Teacher Prep for the Digital Age

There is a lot of talk about
improving teacher education in America. But much of the policy talk of late,
especially in Washington, DC, would—at best—advance changes reflective of the
late 20th century, not 2013.

Granted, there is more that
can, and must, be done to evaluate teacher preparation, including
the efforts of the National Science Foundation to devise a new system to ensure new teaching
recruits are ready to teach in high-needs schools. But teachers must be able do far more than manage a
classroom of diverse learners, implement research-based literacy and numeracy
tools, and teach to standardized tests designed decades ago.

Reading reform reports, like
the ones produced of late by the National Council for Teacher
Quality (no relation to our CTQ), one might think that all teachers must
only master 20th-century imperatives, but if we are going to create the profession
that students deserve, then teacher preparation needs to transcend the debates
of today.

I am proud that a team of 17 classroom
experts, all part of the growing CTQ virtual community, has developed a
framework for thinking and acting on Teacher Prep 2.0, with a hard look toward
3.0 (that will be fueled by the Semantic Web). I have incorporated a number of
their ideas my presentation on Perspectives
on the Future of Teacher Preparation in the Digital Age today at the
Alliance for Excellent Education. (The webinar will be archived as a video—check the Alliance’s website
later this week.)

These classroom experts
believe it is time to get serious about fusing higher education and school
district resources, coupled with serious federal incentive for recruiting,
preparing, and retain teachers.  If
targeted recruits were trained for hybrid teaching and leadership roles, with
responsibility to work with colleagues in redesigned schools, then a variety of
pathways into the profession could be embraced.

The vast majority of future
teachers would be trained in cohort-based residencies, skilled in
interdisciplinary teaching (think Common Core), and would know how to teach
students and learn from colleagues in virtual networks. Performance
assessments, not higher education seat time nor unstable valued-added test
score results, would determine who was ready to teach what, when, and to whom.

But the team also believes it
is time, especially for our most prestigious universities and research centers,
to begin preparing a bold brand of teacher—the learning architect who focuses
on personalized curricular experiences for students. Teachers become
information integrators and surgical learning brokers—and teacherpreneurs who
incubate and execute innovations. Specific teacherpreneur roles could include virtual
PLC organizer, edugame developer, and boundary spanner for policy and
pedagogical transformations.

These 17 pedagogical
powerhouses recognize that excellent teacher education can be found today, even
though it might not be recognized by the policy punditry of Washington,
DC.  For example:

• Abilene Christian University in Texas focuses on
  performance assessments and peer-to-peer observations as teacher education
  professors get deeply involved in providing serious feedback on lesson design
  and instruction.
• West Virginia University prepared
  students in cohorts, where they learn to work collaboratively as they
  experience rural, urban, international, and virtual settings. 
• Stanford
  University ensures its graduates develop deep knowledge of research on teaching
  diverse students, including second language learners, as well as 21^st-century
  student assessments, much in the same way all new teachers are prepared in
  top-performing nations like Singapore and Finland.
• The
  American Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) is partnering with Stanford in
  creating the Teacher Performance
  Assessment (edTPA), designed to measure the readiness of teacher candidates. The
  edTPA looks like an assessment from the National Board for Professional
  Teaching Standards, but is meant for novices as they engage in supervised clinical
  settings or internships. (And six states are already planning to adopt edTPA as
  part of its licensure requirements: Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Tennessee,
  Washington, and Wisconsin.)

These schools are harbingers of the
future—and hope for transforming the teacher education system into one students
deserve.

So it is time to think about cultivating
teacher leaders who build and score new
assessment tools tied to internationally benchmarked standards, integrating
digital media into a more relevant curriculum for constantly wired students,
and partnering with community organizations. It is time to think about
preparing teacherpreneurs who blur the lines of distinction between those who
teach in schools and those lead them.

Stay tuned for the upcoming
release of the teacher team’s project, TEACHING
2030: Leveraging Teacher Preparation 2.0. We look forward to sharing it
with you.