Eduflack: "Teacher Preparation: Who Needs It?"

Eduflack: "Teacher Preparation: Who Needs It?"

"Teacher Preparation: Who Needs It?"

Without question, teacher quality is one of THE hot topics in education reform these days. Logically, we recognize that teachers are the ones primarily responsible for boosting student achievement in the classroom. Programs like the US Department of Education's Teacher Incentive Fund have thus been designed to reward those teachers whose students demonstrate success. It is a simple equation, outcomes result in rewards.

But what about the inputs that result in that achievement? What do teachers need to know, be able to do, and experience before they ever become a teacher of record? Those are the sorts of questions that the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) is trying to tackle with a new series of policy briefings it launched today, titled "Teacher Preparation: Who Needs It?"

In today's episode, AACTE offered up The Clinical Preparation of Teachers: A Policy Brief, a document that provides some of the history, the research, and the vision for how to best address clinical preparation. Chief among the recommendations — all prospective teachers, regardless of their pathway, need at least 450 hours of clinical training (or a full semester).

Full disclosure, Eduflack has worked with the folks over at AACTE for years. Regardless, today's briefing offered some interesting recommendations for the federal government, state government, and those preparing the next generation of teachers, including:

For the feds:

• Revise the “Highly Qualified Teacher” definition within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to require that teachers must establish not only their content expertise, but their ability to teach it effectively, as measured by their actual performance in classrooms, following extended clinical experience;