You Can't Teach What You Don't Know: Examining and Improving Teacher Preparation

Abstract

Teachers have a major impact on the lives of children, however there is no general agreement about what constitutes a great teacher or how to prepare one. With more preparation programs being created each year, this is a crucial time for exploring how to best prepare teachers for the classroom. This thesis examines the research on teacher preparation in light of six different ways to define and measure effectiveness, concluding that research tends to emphasize teachers’ attitudes and student cognition (achievement) instead of looking at teachers’ behavior in the classroom or student motivation. It then uses this research to enumerate the best practices as suggested by the literature. The final section makes suggestions for further research and highlights ideas from psychology that could be useful in overcoming the challenge of providing every child a highly effective teacher. EXAMINING AND IMPROVING TEACHER PREPARATION 4 You Can’t Teach What You Don’t Know: Examining and Improving Teacher Preparation The 1,200 plus teacher preparation programs across the United States differ widely in program structure and quality (Ingersoll et al., 2007). At best, teacher education equips educators with the skills they need to be effective and continue developing as professionals throughout their career. At worst, teacher education provides an abundance of seemingly irrelevant knowledge, several wasted years, and a smattering of experiences that create an uninformed and precarious foundation for practice. With the number of preparation programs increasing each year (Ingersoll et al., 2007), this is a crucial time for research focusing on the unsolved problem of how to adequately train tomorrow’s teachers. Increased recognition of the importance of education combined with the Federal mandate given in No Child Left Behind and the acknowledgement that effective teachers have lasting impact on their students highlight the alarming lack of consensus about what makes a good teacher and how to create one. Research shows that students with an effective teacher can progress as much as two grade levels in one year while those with an ineffective teacher progress half a grade level or less on tests of academic achievement (Ripley, 2010). This effect is amplified by the fact that many low-income students fall further behind each year as their school environments fail to foster and retain the skills of highly effective teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2007). Ensuring that every classroom is staffed by a highly competent teacher EXAMINING AND IMPROVING TEACHER PREPARATION 5 requires that teacher preparation programs review the work they are doing, examining the impact of current preparation practices on teacher effectiveness. Central to the effectiveness of teacher preparation is an understanding of how the outcomes of preparation are being measured. The existing research employs a variety of outcome measures to gauge the effectiveness of teacher preparation, indicating that preparation can have a positive impact on teacher performance (Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Heilig 2005; Boyd, Grossman, Lankford, Loeb & Wyckoff, 2008). Despite these findings, teacher education programs rarely reflect the best practices cited in the literature. This thesis is divided into four sections. The first section focuses on dissecting the way teacher effectiveness is being measured in the literature in order to give a better picture of the way outcomes are being valued in teacher education. The second section of the thesis aims to examine existing research on teacher preparation in order to illuminate which practices in teacher preparation are supported by empirical evidence and which are not. The third section enumerates the best practices suggested by the research. The final section makes suggestions for further research and highlights ideas from psychology that are not central in discussions about teacher preparation but that, if incorporated into preparation programs, provide potential solutions to some of the current shortcomings of teacher education. EXAMINING AND IMPROVING TEACHER PREPARATION 6 Part 1: Measuring Effectiveness Any attempt to categorize teachers’ effectiveness must have a procedure for evaluating their work. Few people would believe the claim that a specific teacher is effective without proof. The same is true on a large scale; defining what it means to be an effective teacher requires a mechanism for determining who meets those qualifications. While measurement is important for specifying who is an effective teacher, it is also particularly important for researchers and teachers who are working to understand the effects of different components of teacher preparation or specific instructional techniques. When practices are implemented in education, those practices need to be evaluated to determine how beneficial they are in the classroom. Measurement is essential for understanding the consequences of teachers’ actions because it provides a way of assessing whether the practices in use are actually having the intended effects. This is particularly necessary when looking for practices that can be implemented on a large scale, as teacher preparation research often aims to do. Standard methods of measurement also provide a means through which different practices can be compared to determine which is more effective. Outcome Measures There are six common ways that the outcomes of education (and specifically teacher education) are operationalized in the literature: (i) teacher affect, (ii) teacher behavior, (iii) teacher cognition, (iv) student affect, (v) student behavior, and (vi) EXAMINING AND IMPROVING TEACHER PREPARATION 7 student cognition. Each approach includes a broad range of outcomes and can be measured in a variety of ways. These six methods have been used to determine the effects of different components of teacher preparation. This thesis looks at six of the most frequently researched aspects of teacher preparation: (i) mentors, (ii) cohorts, (iii) content knowledge, (iv) linking theory and practice, (v) challenging assumptions, and (vi) reflective practice. Each of these research areas is analyzed to determine what evidence of their effectiveness exists and the methods that were used to gather this evidence. 62 studies looking at these components of teacher preparation were categorized by the outcomes the researchers evaluated in the study. The distribution of outcome measured used is shown in Table 1 and Table 2. Table 1 contains the results for teacher affect, behavior and cognition and Table 2 includes the results for student affect, behavior and cognition.