Transformative Partnerships - Authentic Change: Outcomes of the ACI Teacher Quality Enhancement Partnership Projects

Transformative Partnerships-Authentic Change: Outcomes of the ACI Teacher Quality Enhancement Partnership Projects

By Jerry Berberet

 

Author Biography:

Jerry Berberet is Editor-in-Chief of Success in High-Need Schools, the online journal of ACI’s Center for Success in High-Need Schools. He has served as a key consultant in the development of ACI’s Center since its inception and was one of the guiding lights behind the development of ACI’s Transition to Teaching and Teacher Quality Enhancement-Partnership programs.

 

Body:

In 2004, the Associated Colleges of Illinois created the ACI Center for Success in High-Need Schools to partner with its 23 private liberal arts and master’s college and university members in a comprehensive program to recruit, prepare, and retain highly qualified teachers for schools in low-income communities across the state. The Center was founded on the assumption that the power of collaborative partnerships, especially between colleges and schools and between teacher education and arts and sciences faculty, would be transforming and that authentic change would occur to help close the achievement gap among the largely minority students at high-need schools. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the signature educational initiative of the Bush era, provided the primary funding impetus for the Center, of which a five-year $7.2 million Teacher Quality Enhancement Program (TQEP) grant was the centerpiece.

 

With their large and well-established teacher education programs, noteworthy for faculty mentoring of students and emphasis on hands-on field experiences, ACI members made ideal partners for a program whose success depended on committed long-term college-school relationships, shared responsibility and decision-making, and a joint focus on students and learning.  Eight ACI members from across Illinois became TQEP grant co-collaborators with the Center: Aurora University, Concordia University Chicago, Elmhurst College, Lake Forest College, McKendree University, North Central College, Quincy University, and University of St. Francis. The case studies that compose this issue of the Journal for Success in High-Need Schools tell their stories: what they put in place, what they achieved, and what they have sustained since TQEP grant funding ended in 2009.

 

Impressively, based on the quantitative evaluation of project achievements (OER Associates, 2009), these eight colleges and universities, with an aggregate undergraduate enrollment under 15,000 students, created partnerships with more than 60 elementary and secondary schools, worked with nearly 550 teachers in these schools, engaged the active collaboration of nearly 300 teacher education and arts and sciences faculty members, and saw the percentage of ACI teacher education graduates teaching in high-need schools jump from 35-43% during 2003-05.  A total of 965 pre-service program graduates from the eight TQEP institutions became high-need school teachers over the five-year project period, 100% of them being certified as NCLB “highly qualified.”  Reflecting the magnitude of the program’s impact, 2,471 pre-service candidate placements in high-need schools occurred during the project; 2,151 candidates participated in 425 career-related field experiences; 2,766 candidates were exposed to the economic, social, family, and ethnic issues of high-need schools through 436 field experiences; and 4,130 pre-service, accelerated program, and alternative certification candidates were trained to use technology.

 

Nearly 90% of these new teachers rated their pre-service preparation as effective after one year of teaching and 82% of a sampling of principals rated them as highly competent professionally.  Indeed, just under 97% of classes at partner elementary schools were taught by teachers with academic majors in the arts and sciences or with demonstrated high performance in their content areas and 99% of core academic courses in partner high schools were taught by teachers meeting this standard.  Regarding teacher retention, 425 beginning teachers attended at least two ACI induction workshops and 600 beginning teachers participated in the ACI online mentoring program.  Regarding student achievement, students at 47 of the 61 partner schools (77%) scored above the project goal of 50% of students exceeding state standards and 97% of students were promoted to the next grade level.  Admittedly, the data on student achievement is much less complete than that on the teachers.

 

The TQEP project had four goals:

1.  Redesign and restructure teacher education programs.

2.  Prepare pre-service candidates to be high quality teachers for high-need

schools.

3.  Effectively support and retain new teachers for high-need schools.

4.  Develop new policies and organizational structures to sustain TQEP campus

projects and to disseminate accomplishments.

 

The four goals of the TQEP project were seen as essential strategies to achieve transformation and lasting impact on teaching and learning in high-need schools. First, the project had to redesign and restructure participating teacher education programs through collaboration with arts and sciences faculty to increase the academic content of preparation curricula and use of relevant pedagogies in arts and sciences courses.  Teacher preparation programs also needed to develop strategies targeted to high-need schools such as Response to Intervention (RtI), differentiated instruction, and culturally relevant curricula.  Finally, through the school partnerships, the project dramatically expanded school-site instruction and field placements at all stages of the curriculum, thereby instituting a “culture of clinical practice” in candidate preparation.

 

While the first goal focused on curriculum, the second goal emphasized college-school relationships, recruiting candidates, developing their dispositions for teaching in high-need schools, and actively engaging cooperating teachers and their students, the latter through such approaches as professional development opportunities for teachers and programs designed for English as a Second Language (ESL) students. The second goal was intended to implement a level of collaboration and shared decision-making unheard of in traditional teacher education programs. The third goal addressed the chronic problem of teacher turnover in high-need schools (approximately one-half leaving after their first year) which has hamstrung educational reform for decades. The Center created the ACI Induction Academy, which offered four induction workshops each year for beginning teachers, a three-day teacher professional development summer conference, an online new teacher mentoring program, a new teacher coaching program involving veteran teachers who are ACI member alumni, and a leadership forum fostering dialogue between teachers and principals.

 

The fourth goal addressed challenges in which grant programs often fall short: how to sustain and institutionalize new programs and best practices developed with grant support, and how to disseminate successful and replicable project models to others so that grant funds have wider impact. Because the Center stressed replicability and sustainability from the beginning, all of the eight campuses put in place curricula and partnerships that have endured, and all developed truly innovative and distinctive program models worthy of being replicated by others. Regarding the former, the project achieved a generative quality on participating campuses one would associate with dynamic and vital programs that make continuous program improvement a way of life.  Regarding replicable models, each campus created programs that are being disseminated through such means as the Center’s annual Arts and Sciences Colloquium, monthly partnership meetings and forums, and the Journal for Success in High-Need Schools.

Examples of these program models, described in detail in the ACI member project case studies in this issue of the Journal, include:

•    Aurora University’s New Teacher Academy, established through teacher education and arts and sciences faculty collaboration, is an induction model resembling the ACI Induction Academy that serves Aurora area schools and teachers while also being open to pre-service candidates on campus.

  • Concordia University’s iPod Team involved faculty from three colleges who        collaborated with Lincoln School to train teachers to use iPods to help students with language acquisition through student research, development, and production of pod casts.
  • Elmhurst College developed TeacherNet, a professional development event on campus each semester for area high-need school teachers on such topics as Response to Intervention, cultural and literacy issues, and family physical and emotional health in the high-need community.
  • Lake Forest College’s signature program model is its Culturally Responsive Internship, offered in collaboration with the Waukegan Schools. This internship model is an intensive two-week introduction to the Waukegan community—I immigrant and socioeconomic patterns, family values, and cultural perspectives— as a basis for developing a culturally responsive instructional design and effective student relationships.
  • McKendree University established the Metro-East Teleconferencing program utilizing technology to enable candidates to gain field experiences through observing and interacting with high-need classrooms at a distance from the campus.
  • North Central College created the Pipeline to Urban Teaching program through which all pre-service candidates gain field exposure to teaching in high-need schools early in their preparation program. A special feature is the summer Junior-Senior Scholars program on campus which enrolls more than 150 inner-city students in a monthly long academic day camp and provides many candidates with intensive intern teaching opportunities.
  • Quincy University and the University of St. Francis founded professional development schools with high-need elementary and secondary school partners in their communities. These partnerships have been so successful that numerous arts and sciences faculty, as well as teacher education faculty, have become involved and most teacher preparation courses are offered at the school sites.  Curriculum development and program decision-making are joint ventures of professors, teachers, and administrators.

 

Key conclusions, perhaps “lessons learned,” emerge from the eight ACI member case studies (Fitzsimmons, 2009):

  1. The significant collaborations that occurred between teacher education and arts and sciences faculty members not only demonstrated that the two faculty groups have much to offer each other but helped to create or strengthen a culture that all faculty are responsible for preparing good teachers.
  2. The project refuted negative stereotypes and misperceptions, often shared by candidates and faculty alike, about the high-need school environment, resulting in increased interest and commitment to teaching careers and collaboration in high-need schools.  Perhaps Ladson-Billings pinpoints these misconceptions best when she argues for placing multiculturalism squarely in a framework focused not on “helping the less fortunate” but rather on supporting children to “become educated enough to develop intellectual, political, cultural, and economic independence.”
  3. Development of teacher preparation curricula featuring early and intensive field experiences builds candidate interest and sense of readiness for the challenges of a teaching career in the high-need school environment (Hollins and Guzman, 2005).
  4. Strong college-school partnerships are built on a foundation of active faculty-     teacher collaboration, school-site integration of candidate methods instruction and field experiences, and shared college-school decision-making. The more effective the partnership the greater the understanding and appreciation among the partners becomes for the role each plays in the preparation and professional development of strong candidates and teachers in high-need schools.

 

Indeed, the Associated Colleges of Illinois TQEP experience validates research on what makes college-school partnerships effective.  These findings underscore the importance of college and school acting as full and equal partners working side by side on schooling and teacher education plans they have developed collaboratively.  In addition to shared decision-making, it is important, as well, for the partners to share facilities, fiscal resources, and personnel.  Effective partnerships strive to institutionalize their work at the sites of all partners, in the process creating an inter-institutional structure that allows change and improvement to occur at both the PK-12 and higher education levels while fostering a more seamless system of PK-20 education.  (Clifford et al, 2007; Catelli et al, 2000)

 

References

Catelli, L.A., Padovano, K., & Costello, J. (2000). Action research in the context of a school-university partnership. Educational Action Research, 8 (2), 225-242.

Clifford, M. & Millar, S. (2008). K-20 partnerships: Literature review and recommendations for research. WCER Working Paper No. 2008-3.

Fitzsimmons, Jan. “Forward” in Associated Colleges of Illinois. (2009). Transformative partnerships/authentic change: Partner case studies & study of the experiences and performance of center graduates in high-need settings (unpublished).

Hollins, E. & Guzman, M.T. (2005). Research on preparing teachers for diverse populations. In Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education, Cochran-Smith, M., Ed. & Zeichner, K., Ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2001) Crossing over to Canaan: The Journey of new teachers in diverse classrooms. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

OER Associates. (2009). U.S. Department of Education Grant Performance Report (ED 524B, unpublished).