Training, Technique, and Automaticity: Teacher Preparation at the Charles Sposato Graduate School of Education

ABSTRACT

A controversial innovation within the field of teacher education is the relocation of teacher preparation to new graduate schools of education (nGSEs). nGSEs are state-authorized institutions of higher education that prepares teachers, endorse candidates for teacher licensure, and grant master’s degrees, yet are not university-based. This paper offers a profile of the Charles Sposato Graduate School of Education, an nGSE which emerged from the education reform organization Match Education. Sposato’s intensive context-specific model, which employs hyper-prescriptive training, extensive cycles of practice, and “expert” coaching on precise techniques, was aimed at establishing automaticity in the “rookie” teacher. Sposato’s emergence as an nGSE was an attempt to answer to education reform quality debates that demanded that teacher quality be primarily defined by teacher effectiveness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation [5105021].