Student Teachers Perceptions Of A Teacher Training Program - Statistical Data Included

College Student Journal, March, 2001 by Henry S. Williams, Osman Alawiye

The evaluation of an institution must, to a large extent be based on the degree to which its educational program meets the needs of students in the area it serves. Since these needs are related to the opportunities, conditions, program effectiveness, it is important that the students analyze and describe the services they generally receive from the institution.

In the last decade there has been increasing support for teacher education reform. Often, a four-year undergraduate education is not sufficient to prepare teachers for success in the classroom. To help improve teacher quality, many organizations are lobbying for higher standards, through more valid and reliable assessment measures. Therefore, the goal of this study is to determine whether the teacher education program offered to student teachers in our teacher preparation institution in Ellensburg, Washington is perceived adequate. The result to our question suggests that the teacher,training program offered to pre-service student candidates in the teacher preparation program is adequate.

Preparing teachers for the rigors of teaching in our present school systems is a challenging task for every institution (Mason, 1997). Over the past years, the public and politicians have become concerned with the quality of teachers in our public schools. As a result of this concern, today's educational institutions are most interested in the level of preparedness of their teacher candidates. No longer is it sufficient, for the purpose of accreditation or image building for that matter, that teacher preparation programs build fancy facilities, buy the right technology, maintain low student teacher ratios, or even have voluminous books stacked in their pre-service centers. Today, these process variables in themselves are neither sufficient nor adequate substitutes for positive educational outcomes and high academic achievement standards. To quench the public's insatiable thirst for educational reform, teacher colleges are utilizing their resources in the right combination to produce the desired educational results: measure students learning (Stiggins, Kappan, 1991). Fourteen years ago, both the Holmes Group and the Carnegie Commission Task Force proposed a new model for teacher education and the teaching profession. The Holmes Group in 1986 proposed to develop "competent teachers empowered to make principled judgments and decisions on their students' behalf." Individuals who possess broad and deep understandings of children, the subject they teach, the nature of learning and schooling, and the world around them, and who "exemplify the critical thinking they strive to develop in students" (p.28). The Carnegie Commission made the assertions that teachers "must be able to learn all the time. Teachers will not come to school knowing all they have to know, but knowing how to figure out what they need to know, where to get it, and how to help others make meaning out of it" (1986, p.25).

Determining the extent to which pre-service teachers achieve state benchmarks and readiness for effective teaching in the public schools, however, is no simple matter. Most states require some form of an examination for entry into the teacher profession. Other states are designing their own tests to raise standards for teachers. But state attempts to raise standards have met strong resistance from the teacher profession. A few years ago, some southern states set higher cut-off scores on the National Teachers' Examination in an attempt to raise standards for teachers. Teacher lawsuits erupted which resulted in implementation delays. Recently, Massachusetts implemented a new test for candidates seeking entry into the state's teacher profession. The high rate of teacher failure caused considerable controversy while teachers questioned the validity of a test they argue failed to measure what most institutions prepared them to know. Thus, in determining the readiness of pre-service teacher candidates what appears more useful than state standardized tests is some internal assessment mechanisms that would provide teacher preparation program administrators information about the effectiveness of their programs. The logic is that effective teacher preparation programs produce effective teachers. In other words, what prospective teachers experience during the course of their teacher preparation program must be carefully planned and carried out to maximize the candidate's potential for success and to lead them to employ effective teaching practices.

There are many information sources that can be utilized to measure the different aspects of a teacher preparation program. This study utilizes one information gathering source to determine the effectiveness of our teacher preparation program.

Purpose

The evaluation of an institution must, to a large extent be based on the degree to which its educational program meets the needs of students in the area it serves. Since these needs are related to the opportunities, conditions, and program effectiveness, it is important that the students analyze and describe the services they generally receive from the institution. To this end, the participants in this study are pre-service teacher candidates who have completed their student teaching in two of our centers on the West Coast.