Scaling Up
School after school in the Phoenix area has a banner hanging on the side of the building: iTeachAZ.
It鈥檚 shorthand for Arizona State University鈥檚 new flagship undergraduate teacher education program, which integrates several high-profile鈥攁nd hotly debated鈥攔eforms to teacher preparation today.
Under the program, which debuted formally this school year, ASU requires a yearlong student-teaching apprenticeship for all undergraduate education majors, during which time they must demonstrate mastery of specific teaching skills as measured by a popular teaching framework.
While many of the changes under way have been tried elsewhere, there鈥檚 an important issue of scale taking place here: ASU is a public state institution that prepares hundreds of teachers a year. It is, in fact, the largest undergraduate education program in the country.
It is the type of school, in other words, that continues to serve as the engine of teacher preparation in the United States鈥攁nd that has been the target of decades of harsh criticism.
The goal of the project, according to its leaders, is to graduate teachers who, in their first year on the job, match the effectiveness of second-year teachers. Getting there has meant no less than an entire shift in philosophy, according to Mari Koerner, the dean of 础厂鲍鈥檚 Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.
鈥淭he idea was to have a college of education that was part of the solution, as opposed to one that was only defining problems,鈥� Ms. Koerner said. 鈥淔or a research level-one college, it鈥檚 a different perspective.鈥�
Ms. Koerner, a sprightly, animated presence at ASU, herself models the best of teaching practices. She poses questions. She avoids jargon. She challenges orthodoxies. She presses her newest faculty members about the appropriate place of theory-rich 鈥渃ritical pedagogy鈥� in teacher education. She鈥檚 also a driving force of the changes here, and faculty members at Arizona State largely credit her for moving the student-teaching experience from the fringe to the heart of teacher preparation.
鈥淪he never wavered from the first, saying to the faculty, 鈥榃e are going to have a clinically based program. Fight all you want about it, we are going to do it,鈥� 鈥� recalled Nancy J. Perry, the assistant dean for clinical experiences.
鈥業ncubation Period鈥�
Much of the groundwork for the shift had been laid by a prior endeavor that, while largely considered successful, had operated in isolation from 础厂鲍鈥檚 campus-based teacher training.
In 1999, the school used a federal grant to set up seven student-teaching sites using the 鈥減rofessional-development school鈥� approach. Under the venture, aspiring teachers worked for a year under the supervision of a K-12 teacher, while pedagogy classes were taught by ASU professors on site, to improve the connection between coursework and practice.
The sites 鈥渨ere very separate, and actually, in many cases, a bone of contention,鈥� Ms. Perry said. 鈥淲e weren鈥檛 really learning from the grant; we weren鈥檛 necessarily learning how to bring the knowledge into the college. There was always the question of scalability and whether faculty would agree to go out and teach in the districts.鈥�
Ms. Koerner鈥檚 push was, essentially, to require the site-based approach for all undergraduate teacher preparation鈥攏o excuses.
The earlier efforts 鈥済ave us an incubation period of 10 years鈥攁nd the confidence to say that this will never be integrated until we decide it鈥檚 going to be the model for all our teachers,鈥� Ms. Koerner said.
The iTeachAZ program was piloted last year and expanded to 500 teacher-candidates this year. By the end of 2012, all undergraduate education majors will participate.
So far, ASU has been wildly successful in bringing in grant funding to support iTeachAZ. It has received some $77 million in federal teacher-quality funding, in addition to $19 million from philanthropist T. Denny Sanford to support the changes and related ventures in Arizona schools.
Ms. Koerner, though, says iTeachAZ is meant to be seamless. There will be no more 鈥渟iloing"; candidates will be trained the same way regardless of funding sources.
In a step up from the former professional-development-school programming, iTeachAZ emphasizes a set of skills all teacher-candidates must master and demonstrate during student-teaching.
Each candidate is observed and scored a total of five times by an ASU faculty member trained on a well-known teaching framework. Then, he or she is given feedback via a structured discussion in which each teacher is complimented on a skill successfully mastered, and told of one area that needs strengthening.
ASU uses the teaching framework devised for the Teacher Advancement Program, a school reform model run by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based National Institute for Excellence in Teaching.
Today, aspiring teacher Liliana Solorio is receiving the results from her first observed lesson. Her clinical supervisor, earlier in the day, observed her teaching 1st graders how to identify and construct related number sequences: 4 + 5 = 9, and so therefore 9 - 5 = 4. Ms. Solorio has had time to review a videotape of the lesson, too.
鈥淚 thought I tied the lesson to standards and objectives well and why we were learning about them,鈥� Ms. Solorio shares with the clinical instructor as the conference begins. 鈥淚 think I needed to do more on getting academic feedback.鈥�
As it turns out, her clinical professor largely agrees with her assessment. (Both candidate and professor use a 5-point scale to score the different teaching skills, then they compare their scores.)
During a practice exercise, the professor says, she noticed some students counting on their fingers. So, while many arrived at the correct numeric answer, some did not grasp the concept of related equations.
鈥淵our exercise was aligned, but you didn鈥檛 give them enough examples to get there,鈥� the professor says. 鈥淲hat could you have done to elicit more feedback?鈥�
Her gentle urging helps Ms. Solorio come up with a new idea: Ask students to explain their reasoning in writing鈥攕omething that will generate more-detailed information and provide pupils with additional writing practice.
If you鈥檙e new to TAP and need a primer:
TAP: More Than Performance Pay
More than 100 ASU faculty members have been trained on the TAP framework, and they largely say it has helped give teacher-candidates a common language for discussing teaching.
鈥淏efore TAP, students would have a Rolodex of information but maybe not know how to apply it,鈥� said Martha Cocchiarella, the assistant division director of teacher preparation at the education school. 鈥淚t makes you deconstruct your teaching.鈥�
At Arizona State, the framework also serves to gauge teacher-candidates鈥� progress, an area that, in teacher education historically, has been based on anecdotes from principals and supervising teachers.
鈥淵ou鈥檇 hear things like, 鈥榃ell, there are no major issues with classroom management, no major professionalism issues, and the teacher-candidate is really nice,鈥� 鈥� recalled Michelle Rojas, the director of iTeachAZ and a former clinical instructor. By contrast, 鈥渢he TAP instructional rubric allows us to make informed decisions about how to support teacher-candidates, and, in some cases, whether they will complete our program.鈥�
By the end of the program, candidates must score a 3鈥攁 rating indicating proficiency鈥攐n the 5-point TAP scale. Next fall, ASU will also begin to award letter grades to candidates for student-teaching, based partly on the observation scores.
New Partners
础厂鲍鈥檚 work to move teacher preparation closer to K-12 classrooms has also necessitated closer relationships with school districts across the state鈥攏o small task considering that Phoenix, which doesn鈥檛 have a unified school district, counts more than 25 of them.
Each partner district enters into a formal governance arrangement with ASU; professors and district staff members meet at least once a month to plan, troubleshoot, and address candidates鈥� needs.
As Hilary Misner, the executive director of 础厂鲍鈥檚 $43 million federal Teacher Quality Partnership grant, puts it: 鈥淚n order to be true partners, you have to expose the good, the bad, and the ugly.鈥�
This past summer, ASU hosted representatives from many of the partner districts to discuss areas in which those districts felt more emphasis in senior-year coursework was needed. Two emerged in particular from those discussions, Ms. Perry said: ensuring teacher-candidates come away with a more specific understanding about how to generate and use assessment data, and making sure they come with strong literacy-instruction abilities.
Meanwhile, the longer student-teaching commitment provides a clear incentive for districts to participate, said Jeffrey Smith, the superintendent of the 2,900-student Balsz school district, in Phoenix, one of the newest partners.
鈥淔or a long time, teaching was seen as a part-time job, and the old student-teaching model was kind of like that鈥攜ou got someone who learned how to start or end the school year,鈥� Mr. Smith said. 鈥淲e鈥檙e finding that teaching is an incredibly complex skill. ... I think these student-teachers are more dedicated, and that鈥檚 what we want from our teachers.鈥�
Merging Programs
One big factor helping to accelerate change at ASU was the involvement and support of top university officials. That is no small vote of confidence in Ms. Koerner and in teacher education in general, a field often treated as second-class.
In successive reorganizations in 2009 and 2010, ASU President Michael M. Crow and Provost Elizabeth Capaldi united three formerly independent teacher education schools at ASU into a new institution, the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, under Dean Koerner鈥檚 leadership.
Though spurred in part by budget pressures, the university leaders intentionally merged a research-oriented school focused on the preparation of scholars with one that had focused mostly on undergraduate preparation. (A newer, third school focusing on undergraduate and master鈥檚-level preparation was also folded in.)
鈥淩esearch universities tend to focus on graduate education, and teacher preparation is often separate, and I actually think that is quite detrimental,鈥� Ms. Capaldi said. 鈥淲e saw an opportunity to bridge that divide. Putting [all the programs] into the teacher-prep college was a statement that producing high-quality teachers is our priority.鈥�
President Crow said the investments in improving teacher education were also spurred by a drive to do something to improve lackluster state K-12 academic performance.
鈥淲e鈥檙e unwilling to accept this notion that it鈥檚 the school boards鈥� fault, the state funding model鈥檚 fault,鈥� Mr. Crow said. 鈥淲e are responsible, at least in part, for the outcomes of the K-12 enterprise.鈥�
础厂鲍鈥檚 structural transformations help illuminate some of the major tensions and debates playing out in university-based teacher education in the United States鈥攁mong them, the role of scholarship versus that of preparing teachers.
Officials at the American Educational Research Association protested the reorganization, fearing it would affect scholarship. Concerns about university rankings were raised. But Ms. Koerner says the opposite has, in fact, happened: Rankings remain competitive.
鈥淭here鈥檚 this assumption in the field that you can鈥檛 have an elite, selective doctorate program and still train teachers,鈥� Ms. Koerner said. 鈥淎nd that鈥檚 wrong.鈥�
The legacies of those tensions are nevertheless long-standing. One of the continuing challenges is bridging the traditional status divide between professors who specialize in producing research and clinical faculty members.
鈥淭rying to integrate the faculty in meaningful ways that aren鈥檛 sentimental and aren鈥檛 inauthentic is not easy,鈥� Ms. Koerner said. 鈥淭erritory and title are everything in higher education, and some people don鈥檛 want to give up the prestige of only working with graduate students.鈥�
Clinical professors continue to provide the bulk of the teaching at the iTeachAZ sites, but gradually, more tenured faculty are participating.
Associate Professor Yolanda De La Cruz is one of about six tenured faculty members who have taught an on-site pedagogical class as part of iTeachAZ. At first, she opposed the moving of senior-year pedagogy classes to the teaching sites. Now, she says it has opened up new teaching opportunities as well as sites for research.
鈥淚 fought it all the way, to keep methodology courses on campus. But it鈥檚 worth it now,鈥� Ms. De La Cruz said. 鈥淚 would never have seen the kind of growth in my students that I鈥檓 seeing now, if I were on campus.鈥�
Bottom Line
Dean Koerner says 础厂鲍鈥檚 efforts continue to be a work in progress: She and other leaders want the university鈥檚 doctoral programs to become more closely linked to the preparation of K-12 teachers, so that the research produced directly helps inform and improve the college鈥檚 undertaking.
And a redesign of lower-division classes to increase content-knowledge preparation will be completed by 2013.
Meanwhile, faculty members here are open about other aspects of iTeachAZ that they believe offer room to grow.
Juliet E. Hart, an assistant professor of special education, would like to see a more concerted research effort among faculty members to study whether the changes under way are helping to increase K-12 student learning.
鈥淭his has the utmost potential for making a difference in K-12 preparation in Arizona, but it comes with a corresponding need for rigorous research to determine its efficacy,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e need to guard against taking a post-hoc approach.鈥�
One thing is certain: Those conversations will continue at ASU. After all, President Crow says he has a bottom line for the teacher education efforts at the university.
鈥淲e鈥檒l know we鈥檙e doing the right thing,鈥� he said, 鈥渨hen we鈥檝e made significant impacts on K-12 outcomes, directly and measurably attributable to us.鈥�
