THE ESSENTIAL ROLE OF CLINICAL FACULTY - IN TEACHER PREPARATION FOR HIGH-NEED SCHOOLS
Victoria Chou
University of Illinois at Chicago
When I was an assistant professor on the track to tenure way back in the mid-1970s, my academic year was markedby the sheer insanity of making dozens of clinical placements in a very short timeframe each semester. Placements were followed by cycles of school visits to my preservice teachers, first all over the map in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia; and later all over the Chicagoland area. My unpaid summers were spent analyzing the data I’d madly collected during the school year and writing up my research for publication, lest I “perish” at tenure time.
I inhabited two fulfilling and desirable identities—teacher educator/field instructor and researcher—but I could not bring the two identities into any semblance of balance. I could not help but notice that this “Janus” state was uniquely characteristic of faculty charged with responsibility for the early fieldwork of teacher preparation programs that are most commonly—albeit not exclusively—concentrated in departments of curriculum and instruction or teacher education. Other faculty stepped into schools only to conduct research. Or university supervisors without faculty appointments and with no other connection to the teacher preparation program were hired to handle the time-consuming work of supervising student teaching.
Oh, how times have changed at our place! Starting in the 1990s, a handful of our teacher preparation programs decided to commit to placing teacher candidates exclusively in Chicago’s public schools, and a greater proportion than before in Chicago’s poorest, racially segregated schools, as opposed to magnet or selective enrollment schools. The thinking was that our candidates had to practice teaching in such schools, if they were to learn how to teach well in such schools. We had to build relationships in unfamiliar schools and communities more accustomed to having researchers marching in and studying their children, schools that initially regarded our approach with suspicion. We quickly realized we could not and should not rely on part-time adjunct faculty to establish the necessary long-term relationships we sought to support our teacher candidates. Out of this realization grew our commitment to differentiating the standard faculty role and creating and investing in full-time clinical faculty positions.
Our clinical faculty role is similar to what are known as “practice professors” in other institutions, central to recent (re)conceptualizations of teaching as a clinical practice profession (AACTE, 2010). Today approximately one-fifth of our faculty members are clinical faculty funded from our base state budget; several others are externally funded from professional preparation grants. Most have terminal degrees in their fields, but not all do; nearly all of our clinical faculty have had classroom teaching experience and prior experience mentoring teacher or school leader candidates. We have promotion norms and an established clinical faculty promotion process, developed by clinical and tenured faculty; clinical faculty serve on the promotion committee. Newcomers to the College cannot differentiate between tenure-line and clinical faculty in terms of full participation in the life of the College, and the intellectual exchanges among clinical and tenure-line faculty are regularly acknowledged to be beneficial to both.
Our original clinical faculty position descriptions focused almost exclusively on the placement and supervision of teacher candidates, with teaching confined to the seminar accompanying the clinical experience. Roles are no longer so prescriptively configured; rather, responsibilities depend upon each program’s special demands. Clinical faculty responsibilities, now negotiated with department chairs, have expanded to include program leadership and development, teaching professional education courses and the occasional doctoral seminar, securing and directing federal professional preparation grants, mentoring new teachers and providing professional support to more experienced teachers, conducting applied research, and disseminating new knowledge through standard publication and presentation outlets. One clinical faculty member supported both our faculty and partner schools in the use of instructional technology; another collaborates on program design and supervises the clinical faculty who coach our principal interns; still another is dedicated to developing on-line programming with other faculty, and two others focus exclusively on supporting science education and mathematics education, respectively.
In some ways, the role affords more faculty flexibility, creativity, and control over one’s work than the standard faculty model does, witness clinical faculty receiving two of our three American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Best Practice Awards in recent years.
Clinical faculty members’ intentional hybrid scholar/practitioner roles make them quintessential boundary spanners, working between school and university, between researchers and practitioners, and within and across programs. They are trusted intermediaries, when things go awry in a communication or a relationship, as they sometimes will. They pave the way into school communities for other faculty members who may offer or seek support. A number of our clinical faculty have such exemplary and durable relationships with particular CPS schools that their former student teachers are now mentoring our newest student teachers in these schools. It is no wonder, as a result, that some CPS schools have exceptionally high concentrations of UIC teachers.
While we all await the inevitable development of longitudinal student databases that will link teacher outcomes two ways—forward to student outcomes and backward to teacher preparation programs, we point with justifiable pride to alternative meaningful indicators of clinical faculty members’ work. In two rounds of self-study, we’ve demonstrated that teacher candidates with clinical experiences in high-poverty, predominantly African American schools will more likely teach in high-poverty, predominantly African American schools, regardless of race of teacher candidate. We found a similar result for Latino school clinical placements and first teaching position choices. We see these positive correlations as hopeful signs that the school relationships cultivated by our experienced, full-time clinical faculty members have in turn supported prospective teachers who have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to choose to teach (typically) “other people’s children,” without the need for teacher pay incentives to go where the need is greatest.
The clinical preparation of teachers: A policy brief. (2010). Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.