Special report: What will it take to change teacher prep in the U.S.?
After a decade of working with teacher prep programs, Deans for Impact looks to expand its reach
Happy holiday weekend, Bell Ringers! You’re reading a special double issue, and I’ve got news handcrafted by yours truly.
This week’s feature is focused on Deans for Impact, one of the most influential U.S. organizations in the science of learning field. For the last decade, they have been working with teacher preparation programs to bring cognitive science principles to teachers before they ever step into a classroom.
This week they’re out with a new, updated second edition of The Science of Learning, their original report featuring the basic cognitive science framework for teaching and learning that’s been downloaded more than a million times.
The organization also told me that they’re moving into advocating for policy changes, too.
So let’s get cracking on this special issue, a story + a video interview with DfI’s CEO, Valerie Sakimura. We talk about getting cognitive science principles embedded in teacher education, why they added a new section of research to the report, and more. Getting evidence-based practices into teachers’ hands has the potential to change learning outcomes for students, which is why I’ve endorsed the new report.
Weekend reading and watching:
My new story at Tes Magazine, “AI wants to teach the class—and some teachers want to let it,” is out now. In this story, I look at how artificial intelligence is already changing the role of the teacher, and what happens next.
I got to talk about what parents need to know about the science of learning with Katie Merigan at The Reading Symphony podcast this week. You can listen or watch the interview here!
What will it take to change teacher prep in the U.S.?
As I reported just a few weeks ago, according to a survey of eight countries out from the OECD, many teachers don’t have strong “general pedagogical knowledge,” or GPK, on how to teach—even after their teacher preparation training. “Teachers with formal education training…often have lower GPK scores on average,” researchers wrote.
In countries like Portugal, the survey showed, teachers with a master’s degree know a lot about both their content area and how to teach. In countries like Poland and Morocco—and to some extent, the U.S.—having an education degree makes little difference.
U.S. teacher knowledge on basic teaching foundations like cognitive science and evidence-based teaching practices, alongside content knowledge, is all over the place. We have both very knowledgeable teachers and very unknowledgeable teachers, and everything in between—the biggest range of qualifications in the survey by far, and the biggest gap between the most knowledgeable and the least.
The lack of coherent teacher prep and an evidence-based framework for teacher education has been an ongoing problem in the U.S., and contributes to poor student performance and high teacher turnover. States all have individual rules and requirements for teachers; often, so do the universities that train them and the districts that hire them.
But even within education schools, there’s a lot of leeway, too. Douglas Cost, dean of the School of Education at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said that for too long, professors in teacher prep programs all did their own thing: “We’ve arrived, we know everything, let them figure it out has kind of been the way, and I just don’t think that’s working with education anymore,” Cost said.
