One of us recently asked a local school district superintendent in a largely rural state to identify the most important qualities he looked for when hiring new teachers.
"Do they have a heartbeat, unfortunately," he said. "We also look at how many DUIs they have."
Not exactly the highest of expectations. We don't mean to throw this superintendent under the bus. He seemed dedicated, thoughtful, and passionate about providing a high-quality education to his district's students—and rural school leaders often face persistent staffing challenges. But he clearly did not expect new teachers he hired to possess great instructional skills.
Other professions don't accept poorly prepared practitioners into their ranks, so why do we often do so in education?
A Better Model—with Four Building Blocks
There is a better way to prepare and hire new educators. Leaders of school districts and schools should align their staffing efforts with the educator-preparation programs that educate the teachers they hire. Instead of working in separate silos, prep programs and K–12 schools should form partnerships to develop a preparation process that will build the knowledge and skills that novice teachers need, beginning in preservice training and extending into early-stage induction support. In so doing, they can improve student outcomes, improve novice teachers' readiness, reduce teacher turnover, and elevate the teaching profession.
So what do we mean by alignment? What does it look like, and how do we make it happen?
First, some background on why we were talking to that superintendent in the first place, and how we're involved with improving the skills of novice teachers. (Throughout this article, we'll use "novice teachers" to refer to preservice teachers as well as teachers in the first two years of teaching.) We work for Deans for Impact, a nonprofit organization that works with educator-preparation programs to transform the way teachers are readied for service in U.S. schools. In service of that mission, over the past two years we've visited 18 educator-prep programs in 13 states. On each visit, we observed novice teachers in local K–12 classrooms. We also interviewed school district superintendents, school principals, and veteran teachers about what they look for when hiring new teachers and what expectations they have for the programs that prepare educators. Our goal was to better understand how novices are being prepared and get an on-the-ground view of the contexts in which this professional training takes place.
In fall 2017, we released a report based on our research that highlights what we identified as four essential "building blocks" of effective educator preparation: modeling, practice, feedback, and alignment. It's beyond the scope of this article to explore each of these principles in detail, so we'll just summarize the first three:
- Modeling means providing opportunities for novice teachers to observe effective pedagogy by expert educators.
- Practice means giving novice teachers frequent opportunities to practice specific teaching skills in a variety of settings.
- Feedback means giving novice teachers specific, timely, and actionable feedback on their instruction.
All four building blocks are interrelated, and we encourage interested readers to check out the full Building Blocks report to learn more. In this piece, we want to focus on the fourth building block, alignment—which is a little more complicated than the others.
Defining Alignment
Alignment in teacher preparation means that the arc of the preparation experiences novice teachers receive is coherent and structured, rather than unrelated and disjointed. Alignment involves deliberate design choices across multiple aspects of the preparation process. We think of such design as having two dimensions—vertical and horizontal.
Vertical alignment means all teacher-educators—including both school of education professors and K–12 mentor teachers—have a shared understanding of the development trajectory for novice teachers and their specific roles within that process. It means thoughtfully structuring the coursework and practical experiences of novice teachers so that their skills are sequentially developed over time. Think of vertical alignment as the ladder that novice teachers climb as they get better at teaching.
Horizontal alignment means that everyone involved in preparing novice teachers shares a common language of instructional effectiveness. For any given cohort of preservice teachers in a program, those responsible for preparing them—whether in a school of education or partnering school district—should use the same terminology to describe teaching practice. This allows teacher-educators to work together on developing the skills of novice teachers while avoiding a confusing cacophony of different terms and philosophies.
Determining how vertically and horizontally aligned any particular novice teacher's preparation is requires looking at specific aspects and practices at both the educator-preparation program she attends and the school (or schools) where she receives her clinical training. This includes looking at:
- Curriculum: Does the educator-preparation program coursework use the same curriculum and standards as the K–12 school districts where teacher candidates will do their student teaching or likely find a teaching job? Do the schools within each district use the same curriculum, or does it vary from school to school (or even teacher to teacher)? And if the curriculum does vary, how might the educator-preparation program work with its district and school partners to foster greater coherency?
- Expectations: Do the educator-preparation program faculty and the mentor K–12 teachers use the same language to describe teaching effectiveness? Do they have a shared understanding of what skills are important for beginning teachers to master and what mastery looks like? Are teacher candidates assessed during their student teaching in the same way they'll be assessed once they become teachers of record?
- Data Sharing: Do the educator-preparation program and the school district partner(s) share data about each novice teacher's development? Is that data based on a shared framework for a teacher's development?
- Improvement Ethos: Do the educator-preparation program faculty and cooperating teachers from partner schools share a cultural norm that all educators should work together constantly to improve student learning?
When the Stars (of Programs) Align
Let's look at two examples of promisingly aligned teacher preparation we saw in our travels and observations.
Spiraling toward Solid Practice
One of the best examples of alignment we've seen is the literacy sequence within the Integrated Elementary Teaching Program (IETP) at the University of Nevada-Reno. This program eschews the traditional model of tacking on student teaching at the end of a teacher candidate's preparation by integrating practice teaching throughout the arc of the preparation experience.
IETP's literacy teaching curriculum is "spiraled." Concepts are introduced in the introductory course (Lit I), then returned to in greater depth and complexity over the next two courses (Lit II and Lit III). Additionally, the program uses the same textbooks aligned to the same content standards that its largest district partner, Washoe County, Nevada, does.
Just as important, the sequence has been thoughtfully designed to integrate practice-based experiences throughout the arc of the training that teacher-candidates receive in partnership with local schools. In Lit I, for example, teacher-candidates work one-on-one with students in the early elementary grades, but on relatively simple instructional tasks (such as reading aloud). The complexity of practice increases as teacher candidates progress on to Lit II, where they practice teaching with small groups of students. By Lit III, candidates practice an even more complex task: supporting struggling readers. They work all semester in a clinical setting to assess a particular student's reading ability and design lesson plans to address that student's greatest learning needs.
Developing this program and ensuring it was aligned across both the school of education and local schools was hard work. Faculty at the education schools and administrators and teachers in Washoe County initially came together and collaborated on how to create quality practice opportunities throughout a candidate's experience. The university and Washoe County now use the same teacher-observation rubrics, and they've created a data-sharing agreement that provides education school faculty with evidence of how the teachers they've prepared are doing.
As one professor involved in the program's design and implementation puts it, "[It's] not at random that the connections will be made; we're explicit about connecting theory to practice."
Everyone in the Same Room
The Cato College of Education at UNC Charlotte is aligning its entire program with its school district partners. Last year the program launched the Teacher Education Institute, which brings together coursework faculty, clinical faculty who oversee teacher candidates' experiences in the field, and mentor teachers—all of whom coach teacher candidates. These groups build a common language to describe teacher-candidate practice and align how novice teachers are coached to improve their effectiveness. The college holds regular meetings between coursework faculty, mentor teachers, and clinical faculty to talk about development of individual candidates in student teaching in order to calibrate the feedback that all those involved will give candidates.
Deans for Impact assisted in the development of the Teacher Education Institute. Our initial design work revealed conflicting opinions about the contributions different stakeholders were making to candidates' development. For example, one faculty professor believed teacher candidates were "being put in classrooms with mentor teachers [who] aren't using evidence-based practices." On the flip side, one mentor teacher told us that teacher-candidates from UNC Charlotte were "coming with ideas and strategies that are just disconnected from the realities of the classroom."
To address these challenges, the program draws upon the expertise of all teacher-educators (from professors to mentor teachers) involved in preparing UNC Charlotte's teacher candidates. Activities purposefully feature mixed-role groups working together, and faculty and mentor teachers cofacilitate many of the sessions, which helps build trust for future collaboration.
It's too soon to tell whether the Teacher Education Institute will bring about true alignment of UNC Charlotte's education programs with district partners, but the early data are promising: 99 percent of participants said that the institute met or somewhat met the goal of developing trust and respect among faculty and mentor teachers. "As a clinical teacher, speaking openly about candidates with UNCC staff is refreshing, and getting on the same page is critical because we are all equals," one participant said. Another asserted, "It's great to build meaningful relationships with our school partners and learn something together."
An Action Plan for Alignment
We hope that, based on these early partnership ventures, other education schools and districts will become interested in better aligning the programs that prepare teachers with the practices in schools where they'll likely teach. While there's no single path to improving alignment, the following tips offer some places to start:
- Determine the scope of alignment. The literacy program at the University of Nevada-Reno is a good example of a highly aligned preparation experience, but one that's relatively targeted to a particular content area. In contrast, UNC Charlotte is undertaking a much broader effort to align efforts across all areas of its program. Both approaches have merit, although we tend to favor broader approaches (micro-collaborations often die out).
- Develop relationships with leaders. Teaching is a local profession, and as the employers of newly prepared teachers, K–12 administrators are in a strong position to influence teacher-educators to improve alignment. This starts by connecting with the leader of a teacher-education program, usually the dean. Even something as simple as scheduling a monthly breakfast meeting can go a long way toward building trust.
- Emphasize co-construction, not imposition. Alignment does not mean making someone else align with what you're already doing. It means building together an integrated approach to preparing novice teachers, whether a teacher-educator program or a school or district initiates alignment efforts. Everyone has something to contribute.
- Build structural support. Human relationships are vital to improving alignment, but so is the need for developing structures and processes that allow for sustained improvement. Look for systemic ways to use common assessments, jointly provide professional development, and share data between faculty and mentor teachers.
The Payoff
Aligning teacher-education programs with district practices and expectations is hard, and the benefits may not be immediate. But the payoff is worth it. Novice teachers enter the profession feeling more confident and better prepared for the realities of the classroom. Veteran teachers and university faculty often find renewed energy for thinking about their practice. And the ultimate beneficiaries of alignment are the students who receive a high-quality education.
Alignment is but one building block to effectively prepare future teachers—but it's the cornerstone.
What Misalignment Looks Like
Although the examples in this article show that alignment is possible, here's a hard truth: In visiting 18 educator-preparation programs serving communities ranging from urban to rural, we rarely saw strong alignment. In fact, teacher candidates often described receiving contradictory guidance from their professors and mentor teachers.
We visited one program where teacher-educators emphasized to future elementary school educators that instruction should be designed strictly with student learning in mind. As one teacher candidate put it, "If you get too caught up in making it fun, you lose sight of the end goal of learning." Yet this same teacher candidate had seen her mentor teacher design activities that diverged from the curriculum, such as when the elementary school class had an entire unit on apples simply so they could go visit an apple orchard. "This is exactly what we were told not to do," she said.
Another telling moment involved a visit to a rural educator-preparation program serving multiple school districts. The director of student teaching took us to one elementary school to observe one of the program's teacher candidates, only to learn that that particular young person wasn't even placed in the school we were visiting. This program also allowed teacher candidates to find their own placements, which meant the director of field experiences couldn't strategically match candidates with mentor teachers who could address the candidates' needs.
Finally, we think of the meeting we sat in on with the dean of one school of education and a handful of local principals. The principals were planning to adopt new textbooks for the next school year, but when we asked whether they planned to consult the school of education to help aid their decision, everyone was aghast—including the dean. "We would never attempt to influence curriculum decisions," she insisted.
