Abstract
The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) set forth a set of new standards that demand excellence to produce educators who raise P-12 student achievement. This pilot multi-case study describes perspectives and across-case themes of the lived experiences of national key stakeholders in educator preparation programs and their professional development school (PDS) partnership system. CAEP's five guiding principles of Standard 2: Clinical Partnerships and Practice as a priori codes describe experiences and perspectives of three key stakeholders of the university's clinical partnership. The three key stakeholders include (1) university-based teacher educators, (2) school-based teacher educators, and (3) teacher candidates. The researchers discuss results and implications for practice and offer avenues for future research.
TopSignificance
Increasingly, universities and school districts share responsibility for teacher and student learning. Sharing responsibility demands that both institutions work to develop closer relationships, yet many barriers arise from the complex work done in university-school partnerships. When two educational institutions work together to meet both state and federal demands, there are simultaneous efforts to maintain, reproduce, negotiate, and transcend institutional boundaries and barriers (Daniels, Edwards, Engeström, Gallagher, & Ludvigsen, 2010). Schools and universities challenge each other’s expertise, practices, policies, and social arrangements that can create conflicts and tensions. Solutions and support for resolution of any barrier will have a far-reaching impact on partnership sites.
The purpose of this study is to describe barriers in teacher preparation programs that may slow, or halt, the renewal of teacher preparation. The researchers of this study, a unique team of school and university based educators who simultaneously work in both environments, assert that the renewal of teacher preparation begins by removing certain boundaries of governance between the higher-education system that prepares teachers and the P-12 system where teachers work so that teacher educators can respond to the needs in P-12 schools. All stakeholder groups represented in a typical teacher preparation clinical partnership as well as national groups associated with educator preparation participated in the focus groups for this study.
The following research questions guided the data analysis identified in the methods, findings, and discussion sections of this article:
Research Question One: How does current literature identify ways to help educator preparation programs turn barriers into opportunities for renewal?
Research Question Two: How do practitioners in educator preparation programs (EPPs) describe barriers in clinical partnerships and practice?
Key Terms in this Chapter
University-Based Teacher Educator (UBTE): Educator who works primarily with teacher candidates in a college or university setting.
Teacher Candidate: Student admitted to an educator preparation program.
Education Preparation Program (EPP): University-based program to prepare teacher candidates for the profession of education.
School-Based Teacher Educator (SBTE): Educator who works primarily with teacher candidates in a school or school district setting.