The Importance

Preparing good teachers has never been more important or challenging than it is today. The changing demographics of the student body and increasing expectations for all students inevitably lead us to demand more of teachers. Preparing them to meet these higher expectations is a campus-wide challenge.

Schools of education cannot do this alone. Prospective teachers need sufficient content knowledge and the teaching skills to convey that knowledge to diverse students in increasingly challenging classrooms. Preparing teachers who are ready to meet these challenges successfully can only be accomplished through commitment of the entire university and its active involvement with local schools. In this sense, the preparation of teachers is a three-way responsibility of arts and sciences, education, and the schools. Too often, one of these partners is asked to shoulder the full load. Let us transform teacher education into a coordinated effort among K-12 school educators and faculty of both education and the arts and sciences at our institutions of higher education.

The Issues

The following comments, intended to present a variety of viewpoints about the challenges that presidents face, helped to provoke thoughtful discussion among the Summit participants.

• Parents, employers, and policymakers expect teachers to have strong academic preparation in the subjects they teach. An institutional commitment to strong teacher preparation means revamping the general curriculum to prepare teachers with the content they need to be successful. In particular, many elementary teachers do not receive the strong liberal arts background they need.
• During the last half-century, the traditional separation on higher education campuses of schools of education from the arts and sciences, as well as the "second-class citizenship" of education, have made collaboration among the two difficult. Making teacher education an important mission of the arts and sciences disciplines takes sustained leadership from many levels.
• Integrating the liberal arts and education can be expensive because it requires the development of a new set of courses.
• Over the years, schools of education have minimized their connection to local schools, especially as faculty sought recognition within the higher education culture rather than through involvement in schools. The result is that methods courses are generally taught exclusively on campus, and supervision of student teaching has been left to faculty adjuncts.
• Prospective teachers often do not get the extensive field experiences and real connections to schools that they need to apply and practice what they have learned.
• Reducing the high attrition rate for new teachers by supporting them as they begin their careers demands close working relationships between higher education institutions and local schools.
• Lack of partnerships among schools and higher education faculty can mean that the faculty are not well versed in standards for K-12 students. They need this knowledge so that they can expose their prospective teachers to the standards to which they will be asked to teach when they begin their careers.
• Deans and faculty members, hired within an established higher education culture, often are not chosen on the basis of their commitment to enhancing institutional and school district relationships.

Tough Questions to Consider

The following were the kinds of questions that presidents were asked to consider before coming to the Summit.

• How involved am I as president in building real partnerships with the schools where our students teach?
• To what extent is the teacher preparation program at my institution driven by local school improvement goals and student achievement challenges?
• What do I know about the adequacy of the content knowledge, teaching skills and clinical experiences of teachers who receive degrees from my institution? On whom do I rely for information about their training and their quality?
• How closely do the arts and sciences and education faculty members work together in the preparation of teachers?
• Can I list specific ways that my institution has made improving teaching and learning in local schools a main priority?
• Are hiring decisions for deans and faculty made on the basis of criteria consistent with our mission as a teacher training institution?

Next Steps

These are complex issues central to the current debate over student achievement in the United States and the future of higher education. In discussing what can be done to address them, the presidents and chancellors at the Summit generated the following action steps. They are examples of steps that presidents have taken, or steps that presidents could take, to demonstrate their commitment to partnerships on their campuses.

• Revise the reward system to provide incentives for faculty—arts and sciences as well as education—to get deeply involved in all aspects of teacher preparation.
• Put in place a process to ensure that campus teacher preparation and K-12 partnership priorities influence the selection of faculty members, deans, and department chairs.
• Examine the extent to which the program is meeting the needs of local schools for high quality teachers in each subject area, and make significant changes as a result.
• Insist on partnerships of equity and integrity. Exercise leadership to model such partnerships, establish personal relationships with superintendents, principals, and fellow presidents, require that grant applications and other program initiatives within the institution bring together cross-institutional resources and perspectives, and encourage collaborative, rather than competitive, relationships with other institutions in the region.
• Engage K-12 students, teachers, and administrators in evaluating the teacher preparation program.
• Lend personal support to the establishment and effective operation of a K-16 council that is chaired by the president or provost and includes a department chairperson, deans of education and the arts and sciences, and the superintendent in order to bring partners regularly to the table.
• Put in place an infrastructure that ensures that all the appropriate partners are at the table on a regular basis at both the state and the metropolitan levels.
• Build partnerships not just with arts and sciences, but also with the agriculture school, business school, and others. Partnerships need to be built within the university, first and foremost.
• Form a team between the school of arts and sciences and the school of education in order to ensure university cohesion and collaboration. Ensure that the undergraduate affairs department, deans, associate deans, and stellar faculty from both colleges are on board.
• Since presidents have discretion over the institution's budget, redirect funds to ensure that education gets its share.
• Find out what resources (including faculty) you have in your own institution with which to develop partnerships.
• Make it clear to appointed arts and science deans that they will be involved in teacher education, and that their duties will include collaborating with the college of education faculty and dean.
• Find out whether the education dean has the knowledge and skills needed to form partnerships. Ask, "Do I have an appropriate dean?" before committing oneself to further action as a president.
• Ensure that the provost is taking responsibility for ensuring that arts and sciences and education are partners.
• Insist that all research projects conducted at the institution—not just those within the education school—that deal with teaching or learning have a classroom teacher on the team that designs and implements the research.
• View partnerships with the arts and sciences as avenues for the recruitment of education majors and as ways to help overcome the negative reputation of education schools.
• Recruit the best deans and students into the college of education.
• Declare that there can be no unilateral decision-making with regard to teacher education. (Insist on conversations with arts and sciences and the local schools.)
• Think outside the box in strengthening the arts and science connection. If the education dean has impeccable credentials but no connection to schools, appoint a member of the arts and science faculty to be the dean of the education school.
• Create one college of the arts, sciences, and education under one roof.
• Experiment with ideas such as England's Open University and distance learning. Have faculty work in teams to create new programs.
• Build a strong partnership with public schools focused on meeting their needs. In turn, this will encourage the public school system to become a strong advocate for the college.
• Give faculty status to K-12 teachers who, as professional colleagues of the teacher preparation faculty, can serve as mentors to student teachers and new graduates.
• Seek the development of mechanisms and expectations that require education faculty to return to the public schools to teach from time to time (e.g., every five years) throughout their university careers.
• Establish an entrepreneurial rapid-response team that is capable of providing quickly developed, customized solutions to rapidly emerging problems. (Otherwise, the emergent needs of the schools will occur in quick time, as they usually do, while the processes of response from higher education will continue to occur in slow time.)
• Every year, spend two weeks of vacation time in the surrounding public schools.
• Be a "door opener" for education as well as arts and sciences faculty. By taking faculty members with them on school visits, presidents will help them to become ambassadors for increased contact with schools.
• Recognize that building quality teacher education programs at the university depends on extended clinical experiences, which require deep partnerships with schools. (One would not dream of neglecting a strong clinical component at the medical school.) Strong teacher education cannot happen by placing student teachers in schools for a few weeks.
• Establish, cultivate, and maintain a direct and personal relationship with the school district superintendent.
• Take the K-12 superintendent out for breakfast once a month.
• Be aware of and work to erase the snobbery that exists between university education professors and their K-12 partners.
• Involve a broad array of partners—broader than that to which presidents are accustomed. Include teacher unions, community and technical colleges, and businesses. There are very few partnerships that are strong throughout the continuum.
• Interact with a group of community members, enabling them to talk about the community that surrounds the institution. Emphasize the importance of bringing everyone together at the same time in order to alleviate the tendency to "pass the buck."
• Create school-to-work apprenticeships for teaching careers in local high schools.
• Open a public school in a university building on campus.
• Approach the governor and have a conversation about working for a common cause in support of a K-12 funding request.
• Be responsible for keeping graduates in a cycle of continuous education. Encourage the development of formal arrangements and programs that provide the opportunity for teacher graduates to continue to maintain an active relationship with their universities and to participate in continuing professional development and education programs. Invite graduates to return at no cost to utilize resources such as a technology center.
• Develop a mechanism through existing national associations to communicate information about effective practices, together with the data that demonstrates their success in enhancing student learning, so that other universities and school districts can replicate initiatives that have been proven to work.
• Engage retired teachers. Encourage schools of education to develop organized opportunities to engage them in innovative ways, such as mentoring prospective teachers, in their teacher education programs.
• Create summer employment opportunities for faculty by funding their proposals that involve innovative partnerships.
• Make a personal effort to assure that governors and state legislators are well informed about matters of teacher quality. Engage them and their staff in all of the key activities generated out of major school/university partnerships.
• Stress the value and status of teachers. Work with state governments to give teachers tax breaks, grocery discounts, etc.
• Speak out in the community about the importance of partnerships.
• Be willing to admit that presidents and their institutions do not have all the answers.
• Ensure that all parties have a say in the other's programs in order for partnerships to work.