NCATE Changes Follow Board of Regents’ Example

Education majors at TBR institutions are beginning to take significantly fewer courses in how to teach. Instead, they spend a full year’s residency in schools, instead of a single semester of student teaching.

TBR Vice-Chancellor Paula Short says the goal is to replace methods that didn’t fully prepare teachers to take control of their own classrooms.

“They’re very frustrated that first year because they really have large gaps in their experience with schools and their understanding of how to deal with students, and we’re hoping that this approach, that it is addressing that issue, which has been longstanding.”

That change caught the attention of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, or NCATE. NCATE is revising its standards for the first time in a decade. From now on, to receive accreditation, universities have to follow TBR’s example and shift their focus to on-the-job learning.

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The Board of Regents began the new approach this year at two institutions: Middle Tennessee State University and East Tennessee State University. It will be fully phased in at all six TBR universities by 2013. Vice Chancellor Short says initial feedback from faculty at schools where MTSU and ETSU students did their residencies this year is very positive.

The year-long residency is not simply an extended version of traditional student teaching. Prospective teachers spend their first semester in the schools working in small groups on problem-solving activities. They do work in front of the classroom in the second semester, but rather than staying with one class the entire time, prospective teachers rotate through several classrooms.

Nearly 700 college and university education programs are accredited from NCATE. The 20 in Tennessee include Belmont, Lipscomb, Trevecca, Vanderbilt, and all of the universities in the Board of Regents and University of Tennessee systems.

The new NCATE standards follow the lead of TBR in another area, as well. They call for continual use of student performance data, like test scores, to evaluate how well particular teaching methods work.