A critical issue in teacher preparation today is that some candidates meet the criteria for admission to teacher education programs yet they struggle or fail to develop the levels of knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions required to complete the program. This article offers three different case studies to examine the monitoring process developed…

The field of teacher preparation is falling short of its most important responsibility: ensuring that the teachers we train are ready to do the job. For more than a decade,TNTP preparation programs produced teachers who were no more or less effective than teachers from any other program-- some were great, some were poor, most were about average.…

Often secondary mathematics methods courses include classroom peer teaching, but many pre-service teachers find it challenging to teach their classmate peers as there are no discipline issues and little mathematical discourse as the "students" know the content. We will share a recent change in our methods course where pre-service…

Improving teacher preparation is critical to long-term improvement in teacher quality. More than 200,000 new teachers enter classrooms each year. Increasing student enrollment, the retirement of baby boom generation teachers, and high attrition in their first five years (between 40 and 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession) have…

Issues of diversity and social justice are critical for teacher education as the student population in the United States becomes increasingly diverse ethnically, racially, socially, and linguistically. It has been traditionally assumed that social studies, more than other curricular areas, should deal with these issues, especially in raising good…

The Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ), in partnership with the Aspen Institute and the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), has been investigating the urban teacher residency (UTR) -- an innovative response to the longstanding challenges of how to recruit, prepare, and retain bright and capable teachers for…

At both state and federal levels, partnerships of schools, parents, and communities have become an educational priority. Are teacher education programs adequately preparing preservice teachers for these partnerships? Focus groups of College of Education (COE) faculty from five Illinois Professional Learner's Partnership universities were conducted…

This study collected data from a total of 50 special education student teachers from 14 Illinois universities. Approximately half the students had not yet completed their student teaching experience and the remainder had completed the experience. Findings indicated that the most important aspects of a successful student teaching experience are:…

TO EXPLORE THE POTENTIAL OF A TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAM FOR FRESHMEN EDUCATION MAJORS WHICH EMPHASIZES DIRECT TEACHING EXPERIENCE RATHER THAN THE LECTURE-DISCUSSION FORMAT, THIS EXPERIMENTAL PROGRAM WAS BEGUN IN 1964. ITS STUDENTS COMBINE A FULL ACADEMIC SCHEDULE WITH CLINICAL EXPERIENCES AS TEACHER AIDES, TUTORS, OBSERVERS, AND STUDENT TEACHERS.…