Student Teachers Matter: The Impact of Student Teachers on Elementary-Aged Children in a Professional Development School

Teacher Education Quarterly, Spring 2004 by Fisher, Douglas, Frey, Nancy, Farnan, Nancy

Trends in teacher education emphasize collaboration between schools and universities in the preparation and continued professional development of classroom teachers. These linkages are often made under a variety of professional development school (PDS) partnerships (Carnegie Forum, 1986). The works of Goodlad (1990), Levine (1992), and Darling-Hammond (1994) have been widely disseminated, and all are valuable sources of information. They all stress improved preservice preparation as a means of attaining school reform and the efficacy of school-university partnerships as a means of improving preservice education. More recently, the report of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (1996) has recommended the reformation of teacher education through the PDS model. Abdal-Haaq ( 1998) reports that there are over 600 school-university partnerships, with the PDS becoming a widely used vehicle for the educational and professional development of both preservice and in-service teachers.

Interestingly, the same forces that spawned the PDS movement have also given rise to the reform movement with its mandate for accountability. The hallmarks of the reform movement are curriculum frameworks, benchmarks, and performance standards. Forty-five states now have standards for students in place; periodic testing to determine whether the standards are being met; and some policy to hold students, teachers and schools accountable for the results (Gergen, 1999; Stone, 1999).

As defined in the NCATE PDS Standards Field Test Project Document (2000), the mission of the PDS "is professional preparation, professional development at all levels (involving school-based and university-based faculty and administrators), and improved learning for students with diverse needs" (p. 2). This definition, developed through an extensive research and development process, captures the best thinking of the PDS movement. Sometimes described as analogous to teaching hospitals in medicine, "these schools [PDSs] aim to provide sites for state-of-theart practice that are... organized to support the training of new professionals, extend the professional development of veteran teachers, and sponsor collaborative research and inquiry" (Darling-Hammond, 2000, p. 169).

While it has been difficult to separate student achievement from other PDS outcomes, Teitel (2001) argues that multiple measures must be used to assess PDS impacts, particularly "impacts on student learning; impacts on the preparation of preservice teachers, administrators, and other educators; and impacts on the continuing professional development and learning of all the adults who work in the schools and universities" (p. 61). Stallings (1991) and Houston et al. (1999) documented a relationship between changes in teacher behaviors and increased student achievement in the PDS. These findings are further supported by the work of Goddard, Hoy, and Hoy (2000), in which they developed an instrument to measure collective teacher efficacy, defined as "the perceptions of teachers in a school that the efforts of the faculty as a whole will have a positive effect on students" (p. 480).

However, as Knight, Wiseman, and Cooner (2000) point out, there remains a dearth of research on the impact of the PDS on student achievement. They offer various reasons for the paucity of research in this area, the most obvious one being highly complex learning environments and the difficulty of isolating variables in a way that directly ties a PDS to student achievement. A research team comprised of preservice and inservice teachers and university faculty attempted to overcome this research problem by designing a mixed methodology study of student outcomes on newly created writing and math programs. While acknowledging that a direct causal link between the PDS and student outcomes is difficult to substantiate, the researchers found that student achievement increased significantly on the interventions designed collaboratively within the PDS. They concluded that because the activities affected students positively, and "at the same time provided professional development for preservice and inservice teachers, educators could feel confident about their PDS commitment" (Knight, Wiseman, & Cooner, 2000, p. 35).

Three key stakeholders are generally identified in the research about Professional Development Schools - preservice teachers, experienced teachers, and K12 students (Teitel & Abdal-Haqq, 2000). The purpose of this current research was to examine the impact of one stakeholder group, preservice teachers, on another, the students in their assigned practicum classrooms. An experimental design was -used to study the student achievement outcomes in classrooms with student teachers compared with classrooms in which no student teachers were present that year. The importance of this research is underlined by Fry and Konopak's (2002) call to action, saying that "while those involved in teacher education have made great strides in developing a coherent and defined knowledge base, there I still much work to be done" (p. x).