Preparing Better Teachers by Improving the Student Teaching Semester

Abstract

Introduction

In Blueprint: Teaching Quality, the University of Pennsylvania Center for High Impact Philanthropy argues that “the issue is poor management of human capital in education—from recruitment through to retention. ... settling for any teaching candidate who shows interest, training them poorly, deploying them unevenly, failing to support them adequately once they arrive at a school, providing a work environment that is not conducive to teacher or student learning, and evaluating and compensating them in a way that fails to recognize weak or strong performers” (Center for High Impact Philanthropy 2010).

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that “many, if not most, of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom” (quoted in Foderaro 2010).

Student teaching has been recognized by decades of research as the most influential component of teacher preparation (Lortie 1975, Berry et al. 2008). The quality of the field experience is strongly correlated with new teacher performance in their own classrooms and even future teacher behavior. Moreover, most teachers rank student teaching as the greatest lasting factor in shaping their teaching (Guyton and McIntyre 1990, Hamman et al. 2009).