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Over the last few decades, the field of teacher education
has heavily promoted the use and even the mandatory adoption by states of
standardized assessments that can be used to judge how well a teacher candidate
can deliver a lesson. The push has come with a promise that these
“TPAs” fulfill three important and otherwise largely elusive functions:

1. 
They would help programs to better structure
training on how to plan and deliver instruction far better than the home-grown
efforts used by most programs.

2. 
They identify the quality of candidates and
therefore can serve a gatekeeper for entry into the profession.

3. 
They provide information which states could use
in the aggregate to hold programs accountable for their training.

We concluded four
years ago that the edTPA adequately fulfills the first function. TPAs are
an exponential improvement over the rubrics and observation forms most programs
use to assess a “live” lesson.

A new
study from three researchers at CALDER (Dan Goldhaber, James Cowan, and Roddy Theobald) provides evidence
on this second function—whether TPAs actually identify the more capable
candidates who deserve to be entrusted with a classroom of children.  That’s long overdue given the pressure that
AACTE and others have put on states to adopt an instrument without any evidence
that it was predictive of teacher performance.

As was widely
reported in the press last week, results from graduates of teacher prep
programs in Washington state (one of the first states to adopt the edTPA) are
mixed. Goldhaber et al. found that a passing score in the reading portion of
the edTPA is significantly predictive of teacher effectiveness in reading, but
not in the math portion.

Given that the edTPA is a lot of work for programs and is
costly to boot, is this enough bang for the buck? After all, instructions for
candidates entail 40 pages and candidates are alerted that they can be
evaluated on the edTPA on nearly 700 different items. The process consumes the
attention of teacher candidates and teacher educators in their programs for a
good share of candidates’ semester-long student teaching placement. 

There’s a strong argument that the complexity is merited if
it prevents unqualified persons from teaching—unless the same results could be
had with a lot less time and investment.  A recent
study on the measures employed by District of Columbia Public Schools to
screen its teacher applicants indicates that one of the components with
predictive validity is simply a 10-minute audition. A few more studies with
similar results may make it difficult to justify blanketing the nation with edTPA
requirements.
That leaves the third function: program accountability. According
to Goldhaber, the variation of scores of candidates within Washington programs is greater than the variation of scores across programs. This result, which
Goldhaber did not publish, means that all but the most egregiously low performing
programs are likely to have candidates whose scores vary considerably across
the range.  

The bottom line to date in this still-unfolding story about
TPAs: the edTPA 1) is a good organizing vehicle for training, 2) may produce
scores that at least partially discriminate among candidates in terms of
effectiveness—but through a process that appears to be unnecessarily
cumbersome, and 3) may produce scores that cannot be used to hold programs
accountable because they are insufficiently related to the quality of candidate training. 

A few weeks ago while my
blizzard-frenzied hometown of Baltimore was busy emptying grocery shelves of
bread and toilet paper, I took off for Paris—at the invitation of the OECD.
 There’s nothing I love more than a great big snow storm, but sacrifices
must be made.  

The occasion was OECD’s
kickoff event for a new study to look at how the world prepares its teachers.
 Just as the U.S. had recently begun paying attention to the critical role
teacher preparation plays in teacher quality, so too has the international
community.  (One of the first assignments I had when I arrived at NCTQ 13 years
ago was to participate in an OECD study on teacher quality.  Exactly as
the teacher quality debate has played out in the U.S., virtually ignoring
teacher prep until recently, that study only identified the selection but not
the preparation of teachers as a factor of interest.) 
                                    
My assigned role was to speak about US teacher preparation. It did
occur to me that If the OECD had consulted with American higher education
institutions or the AACTE about who would have been best to provide such a
perspective, my name would not have been on their list. And I will concede that
I did not paint a pretty picture, but it was a fair one backed up by the
evidence.  

In fact, no country was there to boast, not even the largely Asian
PISA powerhouses.  Finland’s delegate, for example, dismissed the notion
that only the top 10 percent of their college grads are admitted into teaching,
a myth he ascribed to the poorly understood fact that candidates are able to
apply multiple times and most, he asserted, eventually make it in.
Representatives from Hungary and Turkey expressed considerable dissatisfaction
with what they felt were their country’s excessive focus on teachers’ content
knowledge—and didn’t seem to notice me turning green with envy. Other nations,
particularly Australia and Chile, expressed problems eerily similar to ours.

I was also interested to hear that teacher bashing, however it
might be defined, appears to be a multi-national problem.  Only South
Korea continues to report the high status of teaching as a chosen profession
while the rest of us bemoaned the profession’s ability to attract the best and
brightest.  The most universal complaint?  Without question, the deaf
ear on the part of higher ed to the practical needs of novice teachers.

In any case, the purpose of such a meeting is to fully air the
range of problems and organize them into manageable buckets, not come up with
the solutions.  Actually, I’m not sure if a set of solutions should ever
be an expectation at any stage.  The real challenge for any international
effort is the discipline and persistence required to descend from the clouds,
delivering comparative data at a level that is practical and concrete for the
countries involved. As I cannot recall more than a handful of such studies over
the last 20 years, that must be easier said than done.  Most depend on
platitudes to fill their pages—not to mention a dizzying array of
incomprehensible flow charts (why does anyone think that converting a narrative
into a heavy mixture of text boxes and arrows somehow makes complex systems
more comprehensible?).

Solutions reside within each nation, perhaps spurred by education
ministries or groups such as ours (which appear to be increasingly prevalent, I
was heartened to see).  We all benefit enormously from better
international data—not unlike the way that PISA results have helped the broader
education movement engage in better advocacy.  

Many times over the
years NCTQ has reached out to education ministries and academics in other
countries with what we believe to be basic questions—such as “How many
schools of education do you have?” “What are the courses teacher
candidates take?” “What does it take to get in?” or “What
level of math proficiency does an elementary need to have?”—generally without
success.  These are questions which are grounded in the nuts and bolts of
practice and which, if answered, might explain a lot.  That’s how we learn
and improve. Not with generalizations or by
making assumptions about what works in other countries, but with facts and data
to back them up.

Over the holidays, I ran into an old colleague from back when I
was doing a lot of work in Baltimore during the 1990s. The conversation turned
to NCTQ’s work in teacher preparation. Perhaps half kidding, he accused me of
being a turncoat, referring to my newfound commitment to traditional teacher
preparation. “Whatever happened to you?” he launched in. “You
used to know that teacher prep was a total waste of time. Now you’re such a
booster!”

“Twenty-five years ago, that position may have made some
sense,” I retorted. “It’s just not a defensible position any
longer.”
What this guy didn’t realize—nor perhaps do a lot of people—is
that over the last couple of decades there’s been a boon in all sorts of
knowledge, much of it highly relevant to teaching. Unfortunately, little of
this knowledge has been integrated into teacher preparation. If it were,
we might see a big reduction in the all-too-steep learning curve experienced by
most novice teachers.
For starters, there’s the rock-solid science on how to teach
reading, which didn’t just end with the National Reading Panel in 2000, but has
continued to grow, particularly including the roles of oral language and
building broad content knowledge. There have also been advancements in basic
principles of instruction and managing human (e.g. classroom) behavior.  
In a report NCTQ released yesterday, we again find
little evidence of these advancements making their way into mainstream teacher
education, specifically by means of the textbooks programs require for
coursework. This time, the field of study is human learning, our collective
knowledge of which, resting on a foundation laid over a century ago, has gone
into warp speed over the last few decades. And, we would contend, there is no
other subject that could benefit struggling new teachers more.
To determine the presence of this beneficial knowledge in
teacher prep programs, we analyzed the textbooks required in courses purporting
to teach how children learn (generally ed psych and methods courses), assessing
if any home in on the research-proven  strategies that teachers can use to
help children learn as well as retain what they learn. Those very practical
strategies, some of which are supported by research going back decades, were neatly packaged and tied with a bow for an
audience of educators in 2007 by the Institute for Education Sciences, the
research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

In an exhaustive analysis, our experts were not able to
identify a single textbook in our representative sample of 48 textbooks which
would be suitable for teaching this essential group of strategies. The majority
of texts adequately cover only a single strategy. None in the sample covers
more than two.
We wondered then if perhaps
programs worked around the deficiencies found in textbooks, supplementing them
with other resources. Looking for references to supplemental readings (hoping
one might be the IES guide itself), lecture topics and student assignments, we
found nothing. Further, since publishers generally only publish texts which are
likely to meet consumer demand, it seems unlikely that teacher educators are
clamoring for content they’re not getting. And the fact that the newly formed
Deans for Impact made the “science of learning” its opening salvo also suggests that this material
has yet to be embraced by mainstream teacher ed.

One explanation for the absence of these strategies from
textbooks and coursework is that the field of teacher education is more likely
to ignore research, not just because it sometimes comes from other fields, but
because it counters the prevailing views of teacher educators. That hypothesis
might explain why one of the six strategies (the one which also happens to be
backed up by the most science) receives such short shrift. That would be the “testing” strategy which
advises frequent quizzing to help students remember what they learn. Testing
is a dirty word these days. But it doesn’t explain the indifference on the part
of teacher education to the other strategies, such as teaching about the
importance of teachers distributing review or practice of new material across
weeks to promote retention of new material.
Another hypothesis might point to teacher education’s
unwillingness to put down its collective foot once and for all, rejecting much
of the current “research” which would more aptly be termed thought-pieces, non
generalizable case studies or small-sample investigation. That kind of culling,
by our estimation, would reduce the average ed psych textbook’s 2,200
references by about 90 percent—with most of the reduction due to the common
practice in these textbooks of citing a whole book as the supporting evidence
for this or that practice without even identifying the page number (imagine a
medical textbook accepting as adequate support a citation such as “Your Spine and You, 2000, Chicago:
Doubleday”).
The market for substandard textbooks has got to dry up. There
is simply no defense for using textbooks so untethered from the emerging
research about what works in practice. We look forward to working with
publishers and prep programs to ensure these books are pulled from the shelves.
See NCTQ’s latest report, Learning About Learning,
for a closer look at the research-proven instructional strategies teacher
textbooks leave out.

A Foot in the Door: Exploring the Role of Student Teaching
Assignments in Teachers’ Initial Job Placements by Krieg, Theobald, &
Goldhaber
Every district wants to get a leg up on
hiring the best new teachers. Want a tip? Get your pick of the teachers by
starting before they even finish training. While teachers are likely to get
their first job near home, they’re even more
likely to get their first job near their student teaching placement—and 15
percent get their first job in the same building as where they student taught.
Left wanting more? Find it here: TQB

I am one of NCTQ’s biggest supporters, but I am
very disappointed with the recent publication of The Good Behavior Game as a
means for improving classroom management.  This is not a criticism of the
Good Behavior Game.  There is also a Classroom Protocol Game produced by
the people at the Huberman Foundation.  There are also discipline
programs—two popular ones are Restorative Justice and Positive Behavior
Interventions and Support (PBIS).  And then there are behavior rubrics and
contracts, and every advocate swears that they have research to back their
game, program, rubric, and contract.

The Good Behavior Game has nothing to do with classroom management; it has to
do with behavior management and the two are separate entities.  As long as
we continue to subscribe to the notion that discipline is classroom management,
we will never attain improved student achievement, which is the goal of
NCTQ.  The purpose of classroom management is to maximize student learning
with a well-organized classroom, not to minimize student misbehavior.

Classroom management is the most misused term in education.  Classroom
management has to do with managing or organizing a classroom for student
learning.  Effective teachers MANAGE their classrooms, whereas ineffective
teachers DISCIPLINE their classrooms.  So many teachers have the mistaken
belief that classroom management has to do with discipline; thus, every day is
a self-fulfilling prophecy of going into battle with the students, because that
is the expectation.  Teachers who incorrectly define classroom management
as discipline are likely to join the ranks of the thousands who quit the
education profession after their first few years on the job.

Classroom management is not about discipline.  It is about organization
and consistency.  Store managers manage a store; they do not discipline
the customers.  Team managers manage a team; they do not discipline the
players.  Likewise, effective teachers have a classroom management plan
consisting of a series of practices and procedures that are used to organize an
environment in which instruction and learning can take place.

Can you imagine asking a store manager what she does and she responds, “I was
hired to discipline the customer,” or a stage manager says, “I was hired to
discipline the actors.”  Yet, when you say classroom management to people
in (and out of) education, they invariably equate this with discipline.

I do not deny that discipline is an issue that must be addressed, and if The
Good Behavior Game helps, that is great; however, no learning takes place when
a teacher disciplines.  Learning only takes place when a classroom is
organized so the students know how to do things (procedures) correctly in the
classroom.  The reason behavioral problems occur in the classroom is
because there is no organized management plan in place so the students know
what to do.

Regretfully, the great majority of teachers think that classroom management is
synonymous with discipline, so they spend their days looking for games or programs
to solve their behavior problems.  To tell me that a game helps classroom
management is not classroom management.  My question is, “How do YOU
manage a classroom, and can you teach someone else how to manage a classroom?”

The GBG cannot succeed on its own any more than a diet book can succeed on its
own.  As Kate Walsh so wisely states, “The GBG serves to keep students
focused on learning by promoting appropriate and on task behavior, but the game
is more effective in an environment where the essential components of classroom
management are already in place.”  So I ask again, “Where is your
classroom management plan?”

Teaching classroom management has been our forte for well over 35 years, over
the course of which thousands of teachers have told us, “Thank you for teaching
me the difference between discipline and procedures.”  Procedures range
from how to head a paper, how to begin class on time, and how to write an
essay.  When students know how to run a classroom, you not only minimize
misbehavior, you have a class that can function on its own, and can even run
itself in the teacher’s absence.  Simply put, when you teach students how
to do things, then they won’t do what you do not want them to do.

We teach teachers how to be proactive, not reactive.  A proactive teacher
has a plan to prevent problems; a reactive teacher has no plan, and when a
problem occurs, they react from one problem to another, looking for a game, an
activity, or a threat.  To be effective and successful, all a teacher
needs is a classroom management plan.

Effective teachers prevent problems with a plan that keeps their students
focused and on task, from the moment the opening bell sounds, until the end of
each day.  This is done with procedures, which simplify the tasks students
must accomplish to increase learning and achieving.  Once taught,
procedures become the responsibility of the students to carry out the
appropriate tasks.  A well-managed classroom is safe, predictable,
nurturing, and focus-driven.  A classroom management plan ensures learning
takes place efficiently, with minimal stress.  When you have an organized
classroom, you avoid the pitfalls of becoming a disciplinarian.

Students want a plan, too.  It is extremely important to realize that many
students come from disorganized, unstructured home environments, where chaos
abounds.  Neglected children crave structure and guidance.  Give them
a well-managed, organized classroom with clear daily practices and procedures,
and they will respond positively.

Chelonnda Seroyer, a high school English teacher in Atlanta, says, “My students
enjoy having a predictable classroom.  They feel safe because they know
what to expect each day.  They like consistency in a world that can be
very inconsistent.”

Amanda Brooks is a teacher in Dyersburg, Tennessee.  Upon completing her
first year of teaching, she said, “With procedures that organized my class, I
never had to waste time repeating what they should be doing or reprimanding
them for bad behavior.  I created an environment where students could just
learn.  I simply taught and enjoyed my students.”

At the end of her second year of teaching, Amanda said, “My state test scores
just came back and my class had the highest test scores in my school, and I am
only saying this to encourage new teachers to get it right on the first day of
school and then enjoy the rest of the school year.”

A veteran teacher of 40 years, Audrey Lowery of Irvington, Virginia, says, “If
our new teachers would implement classroom procedures and keep them separate
from rules, they would be in education for the long haul.”

I trust that those who read about The Good Behavior Game will not misconstrue
it as a panacea for classroom management, because the mission of NCTQ is to
promote teacher quality and quality teachers, such as Chelonnda Seroyer, Amanda
Brooks, and Audrey Lowery know the difference between classroom management and
behavior management.

*Dr. Wong is the author  of several popular books used in teacher education.

Every district HR department looks to find
ways to limit the number of time-consuming interviews of new teacher
applicants. A few weeks ago, Politico
ran a story about “Big Data” tools
designed to give districts a better idea of who is “interview worthy”
based on the perceived skills of candidates (e.g., Teacher Match) and next gen
versions of the old school questionnaires that attempt to elicit the
“attitudes” of teacher applicants (e.g., Gallup’s TeacherInsight
Assessment and the Haberman Star Teacher).
An encouraging new study from Dan
Goldhaber and colleagues examines the Spokane
School District’s home-grown, skills-based screening process. It argues
that by using a two-stage evaluation process that relies heavily on data
generated from letters of recommendation, principals are able to limit precious
interview time to only higher-caliber applicants, resulting in better hiring.                  
The process seems to be working: scores on
the second stage of the pre-interview screening positively (and with
statistical significance) predict value-added measures of effectiveness. Also,
teachers hired by Spokane School District showed higher rates of
retention as opposed to those not hired by Spokane
who were teaching elsewhere in Washington
State.
Ratings on
applicants’ classroom management skills stand out as having the most predictive
power, piquing our interest in what exactly Spokane principal/supervisor screeners are looking for in
applicants with regards to classroom management. The bottom line: even though
the district’s rubric related to classroom management is fairly cryptic (i.e.,
“effective[ly] handl[e]… large/small, ethnically/sociologically diverse
groups”), it appears that screeners are still able to zero in on enough in
the letters of recommendation to identify candidates who are most likely to be
effective.
Given how unsystematic Spokane’s protocol appears to be— screeners receive no training on
how to apply the rubric—it probably helps that 71 percent of hired teachers
have had some previous experience in Spokane
as an employee, a student teacher or both; the study’s authors note that
“screeners may be familiar with those who are writing the letters of
recommendation.”
We have one minor quibble. We wonder how much
better Spokane could do in hiring if
it tightened up the protocol for evaluating classroom management skills and
used more structured interviews to evaluate applicants.

Over the
years, there have been a gazillion studies examining the relative merit of
different pathways into the teaching profession. Almost all come up short,
often because the studies do not clearly define the type of pathway being
analyzed (i.e., just what does it mean to be alternatively certified?)
A new study from Gary T. Henry and his colleagues at Vanderbilt does not
disappoint, breaking down  the
definitions of assorted pathways into more meaningful categories as well as
examining the results of only new teachers (those with less than three years of
experience). After all, should we really judge a preparation program by the
teachers who graduated from Ol’ State U. in 1980 or by those who graduated in
2014?
Henry et al. disaggregate teaching
pathways into multiple distinct categories: out of state, in state, graduate,
undergraduate, public, private, Teach
For America and lateral entry (North
Carolina‘s own alternative entry).
As always, the researchers find more
variation within the groups than across; there are some notable differences in
this study from what previous research has found.
There is
some limited evidence of a “home team” advantage for specific teachers; teachers who were prepared in-state
were more effective than those from out-of-state programs in three of the eight subjects tested. Additionally, teachers prepared in private
institutions were no better than those from public institutions, a finding
we didn’t find surprising given that we haven’t found a discernible difference
between the two in the Teacher Prep Review.
One takeaway
consistent with other studies’ findings: TFA
comes out looking great. Students instructed by TFAcorps members annually gain approximately 18 days of additional
learning in elementary math, 11 days in elementary reading and an astounding 73
days in middle grade math.
While there
aren’t many TFA corps members in North Carolina, other alternatively
trained teachers (referred to as “lateral entry”) have a much harder time
posting gains. Findings conclude they are less effective (especially in STEM
subjects) or, at best, average.
Here’s a finding
we’ve never seen before: in both middle
grade math and reading, teachers trained in graduate school aren’t as effective
as teachers trained as undergraduates— though they do better in high school
science. This needs more research to figure out if those different outcomes are
due to the focus of masters’ degrees, if they were content specific, or in
education.

More teacher experience may have a few more benefits than the research has been touting (not that we really think it didn’t). A new study by Helen “Sonny” Ladd and Lucy Sorenson finds a positive relationship between a teacher’s years of experience in the classroom and students’ achievement and non-cognitive behavioral skills, into at least a teacher’s 12^th year of teaching, far surpassing the 5^th-year crest that most research is telling us represents the end of the climb.
Using a sample of about 250,000 students in North Carolina (a state known for its robust data system) over five years, the researchers find that years of experience are positively related to student test scores, especially in math. The effect is not insubstantial: the positive impact on student achievement from a teacher with five years of experience is about twice as much as the disadvantage presented by a student’s race or family income. Those benefits from experience continue to grow until a teacher has about 12 years of experience. The study also found positive (albeit weaker) correlations with students’ non-cognitive and behavioral skills, including student absenteeism, disruptive classroom behaviors, time spent completing homework and time spent reading for pleasure.
Notably, Ladd and Sorenson found that “high ability” teachers leave the profession more often than those of lower ability.
There are a few methodological concerns to keep in mind: non-random assignment of students to teachers (which happens often when principals reward veteran teachers with higher-ability classes or parents request certain teachers) could throw off estimates. Also, because the data set only includes five years of data, even with the use of teacher fixed effects, no teacher is compared to herself across 12 or more years (for example, the data set does not show Ms. Smith’s effectiveness as both a first-year and a 15^th-year teacher). To sum up, while this research finds a relationship between experience and efficacy, it cannot conclude that experience causes teaching efficacy.

In this month’s Tr3 Trends newsletter, we compare teacher pay in suburbs and cities.

What city is home to the Wright Brothers and the birthplace of the Trapper Keeper? If you said Dayton, Ohio, then you would be right! Dayton is also the location of NCTQ’s latest district study on teacher quality.

Our new website just launched. Make yourself at home and take a look around!

Tammie Schrader’s post yesterday about her experiences as a science teacher and a “teacher of future science teachers” hit home the point that the student teaching experience is of immeasurable value both to improve professional skills and as a test of wh

Better training for teachers can lower skyrocketing suspension rates and make schools safer

I’m quarantined at home with the pink eye. My wife avoids me like I’m a leper and I want to scratch my eye out. On the other hand, I get to miss this month’s faculty meeting.

It’s easy to forget that teachers are asked to be “first responders” for students in times of crisis, among their many other duties.