Studying Teacher Education Programs Enriching and Enlarging The Inquiry

The SAGE Handbook for Research in Education
Studying Teacher Education Programs: Enriching and Enlarging the Inquiry
Contributors: Clifton F. ConradRonald C. Serlin Print Pub. Date: 2006 Print ISBN: 9781412906401 Online ISBN: 9781412973359 DOI: 10.4135/9781412973359 Print pages: 78-90 This PDF was generated from SAGE Research Methods Online. Please note, the pagination does not follow the pagination of the print book.
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Studying Teacher Education Programs: Enriching and Enlarging the Inquiry

This chapter builds on and enlarges the study of an enduring problem in teacher education, namely, the nature and impact of different kinds of teacher education programs at the preservice level. It reviews the ways in which the effects of different teacher education programs have been studied in the past, and it offers suggestions for how to conceptualize and conduct studies that (a) illuminate the nature and impact of different approaches to educating teachers and (b) differentiate selection effects and influences of teaching and policy contexts from those of the teacher education programs. The integration of quantitative and qualitative research methods within coherent research programs is recommended as the optimal way in which to illuminate the complexity and impact of specific aspects of various pathways into teaching.
Teacher Education As A Field Of Study

I begin by examining the nature of research in teacher education as a whole and describing the major genres of research in the field. I then focus on one particular aspect of the research, namely, studies of teacher education programs. Following a discussion of problems with existing research on teacher education programs, I draw on the work of the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Panel on Research and Teacher Education (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005; Zeichner, 1999) to offer suggestions for how to strengthen this research so that it will be better able to illuminate the impact of different pathways into teaching on teachers and their pupils. Compared with other research areas in education, such as the history of education, the psychology of learning or literacy, and mathematics education, research on teacher education is a relatively young area of study in the United States. Although there has been research about teacher education since the early part of the 20th century (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005; Zeichner, 1999), only since the 1970s has teacher education research emerged as a legitimate area of doctoral study in graduate schools of education. Prior to 1984 when Division K was founded within AERA, researchers
Page 2 of 21 The SAGE Handbook for Research in Education: Studying Teacher Education Programs: Enriching and Enlarging the Inquiry Sage Research Methods Online
who studied aspects of teacher education either identified solely with the disciplines in which they received their training (e.g., sociology, history) or identified with a very small special interest group within the association (Zeichner, 1999). Now many research universities in the United States have at least one doctoral-level course in the study of teacher education, and several institutions have full-fledged doctoral programs that include a series of courses examining the research literature in the field. During its early phases, teacher education research was dominated by surveys of what practices existed in the field (e.g., Conant, 1963; Evenden, 1933), studies of changes in student teacher attitudes during their participation in teacher education programs (Cyphert & Spaights, 1964), and studies that indirectly sought to identify the characteristics of good teachers by surveying those in the field about what traits and abilities good teachers possessed (e.g., Barr, 1929; Charters & Waples, 1929). There was very little direct study of the process of teacher education at this early stage (Denemark & Macdonald, 1967). Several scholars have attempted to identify the different programs of research in contemporary research concerning preservice teacher education. For example, Koehler (1985) identified six different categories of research in the field: (1) studies of the skills, competencies, and attitudes of practicing classroom teachers that reflect on preservice teacher education; (2) studies of the skills, competencies, and attitudes of teacher education students that reflect either on their current or past education or on the future quality of the workforce; (3) evaluations of teacher education courses, methods within courses, or complete programs; (4) studies of teacher educators; (5) studies of institutions; and (6) studies of studies and research reviews (see also Katz & Raths, 1985; Kennedy, 1996; Lanier & Little, 1986; Turner, 1975). Cochran-Smith & Fries (2005), in an analysis of research syntheses, identify a shift in emphasis in research on preservice teacher education from the late 1950s onward. Their analysis argues that there has been a shift from an emphasis on research on teacher education as a training problem, to research on teacher education as a learning problem, to research on teadier education as a policy problem, even though all three kinds of research have existed throughout this whole period of time.
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The SAGE Handbook for Research in Education: Studying Teacher Education Programs: Enriching and Enlarging the Inquiry Sage Research Methods Online
This shifting set of priorities in the research has involved an expansion in research methodologies used to study teacher education and in the disciplinary lenses through which teacher education has been viewed. Following the nearly exclusive use of experimental and quasi-experimental comparisons of different behavior training methods during the 1960s and early 1970s (Peck & Tucker, 1973), research on teacher education began to incorporate naturalistic and interpretive methodologies, such as ethnography, case study, narrative inquiry, biography, and life history (e.g., Carter, 1992; Weber, 1993), as well as various critical, feminist, and poststructural analyses of different aspects of teacher education (e.g., Britzman, 2003; Giroux & McLaren, 1987; Maher & Rathbone, 1986; Popkewitz, 1998). In addition to the educational psychology-trained researchers who had dominated teacher education research up to the 1980s, researchers from other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, history, economics, and philosophy, also began to devote their attention to the study of teacher education (e.g., Clifford & Guthrie, 1988; Labaree, 2004; Steiner, 2004). In addition to a concern with the impact of teacher education on the behavior of teachers in classrooms (Gage & Winne, 1975), researchers began to incorporate outcomes that addressed the cognitive, moral, and ethical aspects of teacher development (e.g., Feiman-Nemser, 1983; Zeichner & Gore, 1990) and focused on the connections between various policy levers, such as teacher testing and course requirements, and a variety of outcomes related to teacher quality and pupil learning (e.g., Mitchell, Robinson, Plake, & Knowles, 2001). Since the early 1990s, much of the research on teacher education has involved self-studies by teacher educators of their own practices and programs (Loughran, Harris, Laboskey, & Russell, 2004). One reason for the prevalence of self-study research is the lack of access to funding for larger-scale studies of multiple programs (Zeichner, 2005). Teacher educators who have conducted these studies argue, however, that they and their programs benefit greatly from these inquiries (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998) and that self-study research provides a unique perspective on teacher education not obtainable from the outside (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). This chapter discusses a particular segment of research in teacher education that has connections to all three of Cochran-Smith and Fries's (2005) categories of research emphasistraining, learning, and policyand that is a subset of Koehler's third research category. Specifically, I discuss the study of the nature and impact of different
preservice teacher education program models or pathways into teaching since circa 1985, when this became a major policy issue in the United States. Before doing this, I place this body of research on teacher education programs within my own version of the field of teacher education research.
Varieties Of Current Research On Preservice Teacher Education

My own view of the current variety of research on preservice teacher education in the United States is based on a reformulation of the framework that I presented in my vicepresidential address to AERA in 1998 (Zeichner, 1999). There are several major kinds of research that have been focused on the preservice education of teachers in the United States. These include (a) surveys of current practices; (b) conceptual, historical, and comparative studies of teacher education; (c) studies of the process of learning to teach; (d) studies of teacher education participants, that is, teacher educators and teacher candidates; and (e) studies of the nature and impact of teacher education (as a whole; specific programs, courses, and program components; and instructional strategies) and of policies that affect teacher education. Following a brief description of each of these research genres, I discuss the central issue for this chapter of doing empirical research on teacher education programs. The first type of contemporary research on teacher education consists of largely descriptive survey studies that provide information to the research, policy, and practitioner communities about the current status of teacher education in the United States and sometimes in comparison with other countries. This includes both largescale national studies that seek to identify patterns in teacher education throughout the nation and studies that focus on documenting teacher education in specific regions or in particular specialty areas such as elementary education and bilingual education. Prominent examples of this work include the Research About Teacher Education (RATE) studies, sponsored by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education beginning in 1987, which described various characteristics of U.S. teacher education programs, teacher candidates, and teacher educators (Howey, 1997); regular compilations of teacher education policies in different states such as the National
Center for Educational Information annual reports on alternative teacher certification policies (e.g., Feistritzer, 2004); the ERIC Clearinghouse on Teacher Education's reports about the status of professional development school partnerships (Abdal-Haqq, 1995); and the Educational Testing Service's report on teacher education policies in different countries (Wang, Coleman, Coley, & Phelps, 2003). The second major category of research on teacher education consists of conceptual, historical, and comparative studies that go beyond presenting demographic data and examine various issues of teacher education through different theoretical lenses. one significant line of conceptual research in teacher education has sought to identify and discuss substantively different approaches to teacher education. This work has distinguished teacher education programs from one another based on the visions of teaching, learning, schooling, and society that they emphasized. Several different versions of alternative orientations to teacher education have been proposed by scholars in different countries (e.g., Avalos, 1991; Feiman-Nemser, 1990; Kirk, 1986; Liston & Zeichner, 1991; Zeichner, 2003). In addition to the work on different orientations to teacher education, there have been philosophical analyses of the different tensions in teacher education, such as the tension between theory and practice and that between liberal and technical, as well as critical analyses of some of what McWilliam (1994) referred to as the folkloric discourses of teacher education, for example, that coherent programs, more school experience, and more academic content courses are necessarily desirable (Buchmann & Floden, 1993; Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985; McDiarmid, 1992). There has also been a considerable amount of effort devoted to conceptual analyses of various popular slogans in teacher education that have dominated the discourse such as reflective teaching and social justice teacher education (e.g., Valli, 1993). In addition, there have been some studies that analyzed the content of the teacher education curriculum in different programs or teacher education textbooks or course assignments in terms of the academic rigor associated with them and/or in relation to the biases they contain (e.g., Steiner, 2004; Zeichner, 1988). Another aspect of conceptual work in teacher education has been analyses of the impact of external influences on teacher education programs such as state and federal government policies, philanthropic foundations, commercial publishers, test designers,
national program accreditation standards, and economic factors. Examples of this work include Labaree's (2004) analyses of the effect of market forces on the character and quality of teacher education programs, Early's (2000) analysis of federal policymaking in the United States, and Popkewitz's (1993) international research project that examined the role of the state in teacher education in several different countries. Some of this work has employed critical, postructural, and feminist lenses to analyze the various ways in which patterns of reasoning, norms, and patterns of communication (e.g., those stressing technical and managerial definitions of teaching) have been subtly imposed on teacher education structuring in certain possibilities while filtering out others (e.g., Gore, 1993; McWilliam, 1994). There has also been a great deal of important conceptual and empirical work done under the label of multicultural teacher education that has soundly critiqued current practices in teacher education programs for their lack of attention to various aspects of cultural diversity, documented the ineffectiveness of much of what is currently being done in this area, and offered analyses as to why these problems exist and what can be done about them (e.g., Irvine, 2003; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Finally, within the past two decades, there has been a significant increase in historical studies of teacher education that have provided new and important insights into the role of various factors such as the feminization of teaching and the social class backgrounds of teachers and teacher educators, developments in higher education generally, and the development of teacher education in the United States. Some of this work has linked the continued marginal status of teacher education in U.S. universities to the female nature of the occupation (Clifford & Guthrie, 1988; Herbst, 1989), to differences in social class background between teacher education faculty and other faculty (Lanier & Little, 1986), and to reward systems that discourage faculty from working in a sustained way in teacher education programs (Liston, 1995). The third major category of research in teacher education is work that has sought to illuminate the processes of learning to teach in different settings. These studies (e.g., Borko & Putnam, 1996; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Feiman-Nemser & Remillard, 1996; Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998) have used a variety of disciplinary frameworks to examine how prospective teachers knowledge, skills, and dispositions are influenced by their participation in a teacher education program or by
particular components of a teacher education program such as student teaching. This work has shown how difficult it is to change the often tacit beliefs, understandings, and worldviews that students bring to teacher education programs. In some cases, we have learned that prospective teachers transform the messages given in their programs to fit their preconceptions (e.g., Holt-Reynolds, 1992). This work has begun to tell us some things about how to increase the impact of a teacher education program on prospective teachers through means such as the organization of students into cohort groups, more connected relationships between schools and university-based courses, and the use of particular instructional strategies under certain conditions such as community field experiences, portfolio development, and action research. There have been an increasing number of longitudinal studies that follow candidates through their programs and into their early years of teaching, tracking their learning and attempting to attribute changes detected to various influences in and outside of the teacher education programs (e.g., Grossman et al., 2000; Kennedy, 1998). Some of this work has resulted in the generation of theories about the process of learning to teach (e.g., Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999). The fourth area of research on teacher education includes studies that focus on the participants in teacher education programs, namely, the candidates and their teacher educators. These studies go beyond merely describing the characteristics of these groups and attempt to identify the consequences of these characteristics. For example, Zumwalt and Craig (2005a, 2005b) analyzed the demographic and quality indicators associated with candidates in preservice teacher education programs in the United States and attempted to link particular characteristics to a variety of indicators associated with teacher quality and student learning. Lanier and Little (1986) discussed the consequences of the social class and gender patterns that exist among teacher educators for the status of teacher education in universities and for the teacher education curriculum. The final major area of research in teacher education is concerned with illuminating the nature and impact of different approaches to educating teachers at the preservice level and of policies that are affecting these approaches. For many years, there have been debates about the efficacy of different kinds of teacher education programs (e.g., Denemark & Nutter, 1984; Hawley, 1987; Tom, 1987; Von Schlichten, 1958), and during recent years, many alternatives to university- and college-based teacher education
programs have emerged and been given legitimacy by state education departments, including private for-profit programs (e.g., Dill, 1996; Morey, 2001). Although much of the discourse about the value of different pathways into teaching does not draw on evidence from empirical research, a body of research that emerged during the mid-1980s has examined the consequences for teachers and/or their pupils of entering teaching through different kinds of programs. There has also been a body of work focusing on the nature and impact of different program components, such as methods and foundations courses, and field experiences or specific instructional strategies, such as microteaching, action research, and case studies on different aspects of teacher quality and/or pupil learning (e.g., Clift & Brady, 2005; Floden & Meniketti, 2005; Grossman, 2005). Finally, a small body of research has focused on the impact of particular teacher education policies such as those related to teacher testing and program accreditation (Wilson & Youngs, 2005). This chapter focuses on research related to teacher education programs. Because of the variety of ways that now exist for people to enter teaching, it is important to begin to develop a better understanding of the consequences of entering teaching through different kinds of teacher education programs. As is shown in what follows, currently there is very little solid research about the impact of different pathways into teaching that can inform policy and practice.
The Idea Of A Teacher Education Program

One of the most important steps in doing research about teacher education programs is to define what is meant by a program type. Teacher education programs have been distinguished from one another in several different ways in the literature. The most common distinction used in research studies has been in terms of the structure of a program. Programs have been distinguished from one another by their length (e.g., 4 years, 5 years), by when they are offered (e.g., graduate level, undergraduate level), and by the institutions that sponsor them (e.g., college or university, school district, state education department, for-profit company). Programs have also sometimes been defined in terms of their admissions requirements and curricular emphases such as the amount of coursework in the arts and sciences versus education courses, whether they require a major in an academic subject, and the amount of time spent working in schools versus spent taking classes.
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As mentioned earlier, teacher education programs have also been distinguished from one another in terms of their conceptual orientations (e.g., Feiman-Nemser, 1990; Liston & Zeichner, 1991) or whether they have coherent themes that tie together the various program components (Barnes, 1987). Others have defined programs in terms of whether or not they have particular features such as student cohort groups and professional development school partnerships (Arends & Winitzky, 1996). Very few dimensions beyond the general structural labels (e.g., graduate/undergraduate, alternative/traditional) have been used by researchers who have studied the nature and impact of programs.
The Inadequacy Of Defining Teacher Education Programs By Structural Labels

There are several reasons why defining a teacher education program solely by a structural label, such as alternative or traditional, is a problem. First, Goodlad's (1990) national study of teacher education programs documented the ways in which the type of institution in which a teacher education program is located influences the substance of the program. Goodlad and his collaborators studied programs in 29 institutions across the United States that were representative of the different kinds of higher education institutions that offer teacher education such as liberal arts colleges, regional universities, and research universities. The high degree of institutional influence on teacher education that was found in this study strongly suggests that a 4-year program in a liberal arts college is very different from a 4-year program in a research university, for example, and that institutional type is an important factor in influencing the character and quality of teacher education programs. Similarly, differences in state policy contexts with regard to teacher education suggest that the state in which a program exists also strongly influences the character and quality of the program. For example, a program in Texas, where the state has placed severe credit limits on professional education courses in teacher education programs, is different from a program in a state such as Wisconsin, which has encouraged the expansion of the professional education component of programs. In addition, a program in a state that has mandated the national accreditation of teacher education programs,
such as New York, is not the same as a program in a state that does not require national accreditation of teacher education programs. In addition, the character and quality of teacher education programs and the outcomes associated with them are also affected by the subject areas for which teachers are being prepared to teach. For example, Natriello and Zumwalt (1993) studied a variety of alternative and traditional teacher education programs in New Jersey and found that the greatest influence on teacher retention for the graduates of the different programs was the subject areas of the programs rather than their structural type (alternative or traditional). For example, secondary mathematics teachers who had good opportunities for higher-paying jobs outside of education left teaching at much higher rates than did elementary and English education graduates (see also Murnane, Singer, Willett, Kempe, & Olsen, 1991). A final limitation in describing teacher education programs by their structural type alone is that teacher candidates frequently experience their programs in ways that deviate from the program labels. For example, during the 1980s, I studied a so-called 5-year preservice teacher education program at the university of Florida as part of a national longitudinal study of several programs that followed teaching candidates through their programs and into their early years of teaching (Kennedy, 1998). We were interested in learning more about how teachers learned to teach writing and mathematics to diverse pupils and the ways in which specific aspects of teacher education contributed to this learning. One of the things I discovered in this study was that very few of the students in this 5-year program actually spent 5 years in the program. Many students spent their first 2 years in various community colleges around the state, and because of the teacher shortage in Florida at the time of the study, a significant number of teacher education students left the program early and completed their final student teaching experience as full-time teachers of record. This movement of students across institutions is not an uncommon occurrence, according to a survey of teacher education students conducted by Howey and Zimpher (1989). All of these factors mean that it does not make much sense to describe teacher education programs by only their structural characteristics, such as their length, the type of institutional sponsorship, and whether it is undergraduate or postgraduate, without considering things such as the substance of their curricula, the institutional and policy
contexts in which they exist, their admissions requirements, and the characteristics of teacher candidates. Unfortunately, researchers who have studied and compared different kinds of teacher education programs and their relationships to various kinds of outcomes have rarely paid attention to these other factors.
The Empirical Research On Teacher Education Programs

Between 2000 and 2004, Hilary Conklin and I conducted a review of peer-reviewed empirical studies on teacher education programs published between 1985 and 2004 as part of AERA's Panel on Research and Teacher Education that was charged with conducting an impartial and rigorous analysis of the research on various topics in teacher education (Zeichner & Conklin, 2005). In the review, we analyzed 37 studies that used a variety of research designs and methodologies and that attempted to link various kinds of teacher education programs to a variety of outcomes associated with teacher quality and pupil learning. Most of the studies were set up as comparisons of the outcomes associated with different program models. The studies were grouped into the following seven categories based on how teacher education programs were defined by researchers: Studies of 4-year programs versus 5-year programs Studies of state-sponsored alternative programs versus traditional programs Studies of university-sponsored alternative programs versus traditional programs Studies of school district-sponsored alternative programs versus traditional university-based programs Studies of Teach for America Comparisons of multiple alternative and traditional programs In-depth case studies of teacher education programs
Because of the complexity of the ways in which teacher education programs differ from one another, and because of the focus of the research on only a few structural characteristics, we were faced with the problem of defining the teacher education
programs in a way that would enable us to accumulate knowledge across the individual studies. We settled on a definition of different kinds of programs that were limited by the ways in which data were presented in the studies. For example, we defined an alternative teacher certification program, which was the most ambiguously defined type of program in the studies we reviewed, as a program that allows persons to enter the teaching profession without completing a traditional 4- or 5-year university-based program. This definition included university-based postbaccalaureate programs within the category of alternative. Because of the different ways in which researchers had defined alternative and traditional programs in their studies, this definition did not enable us to use all of the data from the studies in the way we preferred, but it came the closest to doing so among all of the possible definitions. If the data had been available, we would have preferred to distinguish teacher education programs based on differences in their assumptions about what teachers need to know and be able to do to be effective instructors and how they can best acquire this knowledge and these skills (Stoddart & Floden, 1996). Clearly, there is a need for those who do research about teacher education programs to use clearer and more consistent definitions of program dimensions and types. The studies that we reviewed examined the impact of the different types of teacher education programs on a variety of outcomes related to teacher quality and student learning. These included the numbers of teachers from different programs who entered teaching following program completion, where they taught (e.g., in schools that were difficult to staff), teachers projected commitment to teaching as a career, and how long they actually stayed. There were also a variety of measures of teaching quality, including teachers own sense of efficacy; their ratings of their own teaching and leadership practices; assessments of teaching based on various kinds of classroom observations done by supervisors, principals, and others; and pupil ratings of the quality of instruction. There were also a few studies that attempted to link teacher education programs to the learning of pupils taught by the graduates of different teacher education programs based on pupils standardized achievement test scores. Finally, in some of the studies, teacher education graduates were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of their preservice programs in preparing them to do particular things in the classroom (e.g., assessment, teaching English-language learners).
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Without getting into the details of the individual studies here beyond providing examples from studies of particular patterns in the research, I summarize what we learned from our analysis of the research and how I think that research on the nature and impact of teacher education programs can be improved to yield more useful knowledge. Doing research about the efficacy of different kinds of programs has become more important as the number of pathways into P-12 teaching has increased.
Problems With The Existing Research

In our review of peer-reviewed research on teacher education programs (Zeichner & Conklin, 2005), we saw several problems with how research on teacher education programs has been designed and carried out that limit its usefulness in generating knowledge that is useful to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. First, individual research studies have been carried out as if in a vacuum. There is very little evidence in this work of researchers building on one another's work, of clear and consistent definitions of key terms, and of the use of common research instruments across studies. The result is that it is very difficult to look across the studies on teacher education programs and draw any conclusions about what we have learned about the impact of particular kinds of programs. Second, most of the studies have examined the impact of programs that are vaguely defined according to a few structural characteristics. We know very little from these studies about the curriculum and instructional strategies used in the programs or about the social relations among candidates and between candidates and their teacher educators. We also know very little about the characteristics of the teacher candidates beyond their level or subject areas of preparation or about the contexts in which programs exist (e.g., schools used for clinical experiences, state policy contexts). The typical study compares graduates of Program A with graduates of Program B in terms of some subset of the outcomes just listed and then draws conclusions about the efficacy of the different programs. For example, in one widely cited study, Andrew (1990) compared graduates of 4- and 5-year programs at the university of New Hampshire and concluded, The nature of the internship and the additional course work required for the master's degree [in the five-year program] result in more effective
learning about teaching (p. 50). To some degree, the data that were presented in this research report supported this conclusion and showed more favorable results for 5year program graduates than for 4-year program graduates in a number of areas such as entry into teaching, career satisfaction, and retention. However, there are several problems with the way in which this study was conducted that illustrate why it has been hard to conclude anything definitive from existing studies on teacher education programs. Specifically, although on the surface the numbers indicate that the 5-year program is better than the 4-year program in terms of the outcomes of interest, there is not clear evidence in the study that the teacher education programs were responsible for these differences. Andrew (1990) recognized this problem and concluded, We cannot eliminate the possibility that differences observed between four- and five-year program graduates in this study are not simply the result of differences in academic ability (p. 50). Similarly, the findings of this study related to the higher retention rates of graduates of 5-year programs are of limited use because of the failure of the research report to provide information about the nature of the schools in which the graduates of the different programs taught. Teaching in schools in New Hampshire, where many of these teachers probably taught, is vastly different from teaching in, for example, Chicago or Los Angeles, and it does not make much sense to talk about the quality of teaching performance or retention without situating these data in relation to the demographic characteristics of schools. These problems of not providing adequate information about the entering characteristics of teacher education candidates (e.g., their knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to various aspects of teaching) or about the contexts in which teachers work are characteristic of the research about teacher education programs, including in the most expensive and ambitious of these studies such as Decker, Mayer, and Glazerman's (2004) national study of Teach for America (TFA). Another problem that is characteristic of this body of research is the consistent failure of researchers to describe the substance of the preservice programs that were attended by teachers. For example, in several of the studies of TFA, the achievement of pupils taught by TFA graduates was compared with that of pupils taught by nonTFA graduates (e.g., Decker et al., 2004; Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002; Raymond
& Fletcher, 2002). In addition to the problem of not describing the nature of the TFA program in the specific parts of the country where it was studied, these studies provide little or no information about the preparation received by the non-TFA comparison groups. Although the studies suggest that comparisons are being made of the consequences of preparing teachers in an alternative program such as TFA and traditional university-based programs, some of the non-TFA teachers could in fact have been prepared for teaching in fast-track programs such as TFA. A number of elements of the TFA curriculum resemble those in traditional university-based programs. In many of the studies comparing outcomes associated with different kinds of programs, it is unclear how the contents of the programs being compared are similar to and different from one another. In every type of teacher education program, there will inevitably be a range of quality and the search for the most effective structural model of teacher education is doomed to failure, just as the quest for the most effective set of teaching behaviors was bound to fail (Kliebard, 1973). Defining a program as 5-year or 4-year, or as alternative or traditional, reveals very little about the key elements of the program and does not enable researchers to link the achievement of desired outcomes to particular program characteristics. A final limitation of the research on teacher education programs is the lack of consistency in the methods and instruments that are used to assess particular aspects of teacher education and various outcomes associated with teacher quality and pupil learning. For example, a number of the studies on teacher education programs have sought to connect the type of program experienced to the quality of teaching performance of program graduates. There are a wide variety of ways in which the quality of teaching performance has been assessed, including surveys of principals, supervisors, and mentors; use of classroom observation instruments; use of selfreports of the teachers; and ratings of teaching quality by pupils. other than the use of rating scales that ask someone (e.g., a supervisor, a mentor) to assess the quality of a graduate's teaching in comparison with other beginning teachers according to unstated criteria, there is almost no overlap between the ways in which teaching performance has been assessed across the studies. The same problem exists with regard to most of the outcomes that have been included in the studies.
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A second weakness in the assessment of outcomes associated with experiencing different kinds of teacher education programs is the narrowness of the way in which pupil learning has been assessed. In the few studies that have attempted to connect the type of teacher education program attended to the quality of the learning of pupils taught by program graduates, there has been nearly exclusive use of standardized achievement tests in defining student learning. The use of growth in standardized achievement test scores as a measure of pupil learning represents only a narrow range of academic performance. Although national attention is currently focused on cognitive measures of academic performance, a look at the broader history of the United States shows a strong and recurrent interest of the public in other outcomes such as students social, emotional, aesthetic, and civic development (Goodlad, 1984).
In-Depth Case Studies Of Teacher Education Programs

Most of the studies that we reviewed compared the graduates of different kinds of teacher education programs in the manner described in the preceding sections (Zeichner & Conklin, 2005). However, we also examined two in-depth case studies of sets of teacher education programs that sought to get inside the programs and illuminate their specific features that were linked to the achievement of various outcomes. In both of these studies (Darling-Hammond, 2000; National Center for Research on Teacher Education, 1991), a variety of program structures were examined and teams of researchers spent time observing classes and field experiences and interviewing the teacher candidates and their teacher educators. The research reports provide a much clearer picture than the studies discussed previously of both the programs and the contexts in which they are embedded. Both of these studies identified various program characteristics that were related to a variety of outcomes associated with teachers knowledge, beliefs, and practices and concluded that a program's substance, rather than its structure, had the major influence on teacher learning. In the Teacher Education and Learning to Teach (TELT) study, for example, Kennedy (1998) reported that programs that had similar structures sometimes had remarkably different influences on teacher candidates, whereas programs that had
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different structures sometimes had similar influences on teachers, depending on their substantive characteristics. In the TELT study and the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) case studies (Darling-Hammond, 2000), researchers generated lists of program characteristics that they believed were related to the achievement of desired teacher learning outcomes. Neither study sought to connect teacher education and teacher learning to student learning. Examples of these characteristics include a shared and clear understanding among faculty, students, and school personnel about good teaching that permeates all courses and field experiences; a clear set of practice and performance standards against which candidates coursework is guided and assessed; and courses that are taught in a manner that relates learning to real problems of practice (Darling-Hammond, 2000). Although there is some question about the adequacy of the evidence that is presented to support these conclusions (Zeichner & Conklin, 2005), these studies have begun to provide the basis for eventually being able to link specific teacher education program components to desired outcomes. Another problem with the lists of the characteristics of good teacher education programs that have emerged from these studies is that they are stated in very general terms. For example, one of the characteristics of a good program that appears in most accounts is the presence of mentoring. Nothing is said in the presentation of these characteristics about the conditions under which these features were effective in achieving desired outcomes. For example, with regard to mentoring, we need to know things such as how the mentors were chosen, whether they work in the same schools and subject areas as their mentees, how they were prepared and are supported for their roles, and the relationship between the mentoring and teacher evaluation. Despite the limitations of the in-depth case studies of programs, they provide the basis for further research into the program characteristics that make a difference in terms of teacher and learner outcomes.
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Enlarging And Enhancing Research On Teacher Education Programs

Given all of these problems with research that attempts to study teacher education programs and link particular outcomes connected to teacher quality and pupil learning, what can be done to raise the quality of research in this area so that it will produce knowledge useful to other researchers, policymakers, and teacher educators? The first thing that needs to be done is for researchers to consciously build on the work of other researchers and to view themselves as part of a research community. I have tried to convey in this chapter the complex factors that influence how a teacher education program contributes to both teacher learning and student learning. Both teacher learning and student learning are affected by a number of factors beyond the specific type of teacher education program a teacher attends. These include the individual attributes brought by prospective teachers to their programs, the specific features of these programs and their components (e.g., curriculum, instruction, social relations), the types of institutions in which the programs are located, and the like. obviously, no single research study can adequately deal with all of this complexity. These are characteristics that can be addressed only in coherent programs of research (Shulman, 2002). Programs of research involve researchers taking on various aspects of a general problem and adding new understandings with each new study. The general problem of the relationships between teacher education and teacher and student outcomes can be represented by the graphic in Figure 5.1. So far, I have argued that the existing research has largely sought to connect teacher education programs to aspects of teacher and student learning without taking into account the characteristics that teacher candidates bring to their programs and the many factors in and outside these programs. If researchers begin to focus on these neglected factors, better coordinate their studies, use clear and consistent definitions of key terms related to the programs and teacher and student learning, and use common research instruments and protocols, this research will begin to produce knowledge and theoretical explanations for the ways in which teacher education influences teachers and student learning. Some of the instrumentation used in studies of teacher education programs has been made public
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for others to use (e.g., Kennedy, Ball, & McDiarmid, 1993), but there needs to be much more effort to develop greater consistency across studies in how various aspects of teacher education programs and their outcomes are studied. A variety of methodological approaches are needed to implement this program of research on the relationships between teacher education and teacher and student learning. Although it is expensive and out of the reach of most individual researchers to conduct in-depth program case studies such as the TELT and NCTAF studies discussed earlier, or to conduct large-scale studies using both quantitative and qualitative methods such as the study of alternative pathways into teaching in New York City (Boyd, Grossman, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2003) and the Mathematica Policy Research Institute study of TFA (Decker et al., 2004), individuals and small groups of researchers can address some of the problems in the existing research even in the small-scale self-studies that dominate research in the field. In addition to situating their own research in relation to other similar research and discussing what piece of the research program is being added by their research (e.g., theoretically, methodologically), researchers need to carefully describe the program or programs that are being studied in terms of the areas identified in Figure 5.1. Specifically, researchers need to describe and examine the institutional and policy contexts in which the program(s) exist; relevant characteristics of the teacher candidates and teacher educators; and enough detail about curriculum, instructional practices, and social relations in the program(s) and program organizational characteristics that the potential exists to be able to link the achievement of certain outcomes to particular program characteristics. The outcomes and the ways that are developed to assess them need to be clearly defined and linked to other work that has focused on the same issues (e.g., the development of teachers cultural competence). Finally, if the research includes a focus on the teaching performance or the retention of program graduates, the nature of the schools in which those graduates teach needs to be described in enough detail so that the findings can be compared with those from other studies. Figure 5.1 Studying the Relationships Between Teacher Education and Teacher and Student Learning
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These recommendations apply whether the research is a small-scale study of one's own program or a large-scale national case study of many programs. They also apply whether the researchers employ sophisticated quantitative research methods (e.g., hierarchical linear modeling), ethnographic methods, or some combination of different methods. Because of the complexity of the problem of studying teacher education programs and their outcomes, I argue that the research program as a whole should include a variety of different methodological approaches. Some of the most interesting work now going on involves qualitative researchers and economists working together in research teams employing a variety of methodologies within the same study (Boyd et al., 2003). I believe that these research recommendations, if followed, can significantly enhance our understanding of the consequences of teachers entering teaching through different pathways and that they will enable us to differentiate, in ways that are not currently feasible, the ways in which individual teachers attributes, institutional and policy contexts, and particular features of teacher education programs all contribute to desired outcomes. University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Studying Teacher Education Programs Enriching and Enlarging The Inquiry

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The SAGE Handbook for Research in Education

Studying Teacher Education Programs: Enriching and Enlarging the Inquiry

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Studying Teacher Education Programs: Enriching and Enlarging the Inquiry

Teacher Education As A Field Of Study

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Varieties Of Current Research On Preservice Teacher Education

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The Idea Of A Teacher Education Program

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The Inadequacy Of Defining Teacher Education Programs By Structural Labels

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The Empirical Research On Teacher Education Programs

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Problems With The Existing Research

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In-Depth Case Studies Of Teacher Education Programs

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Enlarging And Enhancing Research On Teacher Education Programs

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