New Models of Ed School

In this session, instead of looking at how to improve all teacher colleges, we looked at new models.

David Steiner talked about the Hunter College School of Education, which he is head of. Hunter has formed partnership with KIPP, other charter school organizations, and DOE to provide training to charter school teachers.

In the absence of substantial research on what makes a good teacher, Steiner says they turned to the best performing schools for guidance on how to best prepare future teachers. The partners are helping the Hunter faculty choose the best practices for teacher training, that is, the skills that make a difference in the classroom.

All courses at the Hunter College School of Education are co-designed and co-taught by volunteers from the faculty, who spent a lot of time in schools, and figuring out ways of improving urban education. They also get a great deal of support from the strongest teachers, principals and superintendents from charter schools.

Every time an hour instruction is taught at Hunter, that hour is divided into 10 or 15 minute segments. Everything is well thought out and planned: each exercise, assessment, as well as what is the aim in that class.

The educators teach their student teachers the way they want them to later teach in the classroom. They are evaluated immediately electronically and a lot of videotaping is done during the course of teaching. “We video tape all our student teachers and give feedback. We now have a library of 600 clips and entire Hunter faculty uses them as case studies”, Steiner said.

Out of the 400 teachers joining Hunter this summer, none will graduate from the program unless they will have shown demonstrable data based academic gains in their classrooms. “They will have to show, before they graduate, that they can bring a class of children to an academic performance level”, Steiner says.

What assurance does Hunter have it is choosing the right things to focus on?

“We do not have the whole research yet. But what I know is that when you look at various taxonomies, what is striking is that it is beginning to get more and more fine grained”, Steiner says. It turns out, he continues, that being an effective teacher is being in charge of the repertoire of skills, and at Hunter teachers insist on practice of these skills.

“This is a work-in-progress, but we are very excited, because we think we just began to break down walls between the ed school and the school”, Steiner concluded.

Another speaker - Andre Cowling, principal of Harvard Elementary School in Chicago, is also the product of another non-traditional teacher training program, the Academy for Urban School Leadership. In his opinion the Academy represents a perfect marriage between theory and practice. It effectively prepares student teachers for their job through classroom training with a master teacher for 180 days. The Academy trains 70 people each year to come from different professions to the field of education and latter supports them, as a result obtaining high retention rates.

There are 13 schools under the Academy’s leadership. The schools accept all children regardless of their zip cod, family situation and economic status. The teachers who have graduated from the Academy are prepared for these children and that they know how do deal in all sorts of situations.

Jim Cibulka, president of National Association for the Accreditation of Teachers Colleges, put everything in perspective.

He said he was very optimistic about the potential for reform and change at ed schools, because of:

- Developments instrumental in driving change: a move from regulations of Ed Schools around curriculum and libraries to candidate performance.

- Shift in driving reform being from outside the profession, i.e. the emergence in the 1980s of the market of mixed providers, which spurred competition between colleges of education and alternative providers. The strongest of the alternative providers have done strong clinical preparation, which is the future of strong models.

Considering clinical model for ed schools, Cibulka said that there is need for two things:

1) much stronger ties between schools of education and the schools, and traditionally universities and colleges of education have had tenuous ties with schools.

2) stronger knowledge on best practices. “Not only do we have a weak research based on teaching learning, we also have weak research based on what effective practices are in the preparation of educators”, he said.