NAEd Committee on Teacher Education: View list of committee members

At some point in their development, all professions have achieved consensus about the key elements of a professional education curriculum; the building blocks of preparation for all entrants into the occupation. Over the last two decades, the teaching profession has begun to codify the knowledge base for professional practice and standards for the work of practitioners. Strides have been made in our understanding of the teaching practices that support powerful learning. Over the last three years, the National Academy of Education (NAEd), through its Committee on Teacher Education (CTE), has analyzed what the field has learned about effective teacher preparation to support the learning of students. In 2005, the NAEd released the findings from this study through the publication of three volumes, and through a series of dissemination activities targeting teacher preparation and education policy organizations.

Project history and description:

In 2000, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (now the Office of Innovation and Improvement) in the U.S. Department of Education awarded $838,161 to NAEd for support of the CTE. The Office of Innovation and Improvement approved extending the project beyond the original 2001-2002 timeframe, with final extension of the project through February 27, 2004. In 2003, the Ford Foundation awarded $300,000 to the NAEd to complete the work of the CTE, and to promote dissemination activities to be carried out through December 31, 2005.

In launching the CTE project, NAEd sought to achieve the following goals.

The NAEd CTE was formed in 2001 as a twenty-seven-member team chaired by John Bransford (University of Washington-Seattle) and Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford University). The committee was comprised of researchers, teacher educators, and K-12 teachers. A ten-member reading subcommittee, chaired by Catherine Snow (Harvard University), met separately over the same period. In addition to the two committees that worked concurrently, a group of cooperating university liaisons met to discuss and bring the committee’s thoughts back to faculty at their institutions for additional feedback.

In its initial meetings, the committee articulated the goals for its work, established a work plan, and developed a conceptual framework that helped shape the committee’s recommendations. Committee members agreed on three overarching domains:

Committee members then divided by interest and expertise into subcommittees within these domains to complete their work. The committee also examined the following types of research evidence to support its recommendations: 1) research on learning, development, language acquisition, and social contexts, 2) research on how learning conditions and teaching practices influence learning, 3) research on how teacher learning affects teaching practices and student outcomes, and 4) research on how teachers learn successful practices. Although these comprise distinctive lines of inquiry, they build on each other conceptually and the committee believed that they all should inform teacher education practices.

Key Accomplishments

Publications:

After a rigorous review process involving education leaders and NAEd board oversight, three volumes resulting from the work of the NAEd Committee on Teacher Education have been published in 2005:

These publications represent the considered judgments of leading scholars in the field of education. The NAEd also disseminated the committee’s findings through organized briefing events and other targeted outreach activities to relevant teacher education and policy maker audiences.

The first volume: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able To Do was released in February 2005, in conjunction with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education’s (AACTE) annual conference. Sales of this book have included not only individual copies and copies purchased for course adoptions, but copies purchased by members of schools/departments of education study groups who are using the book to reflect on their current teacher education practices.

Written for teacher educators, school system leaders, teachers, staff development professionals, researchers, and educational policymakers, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World outlines the foundational knowledge necessary for teaching, and discusses how to effectively implement that knowledge within the classroom. Specifically, the volume recommends that teachers should have a basic conceptual understanding of how people learn and develop, especially within a social context, as well as strong subject matter knowledge. Teachers must also understand how children acquire and use language, which is the currency of education. In addition, teachers should receive advanced training classroom management, technology use, student assessment, and curriculum development that attends to both classroom and individual students’ needs.

A Good Teacher in Every Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers Our Children Deserve is a policy volume that emerged out of the first book. It was not reviewed and revised in the same way as the other two volumes, since it draws on material included in Preparing Teachers for a Changing World. The book summarizes the committee’s ideas about a foundational curriculum for teacher education and outlines specific policy recommendations to support the development and implementation of such preparation for teachers.

The volume further examines the core concepts and central pedagogies that should be at the heart of any teacher education program, and recommends the policy changes that are needed to ensure that all teachers gain access to this knowledge. The report also hold key recommendations for the structure of pre-service and in-service teacher education, and calls for enhanced funding and teacher recruitment efforts to develop high quality programs in high need areas. In addition, the report advocates for the need to strengthen accountability systems and outcomes measures for teacher education programs.

Working separately, but on a parallel track, members of the reading subcommittee met to examine the growing body of information about effective instructional practices in reading and teacher education. In October 2005, this subcommittee released CTE’s third volume: Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading. This work presents essential recommendations for the development, acquisition, and teaching of language and literacy skills that teachers need to master and use.

Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading warns that educators must also attend to adolescent as well as early childhood literacy given that the number of middle and secondary students needing intensive work in reading is staggering. Despite this need, however, an alarming number of teachers lack grounding in the fundamentals of theory and practice of reading and literacy. Such knowledge has not typically been part of pre-service teacher education programs, especially those preparing middle and secondary school teachers, and this knowledge base is insufficiently addressed in professional development for experienced teachers.

If teachers are to meet this challenge, they must have knowledge to support the teaching of reading as it relates to their subjects, including those teaching disciplines such as science, math and social studies. The volume recommends that teacher training should include advanced knowledge in procedures for assessing students and pinpointing their reading problems, as well as familiarity with effective instructional techniques. This content knowledge must also be developed in the context of practice, and must be made usable and concrete for beginning teachers in order to ease the transition into classroom teaching. Teacher preparation programs should also address student motivation and confront the harmful myths that may be held by beginning teachers concerning the reading potential for children, especially those with disabilities, who are second language learners, and who are members of socio/economic minority groups.

At an organizational level, the Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading calls for more collaboration between novice teachers and more expert teachers as well as other consulting professionals within schools, thus creating teams that will serve students better than any individual teacher could. Ultimately, the volume advocates that a change is needed in how the field views and organizes professional development of teachers. Ongoing professional development should be designed based on the expectation that teacher expertise develops over time. Both pre-service and professional development programs should adopt a “Learn – Enact- Assess – Reflect” framework, and schools/districts need to build in enhanced rewards as well as responsibilities for teachers as they progress from novice to expert.

National Academy of Education
Committee on Teacher Education Members

Committee co-chairs: John Bransford University of Washington Committee members: James Banks University of Washington David Berliner Arizona State University James Comer Yale University Sharon Derry University of Wisconsin-Madison Evelyn Jenkins-Gunn Pelham Memorial High School Pamela Grossman Stanford University Carol Lee Northwestern University Luis Moll University of Arizona Anna Richert Mills College Frances Rust New York University Lorrie Shepard University of Colorado at Boulder Catherine Snow Harvard University Kenneth Zeichner University of Wisconsin – Madison Reading Subcommittee Committee chair: Catherine Snow Harvard University Committee members: M. Susan Burns George Mason University Claude Goldenberg California State University, Long Beach Louisa C. Moats Sopris West Educational Services P. David Pearson University of California, Berkeley MaryEllen Vogt California State University Long Beach Gina Cervetti University of California, Berkeley Peg Griffin Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar University of Michigan Dorothy S. Strickland Rutgers University

Linda Darling-Hammond Stanford University Joan Baratz-Snowden American Federation of Teachers Marilyn Cochran-Smith Boston College Frances Degan Horowitz City University of New York Emily Feistrizer National Center for Education Information Edmund Gordon Yale University, Columbia University and The College Board Cris Gutierrez K-12 Carnegie Scholar Lucy Matos Ella Baker Elementary School Arturo Pacheco University of Texas, El Paso Kathy Rosebrock Novato Unified School District Alan Schoenfeld University of California, Berkeley Lee Shulman Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Guadalupe Valdés Stanford University