RR 88-1 Understanding the character and quality of the academic and professional components of teacher education.
Abstract
This paper explores the question of the relative quality of the academic and professional components of teacher education programs from three different angles: (a) a critical assessment of several widely publicized and representative critiques of education courses with a focus on describing the variety of the criticisms and on assessing the quality of the evidence underlying the critiques; (b) an examination of two recent surveys of teacher education students' opinions of their courses which challenge commonly accepted views of what students think about their courses; (c) an exploration of a new direction for studies of the quality of the components of teacher education programs which overcomes some of the weaknesses of existing approaches. It is concluded that recent state policies which place strict limits on the number of education courses in students' programs may be misguided given the currently weak knowledge base regarding the quality of academic and professional program components.