Tomorrow's Teachers: Do They Engage in the ‘Right Things’ during College?

Abstract

Teacher education programs are often accused of lacking intellectual rigor and failing to cultivate the competencies their graduates will need. Using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, Mr. Carini and Mr. Kuh find that the educational experiences of future teachers compare favorably with those of other students in college. However, these positive experiences do not necessarily stem from teacher education programs. SOONER OR LATER, discussions of schooling turn to teacher quality. Both educational leaders and the general public agree that high-quality teachers are key to boosting student achievement.1 Why might we not have the high-quality teachers we need? Two reasons dominate the debate. The first is self-selection -- the academic ability of those who choose to teach is thought to be cut (or more) below that of peers headed to other vocations. Second, teacher preparation programs supposedly lack intellectual rigor and don't cultivate certain critical skills and competencies in their students. Though the evidence supporting these claims is far from conclusive,2 universities and policy makers seem determined to upgrade teacher quality. One popular approach is to raise the bar for entry into teacher preparation programs by requiring higher minimum college grades or higher scores on entrance exams. This strategy recalls the specious criteria used in many annual rankings of colleges and universities in which higher scores on such input measures as entrance tests and more resources for faculty salaries or in an endowment yield higher quality rankings for the university. The public remains mesmerized by such ranking schemes, despite decades of research on college-level learning that point to very different conclusion. Indeed, studies show that what matters far more to learning and host of other desired outcomes during college is what students do with their time and how they use the institution's educational resources, not the test scores they bring to college or the resources school has. Equally important, scores on college entrance tests and even such outcome measures as the Praxis I and II exams don't tell us what we should focus on to enhance teacher preparation, because it isn't clear which institutional policies or practices affect the outcomes of interest. Looking Behind Test Scores and Outcomes The best predictor of learning and personal development for college students is the amount of time and energy they expend on educationally fruitful activities.3 For example, the more students study or practice, the more they learn or the better they become at something. How can we find out whether students are doing these and other productive activities during college? Process indicators are one potentially instructive source of information. These are measures that represent effective educational practices -- student and institutional behaviors that theory and research show are empirically linked to desired outcomes.4 The argument goes like this: future teachers who are challenged more academically during college or who have considerable firsthand experience in educationally meaningful pursuits, such as active and collaborative learning or classes that demand the use of higher-order thinking skills, will tend to be more effective teachers after college because they will learn more during college and will be well positioned to use similar strategies in their own teaching.5 Consider service learning, which is linked to host of desirable outcomes.6 If we think of service learning as a teaching strategy that connects community service with the curriculum,7 it stands to reason that teachers who've had this experience during college will be better prepared to use this and allied instructional strategies in their own classrooms when they begin teaching. If teacher education programs had valid, reliable process indicators, then faculty members and others could diagnose in which areas prospective teachers were underperforming relative to established standards or compared with their peers in other fields. …