Global Trend toward 'Results-Based Teaching' & New NCATE Standard Requires EVIDENCE of Student Learning
The movement toward results-based teacher education now is being institutionalized and given durability if not permanence. Forty-two countries participated in the 2006 PIRLS evaluation of literacy achievement, and fifty-eight in PISA a similar cross-national test that focuses on science literacy. Schools of Education are being drawn into providing and/or reconciling their offerings with those in K-12 situations where districts offer professional development workshops and credit. Most formidably, the new National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) standards fully reflects this more accountable form of professional education. It contains a Standard that requires evidence from the institutions that prepare teachers to also show how that preparation results in improved achievement scores for K-12 students and ideally on both state and nation wide tests.
This new standard is based on the assumption that the professions are ready to provide teachers-in-training and schools with easy access to an inventory of core information about best- most productive - practices. Even while the core function of teacher education is based on the appropriate selection and use of best practices there is little agreement, and no serious effort that we are aware of to make such determinations. This piece is an effort to declaratively evolve a sensible system for inventorying such practices and in the process to re-establish pedagogical science as a priority item on our professional agenda. The emphasis placed here on Content Area Literacy is prompted, as suggested above, by two factors: This subfield clearly addresses higher-order functioning, as well as addressing the frequent NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) findings that progress in school begins to level off following 4th grade and all but stalls out post 8th grade. Further, the racial divide still is far too great, even while there has been slow though not adequate progress by Latinos and to a lesser extent African-Americans who are being called a forgotten minority (Landsberg and Blume, 2007).
