A new approach: Reforming teacher education

Increasing the effectiveness of teachers is the key to improving our schools, but most systems around the world have only recently focused reform efforts on transforming initial teacher education. The ways in which candidates are prepared to be teachers have a critical influence on what teachers can do and what their students learn, yet very few countries have an effective system for educating teachers. Many programs lack proven practices and are a long way behind the best.

For governments, initial teacher education (ITE) reform is very difficult, partly because the teacher education pathway is complex and not easily controlled. Most ITE programs are housed in autonomous universities, and generally governments do not have direct control over how these programs prepare teachers. Yet governments do exercise great influence over two other dimensions of the teacher education system: the funding of universities and the hiring of teachers into public school systems.

Since government schools are the primary employer of new teachers, it is surprising how little influence and interaction states, districts, or schools have with the providers of ITE. Minimal government oversight combined with this lack of feedback from the main teacher employer means there is little incentive for ITE providers to improve the quality of their programs. Low-quality programs are still able to enrol teacher candidates because of the inattention to training quality across the system. Teacher candidates currently do not have the information to choose programs based on quality. But even if they did, their employment outcomes are not likely to change whether they went to a great ITE program or a poor one because the current employment policies do not differentiate based on training quality. Improving ITE requires an understanding that reform is needed to influence teacher employers (states, districts, and schools) as well as ITE providers.

Learning First is working with policy makers in a number of systems around the world on improving teacher education. Concerns of declining quality in ITE are widespread across the globe and all are looking for a way forward. A framework is needed that identifies the reform options available, their impact in different forms and contexts, and the governance structures that optimise the impact of reforms. Such a framework is particularly important in ITE, which regularly crosses federal, state and local boundaries and is subject to intervention from all three levels.

The aim of improving ITE is to give beginning teachers better skills to increase student learning. Currently, teachers feel underprepared for the realities of teaching because they often do not graduate with the necessary content knowledge and pedagogical skills. The challenge is to develop the mix of reforms so all actors in the system are working together to achieve this objective.

This requires looking at the teacher education pathway in its entirety, encompassing the selection of candidates, progression within a course, graduation requirements, registration1 and employment, induction and early career development. If all these stages are recognised as steps along a common teacher education pathway, reform is more likely to lead to effective teacher preparation.

There is a harmful tendency to look at the steps along the pathway in isolation, which leads to less effective reforms. One of the big problems at present is the focus on inputs at a single stage, particularly the selection criteria of candidates into ITE. While raising the quality of candidates is important, it should not be the main focus of reforms as it will not help drive improvements to the quality of ITE. More effective policy reforms target both teacher candidates and the quality of teacher education providers. They link assessments of teachers at different stages along the teacher education pathway with the quality of the programs training those candidates. Unfortunately, many of these assessments are too weak for meaningful reform. For example, teacher registration is usually too weak to remove poorly prepared candidates and therefore provides little information to the system about which teacher education programs are doing well. Collecting and publishing transparent information about which ITE programs are producing more effective graduates will send clear signals to ITE providers, and will provide evidence about better ways to train teachers. Effective reforms ensure strong assessments at key parts of the pathway, align those assessments to incentives to increase quality, and increase the information flow between the main teacher employer (schools, districts, or states) and ITE providers.