Unprepared to educate

All the textbooks and college lectures crammed during her four years at teacher college flashed through Lacy Taylor's mind as she watched the desk fly and flip in front of her and crash with a loud bang to the floor.

The 17-year-old student who'd sat quietly at the desk only minutes before loomed over the 22-year-old Ms. Taylor, a green student teacher finishing her last semester at Austin Peay State University.

He didn't need math or a high school diploma, he fumed, so close she felt his breath on her face.

"I am not taking this ... test," she remembers him screaming.

She trembled and said nothing. The other teacher in the room just stared at the floor.

"I realized I had no idea what I was doing," said Ms. Taylor, who would a few years later become a teacher at Red Bank High School.

In Tennessee, most people have heard some version of Ms. Taylor's story. An idealistic college graduate comes to his or her first classroom and a rude awakening: His education didn't prepare him to educate.

"Many new teachers have been sheltered," said Clara Sale-Davis, who trains new teachers as director of the Benwood Initiative for the Public Education Foundation. "They expect when they enter a classroom it will be just like the school they went to. ... Then they say, 'I can't believe kids act this way!'"

But many say the current method of molding new teachers doesn't cut it anymore. Teachers have to be better prepared because they will be held accountable under Tennessee's new education reforms.

Earlier this year, Tennessee edged out 39 states and won $500 million in federal Race to the Top dollars. In their 260-page application, state officials showed Tennessee is ready to blow up long-standing teacher tenure policies and put the responsibility of failing schools on the backs of teachers.

And by tying teacher pay to student performance and asking districts to scrub public schools of ineffective teachers, Race to the Top legislation also has put the colleges that train teachers -- long unscrutinized -- in the hot seat.

A state report card that shows teacher colleges have little to no impact on the effectiveness of their recent graduates in the classroom has galvanized support for greater teacher college accountability.

These colleges need a complete overhaul before they become irrelevant in a time when alternative routes to teaching are proving to be successful and popular, say some experts and state education leaders.

"The need for better, more effective training has never been greater, but the schools of education have got to change radically," said Bill Sanders, who developed Tennessee's value-added system of measuring student achievement and helped analyze the teacher college report card.

Still, the call for reform in teacher education is being heard by some higher education systems more clearly than others. Officials with the Tennessee Board of Regents said they are poised to grab national attention for a complete makeover of their six teacher colleges, which will expand the traditional semesterlong student teaching experience to a yearlong residency.

Officials with UTC, one of two teacher licensure programs within the University of Tennessee system, said they question whether increased classroom exposure makes the difference in quality teacher college graduates. More states are recruiting people to go into teaching through alternative licensing programs who have no experience in classrooms when they begin.

"To me it's a mixed message," said Valerie Rutledge, head of the UTC Teacher Preparation Academy.

Mixed results

For years, schools of education have boasted about their quality because they could point to nearly 100 percent passage rates on the Praxis licensing exams. But the number of students who pass the Praxis tests, required to teach in Tennessee, isn't the most important measure for whether teacher colleges are doing their jobs, officials say.

As part of the state's Race to the Top reform plan, officials have, for the first time, begun culling through Tennessee's Value Added Assessment System data, which details individual students' academic progress in a single year, to show the effectiveness of newly hired teacher college graduates.

Long term, the goal of the study is to single out teacher colleges producing larger shares of failing teachers.

But right now, the teacher effectiveness data shows no colleges are having overall blockbuster results. They all give credentials to students who go on to be good teachers and many who go on to be bad teachers.

"Most of the teachers are ending up in the middle," said Art Fuller, a research associate at the state Board of Education who oversaw the report. "Based on what states were asking teacher colleges to do, they were fulfilling that need. But now they aren't."

For example, the value-added data used in the study shows 18.8 percent of UTC graduates who went on to teach math didn't help their students progress academically, while more than 12 percent were considered effective.

Only seven schools statewide, including UTC, stood out with a large percentage of teachers who did a poor job teaching one of the individual subject areas of math, reading, science and social studies.

Forty-four percent of UTC graduates who went on to teach science were deemed ineffective, compared with 5.6 percent who were effective, the report shows. At Austin Peay State University, 35.5 percent of graduates who went onto teach math were considered ineffective. Only 9.7 percent were considered effective, data shows.

"(Teacher colleges) have got to get it right if things are actually going to turn around," said Will Pinkston, a spokesman for the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education, which helped spearhead Tennessee's Race to the Top initiative. "There is no choice. Everyone is going to have to step up their game. Everyone needs to get their shoulder to the wheel."

Finding THE "it" factor

But much of developing good teachers is an imperfect science, officials say, especially because it is unclear if colleges really can teach someone to be the kind of teacher who can correct the course of a faltering student.

Even the criteria principals use to evaluate teachers -- organization, classroom management and clear delivery of lesson plans -- say little about whether they actually educate each student, Dr. Sanders said.

Often teachers who do well in evaluations of instructing whole classes don't show value-added progress with individual students, he said.

A bubbly, fun and motivating personality and a desire to work overtime to meet students' needs are traits teacher colleges can't create.

"There is an edge that can't be measured," Dr. Rutledge said. "We can't with total confidence say we are going to be able to pick the right person every time. We all struggle to identify what that 'it' factor is."

Teacher colleges may not be able to make someone who is boring or shy into a great teacher, but some say the schools can do more to help students with a knack for the profession hit the ground running in their first teaching job.

Katie Warwick, an academic coach at Hixson Middle School, trains newly hired teachers and said many are dumbfounded when getting their first classroom. She felt the same way when she came out of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's teacher college in 1991.

Like most student teachers in Tennessee, she made intricate lesson plans for imaginary classes and theorized about how to respond to hypothetical disciplinary problems. Her experience in a real classroom boiled down to a short stint as a student teacher.

"Other professions go through years of practice and residency," she said. "I don't think you can learn anything about teaching by reading about it. You need to be in the classroom and try some things."

TEACHER TRAINING REFORM

Giving college students more experience in classrooms and intensive training in how to individualize instruction for students is essential if schools of education are going to play a role in turning Tennessee's education system around, Tennessee Board of Regents officials said.

"We listened to the criticism from principals from across the state who had to spend the first year correcting the things students were learning at teacher college," said Paula Short, Regents vice chancellor for academic affairs.

By fall 2013, the Board of Regents plans to eliminate its traditional block of education courses, including education history and education philosophy and theory, and replace the classes with problem-based learning modules modeled after the school of medicine at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Students, who will be admitted into the program after an interview process, will begin shadowing actual teachers as early as their freshman year, which is typically unheard of because most education majors complete at least a year of general education before taking courses in their major.

"Our program will be qualitatively different," Dr. Short said. "It's about building competencies rather than going out and watching teachers and clocking hours."

In their senior year, students will compete a yearlong clinical residency, something that currently isn't required in any Tennessee teacher college.

"We were putting out teachers that were hired, and some did well, but that wasn't good enough," Dr. Short said. "This is revolutionary."

The University of Tennessee, which does not have an undergraduate education major, has a yearlong residency for graduate students in education, officials said. UTC requires a semester of student teaching, and most students have 150 to 200 hours of field observation before they student teach.

Some education professors, including many with Regents schools, say schools shouldn't toss out traditional theory-based courses in the rush to provide more hands-on learning.

"It's important for professionals to have some sense of the change over time of their profession," said Chris Perry, a professor of education history at Vanderbilt University. "It helps them appreciate more deeply what they are seeking to do with their professional life."

The national accrediting body for teacher colleges, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, said the Regents experience could make waves nationwide as teacher colleges work to regain relevance.

Officials said they will be watching Regent schools closely to determine whether the model can be copied as a best practice in years to come.

"The proof will be student achievement. It is a big step. Other states and institutions can learn from what they are doing," said Jane Leibbrand, a spokesman for National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.

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