Teacher Preparation

When and Where

In order to earn a teaching credential, a candidate is usually expected to hold a bachelor's degree, often along with additional education. Some states allow candidates to receive their teaching credential while earning their bachelor's degrees in education. Other states have a postbaccalaureate program that follows a bachelor's degree. And yet other states have programs that offer the teaching credential in conjunction with a master's degree. Newer teacher preparation designs involve direct paths to teaching through internship programs that offer full-time teacher status with university courses taken at the same time.

Traditional teacher preparation programs offer university courses at the college or university campus, followed by multiple weeks or multiple semesters of practicum, called “student teaching,” in K-12 classrooms. However, there is also a movement toward shifting part of teacher preparation programs into the schools and communities. In what is called the Professional Development School model, teacher preparation programs are expanding to meet not only the credentialing needs of university students who desire to be teachers, but also the professional development needs of current teachers who serve as mentors for the university students. These new structures of teacher preparation have resulted in an increased connection between university colleges of education and public schools and districts. In these structures, teacher preparation is more field-based, and teachers in schools have the opportunity to be more researchand theory-based.

Curriculum Issues

Programs commonly combine university coursework with field-based experiences to gain practice in classrooms. When these two components of a teacher preparation program are separated by time or location, the result is a tension between educational theory and educational practice, often termed the “theory/practice split.” To draw theory and practice together, courses in educational foundations draw on philosophy, history, sociology, and anthropology of education to provide the theory on which to base practice.

An additional tension within teacher education is found between pedagogy and content, between “how to teach” and “what teachers should know.” Lee Shulman, among other educators, has helped to clarify the connections between pedagogy and content with his concept of “pedagogical content knowledge,” which states that a teacher must have in-depth knowledge of a subject matter, as well as knowledge of how to teach that content to students.

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