Abstract
We have just completed 5 years as editors of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), having published four full volumes (63-66) and part of one (62), and will hand over the privilege and responsibility to a new team from Michigan State University in the next issue. In one of our first editorials (Knight et al., 2012), we reflected on how views of teacher education research from both within and outside the profession influenced our vision for the journal. At that time, we saw our challenge as building on the emerging traditions of diversity and excellence established by previous teams of capable editors with the ultimate goal of further advancing research to establish teacher education as a distinct field with knowledge, histories, research methodologies, and practices that are recognized and recognizable. Furthering the goal would require us to bring together the three dimensions of teacher education—practice, policy, and research—in challenging and productive ways so that considerations of issues or challenges in teacher education would be enriched by careful attention from these multiple frames of reference. We recognized a number of obstacles: the reputation of research in teacher education as lacking rigor and relevance and, relatedly, an incomplete knowledge base that prevents us from connecting findings in meaningful ways to inform practice and policy (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002; Kaestle, 1993; Moss et al., 2006; National Research Council, 2002; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001); a lack of a sense of professional identity among teacher educators (Labaree, 2008); and publication of teacher education research in specialized content journals with limited audiences rather than in broader teacher education research journals.
In reflecting on our tenure as JTE editors, we see that putting our rhetoric into reality was challenging. The sheer number of manuscripts—more than 700 per year—was overwhelming even for a relatively large editorial team with diverse expertise and interests. We made concerted efforts to address our goal of improving quality; we devoted editorials (e.g., Knight et al., 2012) to the topic of quality and led interactive sessions at the annual meetings of our sponsoring organization, the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), to discuss what constitutes rigor in teacher education research. To address our goal of improving relevance, we sponsored major forums at AACTE meetings on current topics and solicited recommendations from teacher educators for theme issues focusing on emerging areas of interest.
Teacher Education Research Quality
Based on our review of manuscripts from the first year of our editorship (Volume 63), we identified four areas that authors could target to improve the quality of their research (Knight et al., 2013). The first area that we identified, appropriateness for JTE, involves an explicit connection to an important topic or issue related to research and scholarship in teacher education. We initially rejected a large number of articles prior to external review for two primary reasons: They focused on teachers, teaching, or K-12 students without a clear connection to teacher education or they used teacher education students or faculty as their sample but did not connect to relevant theory and previous methodological and empirical work in teacher education.
The second and third areas involve intertwined issues related to the nature of the research design and the samples used in the studies. We received a large number of manuscripts describing studies where the researchers were also the teacher educators or program developers and implementers and the samples were their own students. Whereas this relationship is not problematic in and of itself, the genre of many of the manuscripts often appeared to be program evaluation with program improvement or validation as the primary purpose. Because JTE does not publish program descriptions or evaluations, authors need to provide the kinds of questions and methods that enable findings to be extrapolated beyond improvement of a single program. However, even when researchers identify questions that could contribute to the knowledge base in an area, they often do not provide a research design that can elicit the necessary depth and breadth of data to address the question. Many qualitative studies received by JTE focus on only a few participants who are interviewed briefly—and then the researchers base their claims on these thin data from a single source. There may be some mention of other types of data collected from these study participants, but it is often not clear how it was collected, used, or integrated in the analysis or how it advanced existing research and theory. Likewise, quantitative studies based on the administration of a single survey often do not contribute much. Although these survey studies are very common in teacher education, they typically fall short of the multidimensionality needed to contribute to the knowledge base.
The final area we identified for research improvement relates to authors’ obligation to connect findings to previous research and theory so that the structure of our knowledge base in teacher education is more coherent. We recommended that authors need to explicitly state what gap the study proposes to address and then provide an “explicit, coherent chain of reasoning” (National Research Council, 2002, p. 66) that opens the loop between theory and evidence early and then closes the loop based on findings from the current study related to theory and previous research.
New Challenges to Quality
Whereas the quality of submissions, particularly in relation to the four areas previously described, has steadily increased over the past 5 years, we have encountered challenges to the perceived quality of teacher education research in two additional areas: misunderstanding of what topics are appropriate for research in our field and the loss of historical perspective related to teacher education research. Perhaps not surprisingly, the National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a self-appointed monitor and critic of teacher preparation programs that has itself come under question for its underlying motives and problematic methods (Fuller, 2014), recently criticized JTE for the content of its articles (“Don’t Judge These Teacher Ed Journals by Their Titles”; Greenburg & McClure, 2015). Specifically, they claimed that only 11% of the articles published by JTE in the past 5 years focused on building candidates’ practical skills directly related to the classroom and that other journals that professed to embrace teacher education published none at all. Given their very narrow definition of what constitutes teacher education, their findings are not surprising and appear reasonable. However, their definition is not adequate to describe the field and potentially limits what we can learn through scholarship in teacher education. Their criticism provides us the opportunity to review the scope of the journal. As we describe in our guidelines for submission of manuscripts, As editors, we aim to achieve a strategic balance among the areas of preservice and inservice teacher education practice, policy, and research, bringing those areas to bear on one another in challenging and productive ways. We offer a forum for diverse work of teacher education researchers (university and non-university based), teacher education practitioners (e.g., university, state, district, community college), and policy makers at all levels. Linking research and practice is paramount in our vision for the JTE. The Journal of Teacher Education provides a vital forum for considering practice, policy, and research in teacher education. It examines some of the most timely and important topics in the field, such as: New Teacher Education Standards Assessing the Outcomes of Teacher Education Prearing Teachers to Meet the Needs of Diverse Populations Teacher Education in a Global Society The Research Base for Teacher Education Accountability and Accreditation Issues Collaborating With Arts and Sciences Faculties Recruiting a More Diverse Teaching Force and Teacher Education Faculty School-Based and Partnership-Based Teacher Education Alternative Approaches to Teacher Education High Stakes Testing for Teachers and Students Leadership in 21st Century Schools of Education The Changing Demographics of Schools and Schooling
Although the new editorial team may differ in the details of the list of appropriate topics, the areas will most likely be similar. Our focus at JTE is clearly much broader than building candidates’ practical skills directly related to the classroom.
Another area that has emerged during our editorship as potentially problematic is the tendency for scholars as well as practitioners in teacher education to be ahistorical in their consideration of current topics or problems. Often researchers either ignore prior research in their framing and interpretation of their current questions and findings or do not recognize a related body of research as applicable due to a plethora of different terms for the same phenomena. We still lack a common vocabulary in teacher education, which might help structure and advance the knowledge base and situate new findings appropriately (Grossman & McDonald, 2008). An example of this is the series of articles and commentaries that have debated the use and role of the extensive findings from observation research from the 1970s and 1980s (see, for example, Good & Brophy, 2008, for review of these findings) in the development and use of current classroom observation instruments. The exchange between Gargani and Strong (2014) and Good and Lavigne (2015) highlights this ahistorical stance. However, the insightful comparison of core practices and practice-based education by Forzani (2014) provides an example of how careful analysis of historical perspectives can advance our understanding of the relationship between findings from different eras.
Teacher Education Research Relevance
In addition to questions of rigor or quality, we also addressed as an editorial team the relevance of topics for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers interested in teacher education. We identified focal areas based on our discussions with these diverse groups and developed calls for contributions or solicited guest editors for the following theme issues published during our tenure as JTE editors.
Beyond the Teacher Certification Program Debate: From Models to Features (Volume 63.3)
Studies that merely label programs and ignore the range of features and their interactions with students and contexts do not contribute significantly to our understanding of the various pathways in teacher education. This theme issue challenged the field to shift attention from general debates about traditional versus alternative certification programs toward more nuanced conversations about specific features of programs (whether traditional or alternative, preservice or inservice) and examined the more complex issue of the nature and quality of features that contribute to program outcomes.
Unsettling Conversations: Diversity and Disability in Teacher Education (Volume 63:4)
This guest-edited theme issue grew out of a major session at the 2010 AACTE conference with the purpose of initiating a dialogue among teacher educators in multicultural education, culturally responsive teaching, social justice education, and special education to address the missing element of special education within the larger discourse of diversity related to race, class, culture, and language. The articles reframe the kinds of specialized teaching knowledge needed to prepare teachers for the diversity of current classrooms.
Examining the Complexities of Assessment and Accountability in Teacher Education (Volume 63:5)
Studies conducted by economists without considering the instructional dynamics of teacher education may be valuable to other economists, but may not sufficiently unpack the complexity of the phenomena so that the study is useful for teacher educators. The theme issue examined questions focused on the possibilities and limitations of value-added modeling (VAM) for teacher education.
Teacher Learning and Standards-Based Instruction (Volume 64:3)
The topic of standards-based instruction is at the forefront of conversations about education at every level, including teacher education and professional development. Standards-based curriculum and assessment, and the accompanying accountability associated with their implementation, place considerable pressure on teacher educators to enable teachers to effectively incorporate the standards into instruction and require particular attention to the type of professional development needed for both preservice and inservice teachers. Our intent with this theme issue was to move the community forward in understanding and studying the nature and impact of professional development focused on recent standards-based curricular reforms.
Talking Across the Disciplines (Volume 64:5)
Our framing of the theme for this issue was influenced by shifts in thinking over the past 25 years about how we view teacher expertise and the nature of knowledge for teacher education. As a result of embracing the notion of pedagogical content knowledge introduced by Shulman, teacher educators, previously more concerned with generic teaching knowledge, turned their attention to subject-specific pedagogical issues. Although subject-area specialization has been critical to establishing the specialized nature of teachers’ knowledge and expertise, it is also appropriate to consider the intellectual silos created and their cost or contribution to developing a coherent knowledge base for teacher education. To stimulate the conversation, we proposed a theme issue that prompted researchers and readers to submit research and conceptual articles that considered the intended and unintended consequences of the paradigm shift.
Professional Development and Practices of Teacher Educators (Volume 65:4)
Much has been said about the complexity of teaching and the need for research that reflects that complexity. It follows that teacher learning and teacher education are similarly complex, yet we know relatively little about the learning, practices, and preparation involved in “teacher educator” education. Defining the knowledge and skills that teacher educators will need to prepare teachers for the challenges of standards-based instruction and determining how teacher educators can acquire this expertise are high priority research tasks. As a result, we initiated a call for manuscripts focused on teacher educator practices and professional development that constitute the theme for this issue.
Performance Assessment of Teaching: Implications for Teacher Education (Volume 65:5)
Calls for performance assessments of teaching to provide both formative and summative information about the quality of teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher preparation programs pervade the current discourse on education at every level, including schools and districts, institutions of higher education, state and national policy-making entities and professional organizations. As a result, a number of performance assessments have emerged that can provide feedback to teacher education programs about the strengths and weaknesses of their candidates as well as evidence for licensure and certification of teachers. For this theme issue, we invited research and conceptual articles related to teacher performance assessments specifically as they affect teacher education, including validation studies of measures used in the assessments.
School-Based Teacher Learning (Volume 66:4)
Much of what teachers learn about teaching and learning occurs in school-based contexts and opportunities for teacher learning occur along the professional continuum, from preservice field experiences to a multitude of opportunities for inservice teachers to engage in job-embedded learning. In addition, school-based teacher education is supported by various types of teacher educators, including mentors, university supervisors, peers, instructional coaches, administrators, district-level supervisors, university faculty, and other professional development providers. The articles published in this issue focus on what teachers and preservice teachers learn in school-based settings: theories, concepts, frameworks, approaches, and models that are powerful in explaining and guiding teacher learning in school contexts, and how school-based teacher educators work together to impact their own and others’ learning.
Overview of the Current Issue
The current issue provides both theme and non-theme articles. The non-theme articles include a study by Lincove, Oswald, Mills, and Bellows, that has policy implications and a special feature, “The Deans’ Corner,” compiled by co-editor Fran Arbaugh. In the non-theme article, “Teacher Preparation for Profit or Prestige: Analysis of a Diverse Market for Teacher Preparation,” Lincove and her colleagues investigate how various alternative and traditional teacher education programs (TPP), including non-profit and for-profit sponsoring organizations, differ in terms of certification pathways, organizational goals, and market incentives. They examine the conflict between encouraging innovation and regulating quality in TPPs and test an integrated framework that takes into consideration pathways, goals, and incentives.
The “Deans’ Corner” in this issue was inspired by a newsletter that Dean David Monk wrote for the College of Education at Penn State (Monk, 2013) in which he reflects on the state of teacher education. We thought it would be interesting to end our tenure with a “conversation” with additional Deans of Education on their perspectives of the state of teacher education today. The contributors, who represent a diversity of academic backgrounds and tenure as deans in education, wrote responses to a set of questions addressed in Monk’s original newsletter about teacher education in the United States and provide a catalyst for continuing the conversation.
For the theme section, we invited Paul LeMahieu, Ann Edwards, and Louis Gomez to compile a selection of articles that would represent the new Improvement Science approach championed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. We consider this emerging field an interesting case of the struggle between rigor and relevance in teacher education research and perhaps an opportunity to combine the often competing goals. As the special section editors point out in their introduction, . . . while attributional research helps us to know that some practice can produce some effect, it does little to show us how to produce those effects—over and over and across people and places. Context matters greatly when attempting to get promising, but often complex, ideas into practice.
We were particularly interested in examples of the fourth principle of the approach that posits the use of sound measurement to determine whether improvement has occurred and as evidence of effects and impacts. The five articles in the section provide a starting point for conversations about whether and how Improvement Science, as well as other design-based research models (see, for example, Gutierrez & Penuel, 2014), redefine our notions of rigor and relevance in teacher education research.
We would like to thank both AACTE for the opportunity to edit the JTE over the past 5 years and Penn State University College of Education whose support made our participation possible. A major reward of the editorship has been the occasion to learn so much from our interactions with various individuals and groups: CEO Sharon Robinson; two sets of Committee on Research and Dissemination chairs and members who provided oversight, guidance, and support; and the newly formed Editorial Review Board. We are also deeply grateful to the large number of outstanding ad hoc reviewers who made the effort to contribute quality reviews of the manuscripts submitted to the journal. The many excellent reviews that we received over the 5-year period contributed significantly to the quality of the journal. We are particularly appreciative that such a strong and creative editorial team from Michigan State University will continue our efforts. Of greatest importance, however, has been the conversation with our readers. Thank you for a productive and fulfilling 5 years.