What We Know: Teacher Preparation

As states, districts and schools work toward ensuring “highly qualified” teachers, who meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind and are truly high quality educators, the significance of teacher education has never been greater. Unfortunately, there have been few studies examining the effectiveness of teacher preparation, let alone comparing different models of preparation.

Two reports released in 2005, summarizing the research on teacher education, offer considerable insight into the importance of preparation for teaching. The first report from the National Academy of Education (NAE), Preparing Teachers for a Changing World and A Good Teacher in Every Classroom, draws on a wide range of studies related to how humans learn, teaching effectiveness, and teacher education. The NAE report suggests that both traditional teacher education and alternative route programs should ensure that its graduates:

• Know their subjects well and how to teach them to students;
• Understand how children learn and develop;
• Understand their own language and culture and know how to learn about other cultures;
• Know how to develop a curriculum and learning activities that connect what they know about their students to what the students need to learn;
• Know how to teach specific subject matter in ways that are accessible to a diverse range of students;
• Know how to develop and use assessments that measure learning standards and how to use the results to plan teaching that addresses student learning needs;
• Know how to create and manage a respectful, purposeful classroom;
• Are able to identify and plan for children’s learning needs;
• Are able to develop interventions, track changes, and revise their teaching strategies as necessary; and
• Are able to work with parents and their colleagues to create a common set of expectations and collective supports for students’ learning.

Studying Teacher Education, a report from the American Education Research Association (AERA) Panel on Teacher Education, synthesizes evidence of the impact of teacher education and pre-service education on K-12 students’ test scores, teacher retention rates, administrator perceptions of a teacher’s performance, or other measures of children’s social and emotional learning. Their findings include:

• Collaborative programs between university teacher preparation programs and school districts positively affect both teacher and student learning;
• Research does not indicate that certain types of programs are superior to others (e.g. 4-year vs. 5-year, traditional vs. alternative). Instead, it suggests that specific program components more effectively enhance teacher quality and student achievement;
• Teacher education programs that include work in the school and community, in addition to certain coursework, may increase teachers’ effectiveness teaching culturally diverse students; and
• Evidence suggests that certification in the field, as opposed to a just a college major, is an important indicator of the effectiveness of teachers of mathematics. Research is still needed on the relationship of course requirements and teacher effectiveness in other subject areas.

The AERA panel stresses that more research is needed to understand how certain teaching strategies or policies pertaining to student testing affect student achievement. There is also a need for more research on preparing teachers for working with culturally diverse learners and students with disabilities.