Student Teaching Leaves Much To Be Desired

Student teaching serves as a capstone experience for nearly 200,000 teacher candidates each year. In an effort to understand how to get student teaching "right," The National Council on Teacher Quality embarked on an ambitious effort to measure student teaching programs nationwide, assessing the degree to which they have the right pieces in place necessary for delivering a high quality program.

The result, Student Teaching in the United States, examines policies and practices at 134 universities and colleges to answer questions like... "Who is mentoring our future teachers?" "Do student teachers receive the feedback they need to improve?" "Does the experience sufficiently replicate the experience of being a teacher?"

In addition to providing a national snapshot of student teaching today and overall ratings of each of the 134 institutions, the report includes specific examples of exemplary student teaching practices and recommendations on how all programs can improve. A supplement to the study, "Key Ingredients for Strong Student Teaching" compiles documents that, together, form a model for a successful student teaching program.

Arranging student teaching placements is no easy task and that school districts hold a lot of the cards in negotiations. As one dean put it, "we're all having a dog of a time finding placement sites." Still, it's shocking that only 10 of the 134 programs the authors evaluated (7 percent) take the two most important steps to establish the foundation for a strong student teaching placement: ensuring that the cooperating teachers in whose classrooms student teachers are placed are fully qualified (experienced, effective instructors who are capable of mentoring an adult) by explicitly advertising those qualifications, and by actively participating in the selection process.

It's safe to presume that many teacher candidates are not placed with the exceptional classroom teacher who can help them become effective novice teachers. This bottom line from the review's detailed examination of thousands of documents from institutions and hundreds of principal interviews was borne out by recent surveys of Los Angeles and Miami teachers on their student teaching experiences.

Teacher preparation programs feel powerless to improve the cooperating teacher screening process because they are always scrambling to find a sufficient number of placements. However, each year the US produces more than twice as many elementary teachers as get hired fresh out of preparation. As this report describes in detail, if we focused on producing a smaller cohort of more qualified teacher candidates, we could kill quite a few birds with one stone — not the least of which would be having a lot less trouble placing them with the best cooperating teachers.