Teacher Education in a New Age of Accountability: How Can Programs Develop Responsible and Valuable Self-Assessment

ABSTRACT

This paper intends to demonstrate how within the current contentious environment for teacher education in the U.S., two small teacher preparation programs conducted a voluntary coordinated long-term self-evaluation study, that partially responded to external accountability pressures by the Federal administration, state agencies and various private and non-governmental organizations. In particular, we focus on findings about graduates’ preparation experiences and sense of preparedness for teaching, as well as how they perceived their faculty strengths and weaknesses and programs’ effectiveness. Such an in-depth examination of graduates’ perspectives can serve not only for internal self-study purposes, but also as an example to other preparation programs looking to meet external accountability pressures, while preserving a voice in the process and developing meaningful tools for self-assessment and improvement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ We use the pseudonym JTEP to conceal the identity of the two programs and the teachers who graduated from them.

² We apply David Ellenson’s (2008) definition to “liberal” as one that in the context of Jewish day schools refers to schools affiliated with (a) the Progressive Association of Reform Day Schools; (b) the Solomon Schechter Day School Association of the Conservative movement; and (c) the Network of Community Day Schools (RAVSAK).

³ This means that JTEP teachers are approved to teach in both Jewish and regular state public schools.

⁴ Note, that while this inquiry is pursued individually, self-study researchers often report sharing their interpretations with colleagues, seeking for external feedback and validation for their findings (e.g., Bullough & Pinnegar, 2004).

⁵ In such endeavors, researchers may collaborate in designing the study, collecting data, and analyzing and interpreting the findings.

⁶ For example, CAEP, departments of education at the state level, and the Federal Administration.

⁷ One example of such pressure by external entities is the Department of Education requirement that preparation programs demonstrate efficacy and impact by establishing “a direct link between teacher preparation graduates’ employment and pupil achievement” (Tatto et al., 2016, p. 2).

⁸ These characteristics of high-quality preparation programs were initially developed during the 1980s by the professionalization movement led by the Holmes Group (Case, Lanier, & Miskel, 1986). Later, they were adopted by the prominent Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC, 1992).

⁹ The challenge in these programs is tied to the short cycles of preparation that they offer (usually up to one year).

¹⁰ In the special case of programs serving religious schools, some foundation in a relevant religious knowledge is preferable as well and programs may invest in developing appropriate and meaningful integration of general and religious studies (e.g., Pohl, 2011; Wolfson & Kelman, 1980).

¹¹ We are aware that “reflection” has become a widely used slogan in teacher education, often without clear meaning. This makes it hard to study its impact (Hatton & Smith, 1995; Zeichner & Liston, 1996).

¹² For example, questions were chosen from the School and Staffing Survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (Goldring, Taie, & Riddles, 2014) and surveys of graduating cohorts of teachers by University of California Los Angeles Center X (Quartz et al., 2003).

¹³ As a rule of thumb, the imported items were preserved to allow comparability with original surveys and to maintain validity. Nonetheless, JTEP’s particular characteristics (e.g., its mission to prepare teachers for Jewish day schools) required adaptations particularly in some questions concerning the Jewish aspects of the program. In order to focus the discussion, these questions were removed from this paper.

¹⁴ Nonetheless, we do notice, a general trend in which the JTEP means at CA tended to be slightly higher. We ascribe these small differences to the different institutional settings of the MA and CA sites and further discuss them elsewhere (Tamir, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Joseph Ben Shimon Foundation.