Building Blocks | Deans for Impact

Each year, nearly
200,000
new teachers
graduate from preparation programs
in the United States.

Many report feeling unprepared to
teach in classrooms of their own.

This Must Change.

Effective teachers matter – and if we aren’t doing enough to prepare teachers so they are ready to teach, we need a new approach.

And so we set out to visit programs led by members of Deans for Impact. We wanted to see what it might take to prepare teachers who are good on day one, and on the path to be great over time

To do that, we visited

educator-preparation
programs

across 13 states

We wanted to understand the complete context in which these programs prepare future teachers. We met with deans, faculty members, cooperating (mentor) teachers, school superintendents, school principals, and teacher-candidates. We spent almost equal time on college campuses and in K-12 classrooms.

All told, we interviewed and observed:

257

program
administrators,
faculty and staff

130

teacher-candidates

school-district
representatives

classrooms
and courses

We saw some things that troubled us. At some programs, we saw teacher-candidates who were given little or conflicting guidance on how to teach effectively. To our eyes, these teacher-candidates were unprepared for the realities of the classroom.

But we also were inspired. At a variety of programs, we met teacher-candidates whose sense of professional identity, instructional skills, and understanding of how students learn far outpaced their novice experience levels.

Modeling

Important teaching practices are modeled for teacher-candidates and broken down into component parts so teacher-candidates understand “why” they work.

Practice

Opportunities for practice are intentionally woven throughout a teacher-candidate's experience, and increase in complexity over time.

Feedback

Teacher-candidates receive specific, timely, and actionable feedback – based on a shared vision of effective teaching – across their experiences.

Alignment

Programs carefully design the arc of preparation to create a coherent experience for every teacher-candidate they prepare.

We found that programs that prepared these confident, skilled teachers shared four common elements – modeling, practice, feedback, and alignment – that draw upon scientific learning principles. We see these as essential Building Blocks of effective teacher preparation.