American Teacher
February 1998

Enmeshed in the issue of teacher quality is the question of how teachers are prepared for the classroom. Many new teachers report feeling lost at sea in their first year of teaching, unprepared both for the classroom management tasks before them and for the range of needs diverse student populations present.

The gap between what teachers, parents, students and business leaders want and expect from public education and what teacher educators are preparing their graduates for was highlighted in a Public Agenda report released last fall, "Different Drummers: How Teachers of Teachers View Public Education." While teachers and consumers of education expect safe, orderly schools that graduate students grounded in the basic skills, good work habits and strong values of honesty and respect, teacher educators place a low priority on those expectations. Instead, the professors rate as absolutely essential the importance of lifelong learning, encouraging active learning and having high expectations of all students. That disconnect, notes AFT president Sandra Feldman, is disturbing, but not surprising. "We've got a lot of work to do to bridge that gap."

Joan Baratz-Snowden, AFT's deputy director of educational issues who focuses on teacher quality issues, has been working with others to identify exemplary teacher education programs. "What we look for," she says, "are a concentration on content, a considerable clinical component [a minimum of 32 weeks of practice], a marriage of the arts and sciences, concern for ongoing professional development and good partnerships with local school districts."

Linda Darling-Hammond of Columbia University's Teachers College is heading up a project that has identified seven outstanding teacher education programs that she and others are writing up as case studies to be published and circulated. The programs they focus on are at Alverno College, the University of Virginia, UC-Berkeley, Bank Street College of Education, Michigan State, the University of Southern Maine and Trinity University in Texas. They range from free-standing programs to small, four-year liberal arts college-based ones to those at research universities.

All the programs are intense and rigorous, reports Julie Koppich, one of the authors of United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society and who wrote up the Trinity program case study. In addition, she says, "all required both an academic major and intensive study in how children learn. All had lots of field experience and used experienced teachers as mentors and/or adjunct faculty."

Trinity's program, which is heavily involved in the local San Antonio school district, is unique for how it handles the need to blend current research on teaching and learning with what goes on in schools. The program created five tenure-track clinical positions that require the professors to spend half their time in the schools, half in the university. With the university president's blessing, they redefined the criteria for tenure so that the young faculty can do research, writing and publishing using source material from their work in the schools.

"All these programs focus intensely on teacher quality, not just on cranking out teachers to be certified," says Koppich.

--Mike Rose