A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

DR. GAIL SHROYER: Good morning. It's a pleasure and it's also a challenge because what I'm going to try to do in basically the next 20 minutes is condense what I've been working on for the past 20 years as a teacher educator. [See Slide 1] And so, to begin with, the charge that I was given is to talk about what makes those high quality math and science teacher education programs. And to start that I thought I would begin by saying that as a teacher educator for the past 20 years, probably the greatest challenge that I face is the conception that seems to be fairly widespread that teaching is an easy-to-learn task. I think most people assume that anyone can be a teacher, and therefore it doesn't take much to prepare teachers.

[See Slide 2] Really contrary to this perception, I believe that teaching is the most complex profession, it's the most challenging profession that we have, and I also believe that preparing teachers consequently is the most challenging task that our nation faces.

In the sense of the biggest overview of what it is that we need to do to prepare good math and science teachers, it can be really summarized into a deep understanding of essential concepts and processes of science and math. I know you talked about this a lot. That's easier said than done. We're not just talking about taking a few courses, we're not talking about superficial coverage, we're talking about a really deep understanding of the nature of science and math and what it means to do science and math. Also, the importance of understanding the belief skills which lead to pedagogical content knowledge. That's the knowledge that teachers must have of the students, of the curriculum, of assessment, of teaching, really how to teach so that children can understand math and science.

And the last one is reflective and analytical practice within the real context of school. This is the way teachers continually improve their practice, find out what works, modify so that they can continue to grow. Basically, what we've done in teacher education is we've summarized these areas into what's been referred to as what teachers should know and be able to do. I would say, therefore, teacher preparation is as simple as this, but it's also as complex as this. What I would like to bring to you today is really a message, probably three messages, and I'm going to try to use a bit of a story to go along with that.

But the first message is the complexity of teacher education. I think that most people would agree we're not achieving our goal in most colleges of education, and yet a lot of the solutions that we come up with are simple solutions. Complex problems mean you need complex solutions, and I don't think there's an easy remedy to that.

The second message that I would like to bring to you today is that we have to develop a national consensus regarding what it is that we believe teachers should know and be able to do, that that consensus, that criteria of what makes a good teacher should then be used to accredit our schools of education and to credential or license our teachers, and that all teachers should be licensed and all colleges of teacher education should be accredited.

Then I believe that the next important message is that we need collaboration to achieve those goals, and we need to support all of the people that are trying to collaborate to achieve these schools. So what I'm going to try to do to talk about this message is to give you this, a scenario of the vision of where we'd like to be, and then the reality of where we are now, to get a sense of where we need to move from the reality to the vision. I want to start by saying that obviously we already, as was mentioned by Senator Glenn, we already have many, many wonderful programs of teacher education. But I would say that in many cases, we haven't unified all the visions that I'm going to talk about today in one particular program and, in some programs, we probably don't have much of the vision at all.

[See Slide 4] The first one that I would start with is what I had just mentioned before, and that is that high quality programs have established criteria regarding what teachers should know and be able to do, and these should be based on performance-based standards. We already have standards such as this. NCATE is the accrediting agency for teacher education. NCATE is currently in the process of creating performance-based standards for teacher education. INTASC -- I don't know if you're familiar with INTASC yet at this point, but INTASC is the Interstate Task force on Assessment and Support Consortium for new teachers. And INTASC not only has developed criteria for what teachers should know and be able to do but they're in the process of developing portfolio assistance so that you can go through and you can, you can use the materials they're coming up to, to determine if teachers have the knowledge and skills necessarily to be good teachers.

The reality we know, that elementary teachers frequently lack deep understanding of content, secondary teachers frequently lack the understanding of teaching and learning, and most teachers that are surveyed say they feel unprepared to meet the educational needs of diverse learners. Program expectations for teacher education in the past were usually described in terms of required courses rather than the demonstrated knowledge and skills. In other words, we focus on what we put into the system rather than what was coming out of the system. And even though we're developing performance-based accreditation standards currently, many schools of education choose not to go through this accreditation process. So that starts our first task for us.

[See Slide 5] A second major consideration is that high quality programs enhance teaching proficiency across time through a continuous series of developmentally appropriate yet rigorous courses and field experiences. What we know we have right now is that we have a collection oftentimes of disjointed courses and field experiences, what some people call a hodgepodge of courses and field experiences. And that we know if you look across our nation's colleges of education, what you see is considerable variation in terms of program requirements, the quantity, quality and sequence of those courses and field experiences.

Even when we talk about five-year programs versus fifth-year programs, there's a tremendous difference. Five-year programs are designed to be programs where for the first four years students are taking their content along with methods courses and field experiences, and then the fifth year they go out and are part of an internship for a year. A fifth-year program, even though it sounds very similar, is actually based on taking all the content in the first four years and then going out and getting all the education courses in one year. So those are very different programs.

Oftentimes what you see is a recommendation to increase the number of required courses. One of the recommendations, for example, is that elementary teachers should all have a minimum of three courses of mathematics, and a minimum of four courses in science. But I would say that it depends on how those courses are taught and it depends on what those courses are. At Kansas State, for example, we originally developed -- we had one course in math for elementary teachers. Everyone knew that that was ludicrous. We moved to having three classes that were specifically designed for elementary teachers and I think we were doing a much better job. Then our state, for example, recommended that all teachers needed a course in algebra. So we dropped one of the courses that we had specifically designed for elementary teachers and instead put in its place an algebra class. I would not say we have the same quality of understanding of mathematics in our teachers now as we had before. So simply saying that we're going to recommend more doesn't really solve the problem.

[See Slide 6] What we really need is we need to be modeling in our content, methods courses, and field experiences a wide variety of effective teaching and assessment strategies. In other words, we need to be practicing what we preach with our students. Instead, what we find in a lot of college courses is that we practice what we preach our students not to do. And that is that most introductory college courses, because they have to meet the demands of all different majors, all the different students that might be taking a particular course are basically lecture-based and cover a vast amount of information in a short time frame, few opportunities really to engage in discourse, scholarship, inquiry, active research and deep understanding. These are all the things that we say we want our future teachers to be able to do, but how can they do them when they've never had it modeled for them themselves?

And this is a particular challenge at the elementary level because most elementary teachers take only introductory courses. So all they are doing is accumulating all of this introductory knowledge where they haven't had the modeling that we would like to see them practice then in their own classrooms.

[See Slide 7] So, how can we move towards having the modeling that we need, how can we move towards having some of the -- some consensus about what it is that teachers should know and be able to do, and also a consensus on how we should teach that knowledge, those knowledge and skills to students is that we need collaboration. This is particularly important, this is to me one of the most important messages that we can get across. Currently most people are unaware, but future teachers may take up to two-thirds of their courses from colleges of arts and sciences. The last third of their preparation may be a combination of what's offered at the college of education, which would include both methods courses and field experiences. So once again they're going to be interacting with teachers.

At Kansas State University, for example, we have four field experiences that our students take, so they are out in the schools as much as they are up on campus. So what that means is we have a wide variety of people from different backgrounds, different organizations that are providing the preparation for our future teachers, and yet we don't come together, we don't collaborate, we don't talk about what is it that we could be doing together. What is the vision that we have for our students?

The different individuals who are providing all of the, the different programs, arts and sciences, the education and the field experiences need to be challenged and supported to collaborate. What I found at Kansas State is that our teachers from arts and sciences are very eager to collaborate, they are very interested in collaborating, they just haven't been challenged to do so and they haven't been given the opportunities. We need to provide support structures and we also need to look at new systems, for example, to provide time for teachers and faculty members to collaborate with one another.

We need -- we've used the process at Kansas State, which is planning teams, where we get -- we have planning teams where we'll have, let's say, mathematicians from arts and sciences, with math educators, elementary education and secondary education, and math teachers from the elementary schools and the high schools. They get together, they look at standards, they talk with one another and they decide not only what the content is that should be covered, but also what are the instructional strategies that should be modeled for those students. But that takes time. It takes teachers time, it takes faculty time.

It also takes other support mechanisms. For example, our current promotion, tenure and merit system really does not support faculty from arts and sciences being involved in education, so we also need to look at that issue.

[See Slide 8] Sometimes people ask me if there was one characteristic that teachers had that you thought would really pull them through their teaching career, what would it be? I honestly believe it's this professional vision of teacher as reflective decision-maker. Teachers need to be able to engage in analysis of classroom and school teaching. They need to be able to look at their own teaching, they need to be able to look at the teaching that is occurring in their school. They need to be able to analyze it for its strengths and weaknesses. They need to learn to build on those strengths and to do things differently to limit the weaknesses.

They also need to be able to develop improvement plans, which might mean developing new curriculum, instructional approaches, assessment strategies. They need to be able to conduct classroom-based research to determine the effectiveness of those improvement plans. If children are not improving in their performance then the plans ought to be modified. And teachers then should become informed decision-makers using all of this evidence that they've gained as to the effectiveness of a new strategy or a new curriculum.

What this does is it puts the ownership back on teachers. I've seen more growth in teachers who have engaged in classroom-based research in terms of them becoming advocates themselves for a new teaching strategy or a new curriculum than anything that I've ever tried before. We can spend years and years working with teachers, talking to them about how important it is to do a particular strategy or to use a particular curriculum, but it's only when they actually start analyzing it in their own classroom that they take the ownership to really start making the changes and find what works the best for them.

The reality, however, is that many people feel that this vision of teachers is inappropriate for novices and that it should be delayed until later in a teacher's career. On the other hand, we know that the preparation that's provided later in their career is oftentimes one-shot staff development, which does not provide for this level of professionalism that we're talking about. So two things that I think need to be done here. One is, I think we need to raise our expectations. Just like we talk about children rising up to our expectations, teachers do too. I think that we can have higher expectations for our teachers. But the second thing is that we need to link undergraduate teacher preparation with continuing professional development of teachers. Assuming that whatever we start in the undergraduate programs must be continued in, once the teachers start practicing.

[See Slide 9] And that vision of professional teacher also is closely linked to K-12 school improvement. We have looked at these fields as separate entities. In service teacher preparation is different from pre-service teacher preparation. They're often conducted by different people and again, those folks are not coming together and collaborating on what should be happening so that you don't see a smooth continuum. Colleges of Education are generally responsible for preparing future teachers and the school districts then assume responsibility for providing the professional development once the teacher is hired.

What we need to see is more of a continuum between these two experiences. What you -- it's not going to do any good to change the way we prepare future teachers if we then send them out into schools that are continuing to teach the way we've always taught. And the reverse of that is not going to help either. If we look at what's going on in schools and try to improve the K-12 school system, that's not going to be supported if we continue to prepare teachers the way we've always prepared them. So you need what John Goodlatte has referred to as simultaneous renewal. You need to be looking at the entire K-16 system together.

Which once again brings us back to the importance of collaboration between all individuals who are preparing teachers, and also to the need to really be able to identify what all teachers should know and be able to do. As a part of that, I also believe that programs, teacher education programs, should use evidence of teacher and student learning to assess their program effectiveness and to plan modifications. Currently many teacher education programs don't really think about their effectiveness in terms of what their students can do or the teaching that their students can demonstrate once they're out in schools. And I think we need to change that system. Again, NCATE, INTASC, in those standards for teachers have very clearly linked student performance to teacher performance and to accreditation for colleges.

[See Slide 11] Okay, so what are some of the changes that we need to accomplish this? I'm not going to go through all the changes that are listed on here. I actually wrote them out so that you could refer to them later in more detail if you were interested. I'm just going to focus on the bold headings. We need continuing professional development of teachers, which is a collaborative process, to be identified as a national priority. Many, many commissions and reports have advocated this, but I believe that this Commission is going to have a lot of emphasis, a lot of perhaps maybe more publicity that some of the other reports have had. I would strongly encourage you to advocate for this. I would strongly encourage you, the report as it exists right now and the recommendations focus very much on the need to change goals for teachers to assume, to have teachers assume new roles and responsibilities. But I would say that we need to go further than that. I would say that we need to reexamine roles and responsibilities for all educators, which would include faculty from the colleges of arts and sciences, faculty from the college of education. It would include faculty from two-year colleges just as much as faculty from four-year colleges. Most teachers transfer course work from community colleges. If we're only focusing on four-year colleges, then again we're not providing the same kind of preparation that we're talking about.

We also, as I've mentioned several times, need to develop a national consensus on what it is that teachers should know and be able to do. That national consensus should then be used for accreditation standards for colleges of education and also for certification standards for teachers, and we must insist that all colleges are accredited and all teachers are certified.

[See Slide 12] The second major point that I'd like to make is that we need to then advocate for and provide support mechanisms for this collaboration and simultaneous reform to occur. One of the things that I see a way to do this is that, again, in the report there is a lot of mention of consortiums between state departments, colleges, school districts. There's also the mention of the fellows program. There's also the mention of leadership academies. I would encourage you to take what we know about effective pre-service programs and use that as selection criteria for the various programs that have been identified. Also use it as development for those programs.

[See Slide 13] The same thing could be said about this last one for local, state, and federal standards. Policies and incentives must promote a professional vision of teaching to recruit and retain quality teachers. This one is already well represented, I believe, in the recommendations that you have. Once again, I would say that these various recommendations could be used, however, to select and develop the programs which you've identified in your recommendations.

One additional thing that I would point to is that most of the reform recommendations right now are talking about year-long induction program and three years of mentoring. One of the things that I have advocated for here today is that we blend pre-service and in service, that we more tightly connect them. One of the recommendations I would give to you is that in the report it seems that a more traditional perspective has been taken where those programs have been disconnected from one another. So you have a program for consortium, you have a program for leadership academies, you have a program for the Glenn fellows.

What I would suggest is that you link those programs together so that you have that vision of K-16 improvement. I would also recommend that if you're going to be looking at a one-year program for the Glenn fellows, we know that a lot of what has already been done in terms of alternative certification programs has not been terribly effective. I believe that you start by again having a clear definition of what teachers should know and be able to do, that if you can develop a one-year program that can accomplish that, that's great. But you need to have your vision out there in front of you.

I also believe you're going to have more success if you then connect those Glenn fellows to some sort of mentoring system. Your recommendations call for mentoring, but it calls for mentoring coming from the school district. Again, I think that to be able to connect those two, what you would do is you would have the Glenn fellows remain connected to the institutions where they did their one-year program for their mentoring so that you can see that continuous flow of improvement.

Thank you. Any questions?

SENATOR GLENN: Thank you. We'll take questions later, after we have the second presenter here. And Susan Sclafani, if you're ready to go, we'll have your presentation now.

[Part 2: Sclafani's Interview]