Augustana College Department of Education Rock Island, Illinois Institution Comment Comments submitted by: Mike Schroeder, Ph.D., Chair, Augustana Education Department
Augustana College faculty and staff share with Advance Illinois and NCTQ the sincere desire to improve the quality of public schools within the state through the careful preparation of future teachers. Indeed, the members of our Education Department view teacher preparation as our sacred responsibility, and as our primary professional focus. Further, we are gratified to recognize that NCTQ and Augustana College embrace many of the same guiding principles when it comes to the preparation of teacher candidates, candidates who will dedicate themselves to improving the profession, enhancing student learning, and closing the achievement gap. Our program is extraordinarily well articulated, highly selective, and intellectually rigorous, with an emphasis on direct experience in local schools under the supervision of an experienced college faculty, each a former K–12 teacher and an expert in their relevant field, in partnership with outstanding local teachers and administrators. Our faculty fully supports the need to assess and ultimately improve teacher preparation programs through transparent, credible efforts aimed at linking the inputs of candidate preparation with the outputs of enhanced student learning, based upon rigorous standards broadly agreed upon by experts in the field. Such investigations would entail the consideration of multiple sources of evidence as well as direct interaction with college faculty, partnering K–12 teachers, and teacher candidates. Unfortunately, the methodologies utilized by NCTQ, based on a distant assessment of course syllabi and college catalogs, can’t possibly provide a complete and accurate assessment of the performance of teacher education programs. While reviewers have seemingly grasped many of the outstanding features of our program through this review (e.g. our high degree of candidate selectivity, the quality of our clinical experience sequence, the expertise of faculty, the complete nature of course offerings), many of the more subtle and frequently more significant dimensions of the program (e.g. the integration of a high quality liberal arts experience with the professional course sequence; the intentional infusion and developmental integration of topics such as the use of technology and classroom management across courses) have been much more difficult to convey via document analysis alone. In addition, in several respects we are, in effect, being “downgraded” for relying on what NCTQ considers to be flawed state Basic Skills and content tests, as well as for following state mandates regarding academic requirements for secondary teachers in the sciences and social sciences. Without a more robust assessment approach, it is impossible to accurately evaluate the quality of a program, as measured against the program’s own unique institutional mission or any set of established standards. In the future, we urge NCTQ to review its approach to program assessment and to truly collaborate with college and university faculty in Illinois and across the nation as we all work to improve teaching and enhance the learning experiences of all children.
www.nctq.org/edschoolreports
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