year explores a simple idea: The first year is the most important year of a teacher’s career, and it should be treated that way. Right now, most schools and preparation programs treat teachers’ first year like a warm-up. Instead, it should be seen as a critical window of opportunity to help teachers develop essential skills and make thoughtful decisions about whether they can make a successful career teaching.

TNTP has put this philosophy into practice in 15 programs across the country with the Assessment of Classroom Effectiveness (ACE), a multiple-measures evaluation system designed specifically to ensure that first-year teachers in the TNTP Teaching Fellows and TNTP Academy programs meet a high standard of effectiveness.

Leap Year explains the development of ACE and what its first year taught TNTP about evaluating and supporting the growth of approximately 1,000 new teachers. Here are some of the key conclusions:

New teachers perform at different levels and improve at different rates. Contrary to conventional wisdom, first-year teacher performance is not uniform. Some start strong, while others struggle. Many improve as they gain experience, but some do not.
Teachers’ initial performance predicts their future performance. In particular, teachers who struggled from the start rarely came close to becoming effective, even in their second year.
A few core skills appear to be important to first-year teachers’ success. TNTP found that first-year teachers who are purposeful, responsive and focused on student understanding develop more quickly.

The report goes on to make the following conclusions based on the experience of ACE and similar programs of the last two years:

Certification should be linked to a teacher’s actual performance in the classroom, not just coursework and seat time. Nothing better indicates a teacher’s future success than his or her first-year performance.
Teacher preparation programs should stop certifying teachers who are unlikely to become effective, which only does a disservice to those teachers and their students.
Schools need to help first-year teachers focus on the skills that matter most for their future success, providing regular useful feedback along the way.

To learn more, please download Leap Year from TNTP’s website:

http://tntp.org/ideas-and-innovations/view/leap-year-assessing-and-supporting-effective-first-year-teachers

CAEP “Raising the Bar” for Teacher Education Accreditation Programs

Posted on April 1, 2013 by coreeducation

The Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) and the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) are merging into the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). CAEP will become the sole body responsible for the accreditation of teacher education programs and will serve the more than 900 educator preparation providers currently accredited by the TEAC and NCATE. According to the press release on the merger, “Accreditation is a non-governmental activity based on peer review that serves the dual functions of assuring quality and motivating improvement.”

As far back as 2009, NCATE and TEAC began preparing for the merger, recommending in a report:

“That the Executive Board of NCATE and the Board of Directors of TEAC adopt a motion authorizing their Presidents to execute, on behalf of their respective organizations, agreements… which would provide for (1) the creation of The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, Inc., (CAEP), (2) a transition period of no more than two years to complete the design work and implement its capacity to accredit all institutions and other entities that prepare teachers, administrators and other P-12 professional educators and (3) immediately afterwards, the consolidation of NCATE and TEAC into CAEP as the field’s accreditor.”

Along with the merger, CAEP has made its new draft standards available.

The Commission has developed a draft of its recommendations for the CAEP Board of Directors… The Commission has given emphasis to a firm grounding of its standards and evidence on empirical research or, where there is little guiding research, has based its recommendations on best practices and professional consensus. The Commission calls for accountability of providers and CAEP, itself; public reporting must be forthright and transparent. And, the Commission recommends new standards and decision procedures that balance strong evidence with professional judgment.

CAEP’s leaders have set challenging goals to enhance the value of accreditation. Commission members have responded to their charge by identifying four especially critical points of leverage to transform educator preparation in our nation:

Build partnerships and strong clinical experiences-Educator preparation providers and collaborating schools and school districts bring complementary experiences that, joined together, promise far stronger preparation programs. (See standard 2.)
Raise and assure candidate quality-From recruitment and admission, through preparation, and at exit, educator preparation providers must take responsibility to build an educator workforce that is more able, and also more representative of America’s diverse population. (See standard 3, including minimum admissions criteria and a group average performance on nationally normed admissions assessments in the top third of national pools.)
Include all providers-Accreditation must encourage innovations in preparation by welcoming all of the varied providers that seek accreditation and meet challenging levels of performance.
And surmounting all others, insist that preparation be judged by outcomes and impact on P-12 student learning-Results matter; “effort” is not enough. (See standard 4, especially.)

These points of leverage are not accreditation “business as usual,” nor do they represent marginal changes from current and former education accreditation practice. Exercising them can add value to what states are trying to accomplish with their reforms in preparation policy.

The Commission’s work is organized in part around three areas of teacher preparation identified by the National Academy of Sciences 2010 report, Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy. The Academy panel sifted through hundreds of research studies from recent decades and, not surprisingly, concluded that more research is needed in order to have sound evidence about the effects of particular aspects of preparation. But it found that existing research provides some guidance: content knowledge, field experience, and the quality of teacher candidates “are likely to have the strongest effects” on outcomes for students.

CAEP promises to bring a rigorous, 21^st century approach to their work in hopes of becoming the model professional accreditation organization.

The draft standards can be found at:
www.ncate.org

AFT Moves Forward with Bar Exam for Teacher Candidates

Posted on February 26, 2013 by coreeducation

AFT President Randi Weingarten recently reaffirmed the AFT’s commitment to increasing the standards for teacher certification.

In a follow up to our previous post, American Federation of Teachers calling for an adoption of a bar exam for aspiring teachers, following are Randi Weingarten’s recent comments on the AFT executive council’s adoption of the report on teacher preparation entitled “Raising the Bar: Aligning and Elevating Teacher Preparation and the Teaching Profession”:

“The world is changing at breakneck speed, and so are the knowledge and skills educators need so they can help students be prepared for life, career and college. That’s where the AFT’s task force report “Raising the Bar” comes in-to accomplish our work, we must raise the professional standards for teachers and align them with what kids need to succeed in the 21st century. It’s well past time to end the sorry tradition of tossing brand-new teachers the keys to their classrooms and leaving them to see if they and their students sink or swim. This is unfair to both students and their teachers.

“Teaching, like the medical, legal and other professions, must have a universal, rigorous, multidimensional entry assessment to ensure that a new teacher possesses the required knowledge and skills to be a caring, competent and confident classroom professional. The report outlines such an assessment’s components, which include completing a yearlong clinical experience, knowing one’s content and basic teaching skills-like classroom management and differentiating instruction-and demonstrating that knowledge in real-life clinical classroom situations. It makes clear this ‘bar-like’ process is for prospective teachers and in lieu of, rather than in addition to, the processes that exist today.

“As in these other professions, those with the primary responsibility for setting and enforcing the standards of our profession should be the professionals themselves-in our case, educators, not those who haven’t taught or prepared teachers and have never walked in our shoes.

“All stakeholders-teachers and teacher educators, state education chiefs and education boards, accrediting agencies, and education associations and unions-must help end the patchwork processes we have now. We must work together to ensure that teacher preparation standards, programs and assessments are aligned with a well-grounded vision of effective teaching.

“After a great discussion, the AFT officers and executive council embraced the report’s recommendations and agenda for action. AFT teachers and teacher educators will now move forward with other invested parties as we work with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to design the standards and assessment prescribed by the report. Development and implementation of this assessment will give educators at all levels real ownership of their profession.”

For access to the full report, see: http://www.aft.org/pdfs/highered/raisingthebar2012.pdf

Technology and Teacher Preparation

Posted on February 25, 2013 by coreeducation

Aspiring teachers want more digital avenues for learning, says a new report from Project Tomorrow.

The findings are included in the report Learning in the 21st Century: Digital Experiences and Expectations of Tomorrow’s Teachers, prepared by Blackboard Inc. and Project Tomorrow, which includes findings from the Speak Up for Aspiring Teachers survey of nearly 1,400 college students in teacher preparation programs during spring 2012. The data collected from the aspiring teachers was compared with the results of the surveys completed by 36,477 in-service K-12 teachers and 4,133 administrators during Speak Up surveys from fall 2011.

Since 2007, Project Tomorrow has collaborated with Blackboard Inc. to create a series of annual reports that focus on key trends in the use of technology to increase student achievement, teacher productivity and parental engagement. This new report is the latest in the series and provides new insights that will inform college and university based teacher preparation programs as well as the induction and professional development processes within K-12 schools and districts. Tomorrow’s teachers may have the keys to finally unlock the potential of technology to transform teaching and learning, but much depends upon their experiences in their preparation program and how well future school leadership can support their expectations for essential technology tools and resources.

Highlights from the report include the following:

Aspiring teachers are tapping into emerging technologies such as social media and mobile devices to self-prepare themselves for their future teaching assignments. For example, tomorrow’s teachers are leveraging social networking sites and discussion boards as informal professional development sources to complement their formal coursework.
In spite of their comfort with using technology tools, the aspiring teachers say that their field experiences as student teachers and observing their professors are the best way for them to learn about how to integrate technology within instruction.
School principals have high expectations for the pre-service technology experiences of their future teachers. The specific technology tools and techniques that the aspiring teachers are learning to use in their methods courses however do not match the expectations of those school principals.
Aspiring teachers place a high value on the role of technology to both impact student academic success and their own effectiveness as a teacher.
Thinking about their future teaching assignment, aspiring teachers consider access to technology tools and resources to support instructional plans as one of the top five factors that will determine their future success as a teacher.

Future teachers want more digital, mobile and social technology integrated into their training and, in turn, their future classrooms, according to a survey report released from Blackboard Inc. and Project Tomorrow®. According to the report, nearly 50 percent of students in teacher training programs use online podcasts and videos and turn to social networking sites to self-train for future teaching assignments.

The tendency for tomorrow’s teachers to leverage technology is a direct result of their own experience as “active learners” – students who expect technology to extend teaching and learning. The report finds that over half of the aspiring teachers polled (58 percent) are taking online classes and nearly the same amount (52 percent) use digital textbooks as a part of their education experience.

The findings, intended to inform preparation and professional development programs for new teachers, also reveal that today’s principals have high expectations for the use of technology in classrooms. Over 80 percent of principals polled want their future hires to use digital tools to connect and communicate with students and their parents.

“Due to increased access to digital learning tools throughout their lives, aspiring teachers gravitate toward online collaboration, which translates to a more self-directed teaching approach,” said Julie Evans, chief executive officer of Project Tomorrow. “The correlation between an educator’s familiarity with technology, and the strong likelihood of using that technology within instruction, is a good way to predict the future classroom.”

The survey also found that over 40 percent of students in teacher training programs sought career guidance online from educators outside of their institution, demonstrating the important role that access to and fluency in technology tools can play in their future success.

“In order to be effective in the classroom and create an engaging learning environment, a great teacher needs to realize that children today are exposed to a vast amount of technology outside of the classroom, and when they walk into a classroom, they are walking back in time,” said an aspiring elementary school teacher from Purdue University that participated in the survey.

To access the report, see http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/tomorrowsteachers_report2013.html

New Pathways for Teachers, New Promises for Students

Posted on January 30, 2013 by coreeducation

In a recent AEI Teacher Quality 2.0 report, Timothy Knowles argues persuasively for radical changes with a practical mindset. His article is called “New pathways for teachers, new promises for students: A vision for developing excellent teachers.” Knowles, John Dewey Director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, writing as part of the American Enterprise Institute’s Teacher Quality 2.0 series, focuses on reform of teachers and concludes, “If we are to significantly improve academic outcomes for American children, we must re-conceptualize what it means to teach, and build ambitious new systems to recruit, prepare, place, retain, incent, and hold individuals and institutions accountable for results. . . And, finally, everyone—organized labor included—must put a stake in the ground, and take unfamiliar steps toward making teaching a legitimate profession.”

The article makes compelling arguments for changes that are big enough to offer hope of real change yet realistic enough to be feasible certainly. Knowles consolidates his recommendations into six categories:

Recruitment: Aggressively subsidize teacher education programs that deliver results; eliminate federal policies that conflate certification with quality; increase beginning teacher salaries; improve tools to assess aspiring teacher candidates.
Preparation: Demand an undergraduate major in the teaching subject area for all teacher candidates; dramatically diversify approaches to teacher training; institute results-based, renewable teacher licensure.
Placement: Encourage “preparation to placement” pipelines; invest in district-level recruitment; place cohorts of teachers from particular training institutions in specific schools.
Early Retention: Encourage school systems and teacher education programs to jointly support new teachers; measure and report on which schools are or are not good places to learn and work.
Career Incentives: Diversify roles for exemplary teachers; base compensation on student success; provide ongoing, job-embedded training and development.
Accountability: Develop tools that accurately measure multiple indicators of teacher success; measure and report on the extent to which schools are organized for improvement; hold all teacher training institutions publicly accountable for graduate hiring, retention, and classroom success; give students incentives to care about their learning.

Frederick M. Hess, the Director of Education Policy Studies at AEI, in the foreword to the report, fits Knowles’ work into the larger framework of the AEI Teacher Quality 2.0 Reports:

As we start to rethink outdated tenure, evaluation, and pay systems, we must take care to respect how uncertain our efforts are and avoid tying our hands in ways that we will regret in the decade ahead. Well-intentioned legislators too readily replace old credential- and paper-based micromanagement with mandates that rely heavily on still-nascent observational evaluations and student outcome measurements that posit as many questions as answers. . . AEI’s Teacher Quality 2.0 series seeks to reinvigorate America’s now-familiar conversations about teacher quality by looking at today’s reform efforts as constituting initial steps on a long path forward.

For more information, including a link to the full report, please visit the following website:

http://www.aei.org/papers/education/k-12/teacher-policies/new-pathways-for-teachers-new-promises-for-students-a-vision-for-developing-excellent-teachers/

Video Teacher Evaluations: Memphis Schools say Yes

Posted on January 20, 2013 by coreeducation

Memphis City Schools has partnered with Teachscape to install a city-wide system of video capture systems that will allow for improved teacher professional growth. The city expects to use the system for teacher development, support, as well as evaluation. Each school will have at least one device as part of the district’s long term goal of creating a library of successful teaching practices that can be used to instruct Memphis teachers.

“The use of Teachscape’s video technology allows our teachers to be their own first observer,” said Monica Jordan, coordinator of reflective practice and teacher support at Memphis City Schools. “Teachers have so many ways in which they can use video to enhance their practice. They can use it for self-reflection, feedback, instructional planning, lesson prep, co-teaching, and more.”

Memphis teachers first had the opportunity to use video for professional growth as part of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ms. Jordan added, “As a result of the MET Project, teachers started using video to deconstruct and analyze their lessons and saw its value in improving their teaching effectiveness, and ultimately student achievement.”

Use of video for teacher evaluations has been a growing, yet contentious, issue in recent years. One other example of the possibility of using video for evaluations is the proposed Teacher Performance Assessment for pre-service teacher candidates. Wisconsin, as well as some other states, have discussed the future possibility of having teaching candidates record sessions of themselves teaching. Those sessions would be judged by master teachers or administrators to analyze readiness for that candidate to enter the teaching field.

For more information, please visit the following websites:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/memphis-city-schools-selects-teachscape-video-solution-to-augment-teacher-effectiveness-initiative-186016762.html

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/new-teachers-getting-ready-to-be-graded-on-classroom-work-dg4fu8e-142232725.html

AFT calls for Bar Exam for Teacher Candidates

Posted on January 4, 2013 by coreeducation

The American Federation of Teachers, led by President Randi Weingarten, has recently published a report entitled “Raising the Bar: Aligning and Elevating Teacher Preparation and the Teaching Profession.”

This report calls for a more rigorous process by which teacher candidates would be certified. The process would consist of the following steps:

Teachers demonstrating subject area knowledge through evaluation of college level course load and a test to evaluate this knowledge
Teachers demonstrating an understanding of social and emotional aspects of learning through evaluation of education related course work and a test to evaluate this knowledge
One full year of “clinical practice” as a student teacher
A “rigorous professional exam for K-12 teachers”
More selectivity from teacher preparation programs including a minimum GPA of 3.0 for entrance and graduation and other measures

The last of these steps is part of a larger effort to have teacher certification programs, which vary widely in format and requirements across states and even within states, align themselves with the system created by the AFT.

Many states already require similar standards for teacher certification. For example, many states require candidates to pass two Praxis exams—one general teaching test and one in the candidate’s subject area. Most states also require student teaching, although often not one full year.

The AFT is at least in part responding to contentious policy issues and complaints in recent years about poor teachers and low standards for teacher certification. For example, NCLB of 2001 set up a new demand of putting “highly qualified” teachers in classrooms. Another example would be the Education Department’s negotiated rulemaking on Title II of the Higher Education Act. One highly publicized example of the highly debated issue of the role of teachers in failing schools and a lack of improvement in student test scores is that of the Washington DC public schools under former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee attempted to clear out underperforming teachers, and Randi Weingarten of the AFT was one of the chief opponents of these efforts.

The irony of the situation is that there are already other efforts in place on the national and state levels as well as from professional organizations such as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). The NBPTS has had, for 25 years, a strict certification process for teachers who would like to become nationally certified. These requirements are optional for teachers, however, and usually teachers seek to achieve NBPTS certification in order to receive pay raises or have greater chances to teach in other states.

The NBPTS would actually be the organization in charge of creating the new “bar exam”, which they suggest they could prepare within five years.

Another example of an effort already underway to make teacher certification more rigorous is that of Teacher Performance Assessment, a performance-based licensing test that about 200 teacher preparation programs across 25 states are now piloting. One state which is moving toward using the TPA is Wisconsin, and their hope is that the requirements of submitting lesson plans, reflections of their work, and a video of their classroom interactions with students as part of the Web-based program will greatly improve teaching standards.

At the same time, the fact that a prominent teachers union such as the AFT is making an independent effort to create a more stringent process by which teachers are certified marks a shift in the debate about teacher certification. There now appears to be a growing consensus among federal and state education officials, those in professional organizations, teachers unions, and others that an increase in the rigor of the teacher certification process which includes more alignment across teacher certification programs would be a desirable change that would help both students and teachers. For example, Weingarten stressed that one of the key reasons for this new process would be to more fully prepare new teachers for their first years in the classroom, rather than trusting that these new teachers would “figure things out, and [be] left to see if they and their students sink or swim.”

Following is the link to the brief on the AFT website and report: http://www.aft.org/newspubs/press/2012/120212.cfm

Webinar: Perspectives on the Future of Teacher Preparation in the Digital Age

Posted on December 10, 2012 by coreeducation

This Tuesday, the Alliance for Excellent Education will host a webinar entitled “Perspectives on the Future of Teacher Preparation in the Digital Age.”

The webinar will be moderated by Mary Ann Wolf of the Alliance for Excellent Education. The panelists, who will provide a diversity of views from different perspectives within the field,will be Barnett Berry, PhD, President and Chief Executive Officer, Center for Teaching Quality; Lynne Schrum, PhD, Dean, College of Human Resources and Education, West Virginia University; and Ronald Thorpe, EdD, President and Chief Executive Officer, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

Please join the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance) on Tuesday, December 11, 2012 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (ET), for a webinar on the future of teacher preparation in the digital age. The webinar will highlight promising developments and explore the challenges of remodeling teacher preparation programs.

Due to an increasingly global economy and complex world, the skills and knowledge that today’s students need to succeed have changed. In its recently released paper, Culture Shift, the Alliance states that it is imperative to continue shifting the culture of teaching to ensure that all students graduate from high school ready for college and a career. Meeting these twenty-first-century learning demands requires moving the education system to a learner-centered instructional model driven by high-quality digital learning and the effective use of technology that provides a more personalized, rigorous, and collaborative learning environment for each student.

Successfully transitioning to this type of education system requires a culture shift in the way high-quality instruction is delivered in the nation’s schools. Additionally, the teaching profession needs to be elevated and made more specialized through changes in the way the nation’s teachers are prepared.

For all of the details, please visit http://media.all4ed.org/registration-dec-11-2012

NBPTS and edTPA partners to Create Online Video Library for Teacher Preparation

Posted on November 30, 2012 by coreeducation

The U.S. Department of Education has awarded a $3 million “Investing in Innovation” grant to a partnership of educational organizations that will aid in two major educational initiatives: better preparing new teachers and bolstering math and science instruction.

The project will operate under the leadership of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and with the cooperation of faculty from Stanford University, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium (TPAC). These organizations are responsible for the creation of edTPA, “a performance-based assessment tool to help determine if student teachers are ready for the classroom.” edTPA is “based on standards developed by the National Board to identify the most accomplished teachers among experienced educators” and therefore attempts to merge the best practices of experienced teachers with what is taught to and expected of new teachers.

The grant itself allows for the creation of “an online repository of classroom videos and accompanying written materials that illuminate how master teachers go about the job of challenging and stimulating students to learn.” The repository will be known as ATLAS, or Accomplished Teaching, Learning and Schools, and will be constructed through a project the National Board calls “Building a Pipeline of Teaching Excellence.” Building a Pipeline of Teaching Excellence will focus on teachers in seven local school districts in New York, Tennessee and Washington along with six universities in those three states. The five-year project will attempt to prove that ATLAS has improved beginning-teacher instruction in the areas of math and science for grades 3-6.

Eventually, ATLAS will include all 25 National Board certificate areas, “including thousands of cases addressing all areas of the curriculum and every developmental level of pre-K-12 education.”

Work on the grant will begin before the end of 2012 and will require NBPTS to raise $450,000 in matching funds. Furthermore, NBPTS will “disseminate findings from this project through research and policy briefs, presentations to their memberships, research monographs, postings on websites and social media” to “all of the nation’s schools, colleges and departments of education; state education agencies; and the National Board’s network of 100,000 accomplished teachers and policy partners.”

Linda Darling-Hammond, a co-principal investigator of the grant and the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education who helped develop edTPA, summed up the importance of the grant: “This is cutting-edge work at the nexus of the nation’s two most important educational challenges: promoting educator effectiveness and strengthening science and math teaching and learning. The integration of the National Board’s repository of master teacher certifications into teacher preparatory programs will be extraordinarily beneficial.”