Seasoned for success
How improved teacher education gives new recruits
a head start in the classroom

Cheryl Wiest walked through the doors of Jefferson Township (N.J.) High School last January with a serious case of "butterflies," something that every new teacher feels on the first day. This alumna of Montclair State University also brought something else to her biology classroom that morning--the type of training and preparation that most new teachers only dream of.

The rookie teacher had just graduated from the university's rigorous five-year teacher education program. It provided a heavy dose of classroom experience for MSU undergraduates that went well beyond the typical 10-week stint in student teaching that many schools of education still rely on. Even before beginning her student teaching assignment in the fall of her final year, Wiest had observed almost 80 hours of expert teaching at nearby Paramus Professional Development High School. And, having completed 65 credit hours in biology at MSU meant that the academic terrain was familiar ground to Wiest.

Wiest says both the heavy clinical exposure and the strong academic program at MSU helped make the transition into teaching much smoother. "I didn't feel nearly as lost. I knew where things were in the school [and] the different policies schools have about things like discipline and referrals."

The strong academic component of her college education also was crucial, stresses Wiest. "I can't imagine how I would have been feeling if I hadn't had the biology experiences I had in college."

Applied learning

Unfortunately, Wiest's experiences are still the exception rather than the rule in teacher education today, which has become a front-burner issue across the nation. Faced with surging student enrollments, large numbers of teachers on the verge of retirement, and a high percentage of teachers who quit the profession after just a few years, the nation will need to hire an estimated 250,000 new teachers each year of this decade. And, with states and districts requiring students to meet higher standards of academic achievement, the challenge is not merely to put warm bodies in front of the class but, rather, educators who possess a deep understanding of subject matter and how to teach it effectively.

This is a challenge that crosses constituency lines in the AFT. For more than a year, a task force of K-12 and higher education leaders has studied the issues involved in teacher education; the group's observations and recommendations have shaped a resolution that delegates to the AFT's national convention will consider in July. A key message contained in the proposal is that any solution to the teacher shortage crisis that seeks to weaken professional schools that educate teachers--either through deregulation or the elimination of teacher training--is no solution at all. "The best way to bring an adequate supply of well-trained teachers into the classroom is not by avoiding collegiate teacher education but rather by strengthening it--by bringing higher quality, greater resources and much more coherence to the way higher education screens and prepares teacher candidates today," states the proposal.

It goes on to recommend improvements in teacher education, many of which already can be found in some of today's exemplary teacher education programs. Among the steps the resolution suggests taking:

• Education and arts and science faculty should establish core courses in the liberal arts and sciences that college freshmen and sophomores should take for admission to a teacher education program; the courses should provide broad exposure and a solid foundation in subjects and information relevant to K-12 student standards.
• Schools of education should phase in higher entrance standards for their programs, ultimately requiring a 3.0 minimum grade-point average at the end of the sophomore year.
• An academic major, in addition to pedagogical studies and general liberal arts coursework, should be required for teacher candidates at all levels--elementary, middle and high school.
• Schools must provide a stronger clinical experience for teacher preparation that encourages meaningful links among cooperating classroom teachers, education faculty and others who serve as liaisons between the campus and K-12 classroom.
• Teacher preparation should be organized, at a minimum, as a five-year process. If the current university program is four years, it should be lengthened to include a year-long internship and mentoring program for new teachers.

Many of these pieces are already in place in strong teacher education programs, such as the Cincinnati Initiative for Teacher Education (CITE). A collaboration among the University of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Public School District and the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers, CITE was created more than 10 years ago. It combines many of the elements widely recognized as essential for producing effective teachers--and then some. The five-year program has a revamped curriculum that requires a high GPA (3.2) and an academic major for admission. The fifth year is an extended clinical component, replacing the average 10-week field experience with a year-long internship.

But what makes the CITE program a real standout has been the involvement and commitment of the district and union from the start. This has created what CFT president and AFT vice president Tom Mooney describes as a bold design from whole cloth, instead of piecemeal reforms that are difficult to support.

CFT has negotiated a contract that sets out a collaboration with the university to establish professional development schools to train new teachers. Today, Cincinnati has nine professional practice schools (PPS), a career ladder that fosters and rewards highly trained master teachers and mentors, and a system for paying teacher interns within the bargaining unit so that the costs of the fifth year of training for the teacher candidates won't be prohibitive.

Sue Taylor is a professional practice school coordinator at the Hughes Center, a magnet high school located across the street from the University of Cincinnati. It is an inner-city school that poses all the challenges a young teacher might encounter in a first year of teaching. It was the first professional practice school in the city and has been taking interns for the past six years.

Taylor says the city and her school have benefited from the CITE program in several ways. The new teachers are impeccably trained. The questions they raise, combined with the supervision mentor teachers provide, lend a reflective atmosphere to the school. The PDS team, including the interns, meets once a week to discuss problems, and "the beautiful aspect of that is that everybody learns from the discussion, even the experienced teachers who are exposed to new ways of doing things," says Taylor.

Taylor adds that the university's heightened academic standards for prospective teachers ensure a high-caliber intern. Along with a minimum 3.2 GPA and a required major that gives them expertise in subject content, the interns also have 110 hours of field experience they have acquired in their fourth year--experience that lays the groundwork for a meaningful internship. The university's teacher education program also is aligned with the standards that teachers' students are expected to reach.

Building the CITE program "has been a reality check for me and my colleagues," says Ted Fowler, assistant division head of CITE and a science education professor in the UC School of Education. Because the faculty are attached, long-term, to teams in the schools, they "certainly get a sense of what is going on in the schools right now. The curriculum is better linked to standards in the schools than it was in the past."

On the other hand, Fowler and Taylor both note, the program is intense enough to cause some fatigue. While the lead mentor gets release time to be free to observe and supervise interns, the classroom teachers have to work this into their normal day. College professors, who teach in the afternoon and at night, don't always have a compatible schedule for sitting down with teachers. And the burden on the professors to do research and create new knowledge doesn't go away, Fowler notes. "It leaves us caught in the middle, run ragged," he says.

Everyone agrees that the UC program is producing a different breed of teacher. "This is my 21st year of teaching," says Taylor. "Thank God people were willing to listen to me in my first year and help me through. I was totally unprepared. That is not true of any of our interns."

Adds Mooney, "Our biggest problem is not having our interns stolen by the suburban districts."

Mooney, who served on the AFT teacher education task force, says that the Cincinnati experience shows the value of working to achieve all of the task force's recommendations. "I can't see that we've got it 100 percent right," he says, "but I don't know of anyone else who is closer."

Giving back, getting back

Along with its rigors, many veteran teachers and higher education faculty speak of the personal rewards of participating in a strong teacher induction program.

John Barell, a professor of curriculum and teaching who works closely with students at New Jersey's Montclair State University professional development school at Paramus, says the experience has been one of the most rewarding challenges of his career. It's work he and other tenured faculty are encouraged to pursue, thanks to a contract negotiated by the Montclair State University Federation of Teachers/AFT. The agreement offers faculty a chance to reduce the number of on-campus courses they teach to spend more time working in the school with students and teachers.

"I worked myself out of teaching education courses at the university [when] I realized that the most authentic place to be is with teachers who are doing these types of things" in the clinical training setting, says Barell. "It's a combination of the practical realities they face day by day and the conceptual frameworks" of teaching.

Barell also designed a pilot program at Paramus that allows cohorts of student teachers to stay together for three semesters. Wiest says she learned the value of collegiality--the human dimension of schools--through this extended interdisciplinary partnership, where students brainstorm across subject areas and critique each others' work under the guidance of mentor teachers and MSU faculty. The cohort approach "results in a very strong support group" for new teachers, explains Barell.

MSU's clinical training is anchored by a network of cooperating teachers in surrounding public school districts who receive extensive training and a stipend; members of this network are designated as clinical faculty at the college. At Paramus, "the quality of the faculty, and their willingness to extend themselves" for students, is making a big difference in the preparation of new teachers, says Barell.

That view is also shared by faculty at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, another nationally acclaimed model of teacher education (for a profile of Trinity's program, see the Summer 1999 issue of American Educator magazine). "We couldn't run the program without the commitment and the talent of the people in the schools," says Bruce Frazee, a professor of education at Trinity and a clinical professor at the university's K-12 partner schools.

Like MSU and Cincinnati University, K-12 teachers working as mentors in the Trinity program are considered clinical faculty and have great sway in shaping the program, along with ample training and professional development opportunities. It was school-based clinical staff, for example, who played a leading role in developing guidelines for a new handbook for teacher-mentors in the program. "We're constantly being steered by the teachers, who really know a lot about teaching and should be a link in the preparation of teachers," says Frazee. "I don't know what we'd do without them."

A true partnership

"It's not just lip service," says Tricia Shaughnessy, a second-grade teacher and clinical faculty member at Hawthorne Elementary in San Antonio. "They really do want it to be a partnership among the university, the teachers and the district," says Shaughnessy, a member of the Bexar County Federation of Teachers/AFT. "And they're constantly asking me, a 'lowly teacher,' what my ideas are for teaching their students better."

Students in the five-year program will attend three practicums, each totaling 36 hours of observation and practice, followed by a one-year internship in which the student assumes all the duties of a first-year teacher under the close supervision of outstanding K-12 mentor teachers.

"In the beginning, they don't have a big bag of tricks in their repertoire," Shaughnessy says of the Trinity students, so the emphasis is on observing veteran teachers in action. In the final internship year, however, "it's a very different picture. You're basically a first-year teacher, beginning to end." Hawthorne Elementary also is a leader in implementing the Core Knowledge curriculum, which is the basis of schoolwide improvement efforts for many schools in the district, notes AFT member Janie Reyes, a fifth-grade teacher who is also a bilingual education mentor for Trinity student` Trinity graduates are in "high demand in other schools because they know the Core Knowledge program--they see it in action every day," Reyes says. The college students' extensive exposure to all aspects of school life--from Core Knowledge to parent conferences to preparing, administering and analyzing results of high-stakes standardized tests required in Texas--increases their odds of staying in the field, Reyes says.

Trinity's emphasis on academics and on discipline-specific courework is another key to success, says mentor Delores J. Kiris, a fifth-grade teacher at Hawthorne and AFT member. "When I went through college, I felt like I had a two-year college education and two years of methodology. I felt kind of unprepared to be in the classroom," says Kiris, who worked hard through in-service professional development and graduate coursework to fill in what she saw as gaps in her preparation.

Working as mentor is difficult but rewarding for the teacher as well as the student, she says. "It gives teachers the chance to see new things happening in a university education program without leaving the classroom." Kiris also thinks that the student-mentor relationship is a great working experience, pairing the unique, questioning perspective of individuals just entering the field with veterans who can put a seasoned slant on daily classroom life.

American Federation of Teachers, AFL•CIO - 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW - Washington, DC 20001