How can schools ensure that the teachers they hire are effective in the classroom? A new APA report, Assessing and Evaluating Teacher Preparation Programs, offers evidence-based guidance on how to ensure that teachers are graduating from their preparation programs with the skills they need to boost learning among PK-12 students.
The report recommends that teacher preparation programs use reliable, valid and fair assessments to provide empirical evidence that their graduates will be effective in the classroom. Such data should be collected from multiple sources to produce a complete picture of teacher performance — such as in-class standardized observations of the teacher, surveys of principals and students, and standardized tests of student performance, the report recommends.
"Evaluating the effectiveness of teacher education programs ought to be informed by well-established scientific methods that have evolved within the science of psychology, which at its core addresses the measurement of behavior," says University of California at Berkeley psychologist Frank C. Worrell, PhD, an expert on teacher effectiveness who chairs the APA task force that wrote the report.
Programs that prepare teachers should use that data to fine-tune their training and pinpoint the strategies that produce the most effective teachers.
The report also recommends that:
- States work with teacher preparation programs to develop measures of student learning outcomes for all grades and subjects. Typically, such measures are given only to students in grades four through eight and for a handful of subjects — usually mathematics, language arts and, in some states, science.
- Federal funding agencies, state education departments, research organizations, teacher accreditation bodies, and faculty should develop reliable student surveys of teacher performance that can predict student achievement.
- Faculty and supervisors who prepare teachers should use well-validated observation systems and establish regular reliability checks so the observations are conducted with a high degree of fidelity.
APA released the recommendations in July to coincide with federal plans to reform teacher preparation. The U.S. Department of Education is expected to announce new rules aimed at holding preparation programs more accountable for producing effective teachers before the end of 2014.
"This is a great opportunity to enter the debate at a time when change is going on," says Worrell. "Over time, using the measures of behavior called for in this report will enhance the ability of programs to produce effective graduates."
Some of those enhancements could happen very soon. The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), the group that sets the standards for educator preparation programs, and provided support for the development of the APA report, has already used the recommendations to guide the restructuring of its accreditation standards for teacher preparation programs to include a stronger focus on selecting better candidates, making data-driven program improvements and assessing student learning outcomes.
That emphasis on evaluating teacher preparation programs in terms of how their candidates perform, and how well they achieve the goal of helping all kids learn, marks a huge shift in accreditation, says New York University psychologist Mary Brabeck, PhD, who served on the task force and chairs CAEP's Board of Directors.
"It's the first time a profession is saying, you can look at the outcomes of our graduates, including how much their students learn, and judge us as teacher educators by those outcomes," she says. "This report is a huge contribution to the field of education and the credit goes to APA for taking on this work."
