In Both Educator Preparation and School Reform
While the belief that teachers and school leaders must understand and address the needs of all children has become a core premise of how we prepare educators, too few enter the profession with an understanding of the developmental sciences, which research says have a critical impact on students’ ability to learn.
A new report from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the professional accrediting organization for schools, colleges, and departments of education, says that despite growing evidence of the impact that developmental sciences knowledge and ability to apply it have on student learning, little effort has been made to ground school reform and educator preparation in the developmental sciences, which includes cognitive science, neuroscience, and the science of child and adolescent development.
The report, The Road Less Traveled: How the Developmental Sciences Can Prepare Educators to Improve Student Achievement: Policy Recommendations, was prepared by a multi-disciplinary panel of experts, including some of the nation’s most prominent educators, psychologists, and authorities on young people from related disciplines. Its findings include:
• Educator preparation programs provide insufficient grounding in the developmental sciences, including cognitive science and the science of child and adolescent development.
• Programs must integrate academic study in the behavioral sciences with real opportunities to implement child and adolescent development best practices in classrooms and communities.
• Policymakers must consider the importance of child and adolescent development as they design new standards and assessments of evaluating student and teacher performance—particularly when turning around low-performing schools, whose students are often in particular need of developmental supports to improve achievement.
“Teachers cannot improve learning if they don’t know how to help address the social, emotional, and cognitive needs of children and adolescents,” says Dr. James P. Comer, founder of the Yale Child Study Center School Development Program and associate dean of the Yale School of Medicine, and co-chair of the NCATE expert panel. Dr. Robert Pianta, a prominent psychologist who is the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and who co-chaired the panel, noted the urgency of the matter.
“Developmental science is not ‘fluff’ that can be considered optional or an add-on to what schools do or how educators are prepared,” he says. “If we don’t act now to integrate development sciences knowledge into preparation programs, we may lose another generation of learners.”
Growing Evidence that Behavioral Science Is Crucial to Achievement
The report draws on more than a decade of research linking teachers’ ability to address social, emotional, and cognitive development with increased student achievement results. Studies suggest that as many as half of all students become chronically disengaged from school, and that key social, emotional, and cognitive traits are more likely to be underdeveloped among at-risk students, contributing to higher dropout rates and persistent achievement gaps. Conversely, a meta-analysis of 213 school programs that employ developmentally focused approaches to social and emotional learning found an 11 percentile-point gain in student achievement, as well as reduced behavioral issues. The report details such research and cites the example of Asheville City Schools in North Carolina, where achievement gaps between black and white students closed rapidly following a systemic reform implementing James Comer’s School Development Program, which is based on developmental principles.
The report was developed to identify ways to improve educators’ developmental knowledge and ability to apply it following a 2007 report from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) that concluded that key elements of a child’s development, including social, physical, emotional, and cognitive factors, can have “far-reaching effects” on that child’s ability to learn.
NCATE and NICHD collaborated to identify gaps between what is known about child development and what is taught in educator preparation programs, which led NCATE to convene a national expert panel to produce this report, with funding from the Strategic Knowledge Fund, a partnership between the Foundation for Child Development and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Recommendations
The report urges policymakers, teacher preparation programs, and other stakeholders to:
• Revamp educator preparation programs to improve teachers’ knowledge of child and adolescent development. This can be done, the report says, “by providing quality coursework, along with deep and sustained opportunities for candidates to practice teaching.” To do so, educator preparation programs must develop new tools and resources to guide educators in learning and improving developmentally sensitive instructional techniques, such as evidence-based “common denominators” that identify effective practices in the classroom.
• Include child and adolescent developmental strategies in standards and evaluation systems. Key elements of child and adolescent development science should be incorporated into accreditation and new academic content standards and into assessment practices. In equal fashion, emerging measures of teacher effectiveness should include measures of an educator’s knowledge and application of child and adolescent development strategies.
• Acknowledge the need to address developmental issues in turning around low performing schools. Evidence suggests that culturally specific knowledge of child and adolescent development can improve student learning in schools that serve high poverty, high-need communities.
The Complete Commissioned Papers
Supplementary Materials
Abstracts of Meta-Analysis Results of Developmentally-Oriented Programs
Briefs of the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education
Learning How Much Quality is Necessary to Get Good Results for Children (Adobe PDF)
Readiness for School Involves an Array of Skills (Adobe PDF)
Expanding School Readiness Gains in Kindergarten (Adobe PDF)
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