AACTE’s first taste of the National Teachers Hall of Fame

In the Big Apple, The National Teachers Hall of Fame (NTHF) spiced up the annual conference of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) with a sponsored panel and the ascension to Chair-elect of the AACTE Board of Directors by Dr. Kay Schallenkamp, of long-time NTHF board member and current president of Black Hills State University in South Dakota.

While not exactly a coup, Dr. Schallenkamp’s commitment to AACTE predates her current position and tenure as president of Emporia State University (1997-2006). Joining NTHF and AACTE just made sense as Schallenkamp noted that “in addition to honoring individual teachers each year, the NTHF mission includes advancing the teaching profession.”

For this reason, Schallenkamp moderated a panel with the deceptively benign title, “Educating School Teachers – A discussion on Dr. Arthur Levine’s report.” Across the teaching world, Levine’s report drew both fanfare and criticism when released in 2006 for attempting to point out the good and bad surrounding teacher education.

Levine wisely chose to highlight a few case examples of “Exemplary Teacher Education Programs” whose representative comprised the special panel and recounted key factors that make their programs noteworthy, accountability issues and what is necessary to focus public attention on the positive attributes of education.

Panelists included Mary E. Diez, Dean, Master of Arts in Education and Nancy C. Jelen, Dean, School of Education from Alverno College, Teresa A. Mehring, Dean of The Teachers College at Emporia State University, Kristin Sayeski, Director of Field Placements, Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles Ducommon Professor of Education of Stanford University’s Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP).

Dean Jelen expressed Alverno’s successful mixture of outcome-based curriculum, high graduation standards and extensive field work depends largely on ensuring that students successfully demonstrate teaching skill in order to graduate. Each panelist echoed the clinical demonstration aspect over classroom learning underscoring the collective emphasis on education delivery. To this end, Dr. Darling-Hammond, who as Co-Director of the School Redesign Network, banded together with twenty five other California institutions in creating a post-education assessment, much like the National Board Certification, that provides portfolio scoring for licensure recommendation and also helps institutions gauge measure and improve.

Each panelist stressed the importance of quality fieldwork locations and engaging mentor teachers as key elements to ensure effective skill demonstrations, yet the elements are modeled in different ways. UVA students, whose program is a 5-year joint degree in education and an arts and sciences major, attend “counterpoint” seminars jointly presented by both faculties to process how content should be presented in an education setting. ESU students spend the entire senior year in the field either taking classes or teaching with a mentor teacher.

Critics of education often dwell on failures so Schallenkamp challenged panelists to offer insight on how to change the dialogue. Consensus around data issues suggests that technology enables the collection of mounds of data, yet, there are no universally accepted metrics on what education processes create good if not great teachers. As an example, panelists noted that their collective “5-year teacher career retention rates” were between 70% and 93%, but even measure offers nothing about the quality of education delivered.

Schallenkamp wrapped up the panel acknowledging the value The National Teachers Hall of Fame sees in discussing innovations, controversies and challenges facing the teaching profession.

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The Mission of The National Teachers Hall of Fame is to recognize and honor exceptional career teachers, encourage excellence in teaching, and preserve the rich heritage of the teaching profession in the United States.

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) is a national voluntary association of almost 800 higher education institutions and other organizations and is dedicated to ensuring the highest quality preparation and continuing professional development for teachers and school leaders in order to enhance PK-12 student learning. Collectively, the AACTE membership prepares more than two-thirds of the new teachers entering schools each year in the United States.

Last Updated July 2, 2007>