Archive for Teacher Training

The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation is annocuncing the publication on June 15 of the book Teach Anyone to Read: The No-Nonsense Guide. This is a new edition of Dr. Lillie Pope’s classic manual, originally titled Guidelines to Teaching Reading, which, over decades of use, and through the sale of hundreds of thousands of copies, proved that its methods are successful when used by teachers, teacher assistants, tutors, and lay people working with children, adults, teenagers, and ESL students.

Dr. Pope’s approach, based on solid theory supported by experience, includes instructions and sample materials, presented in easily understood and reassuring language. The No-Nonsense Guide is based on the conviction that with patience and the approach outlined in this book, the teacher and student will be successful.

This is the first book published by the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation. For more information on the book, visit the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation website.

Every Monday afternoon, Sioux City (Iowa) Community School students get an early out for the day while their teachers go back to class.

“Our teachers have had some form of professional development for years,” said the district’s special education and professional development coordinator Janet Rohmiller, “but it’s only been in the past two years that we've been doing it on a weekly basis.”

Rohmiller said these weekly sessions allow educators to learn successful teaching techniques from proven experts. “In the past, we’d call professional development sessions ‘sit and get it.’ The sessions would be scheduled erratically and the teachers would try their best to absorb what they’re listening to,” she said. “You sat through a lecture and hoped you got the gist of it.” Read the article in The Sioux City Journal online.

What makes a good teacher? Experience helps. But a new study of Teach for America (TFA)—education’s version of the Peace Corps—shows that their novice high school teachers bring something to the classroom that trumps traditional training and experience. The advantage of having a TFA teacher is particularly strong in math and science, the study finds.

The results are eye-opening at a time when teacher quality is a front-and-center issue. Good teachers are a key to closing achievement gaps for low-income and minority students, researchers say, but there’s still much to be learned about how to get people into the classrooms where they’re needed—and how to ensure their effectiveness once they get there. Read more about the study in The Christian Science Monitor online.

A variety of methods for measuring student achievement is the best way to assess and improve high school teaching, according to a new brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education. Measuring and Improving the Effectiveness of High School Teachers, made possible with the support of MetLife Foundation, looks at effectiveness—demonstrating contributions to growth in student learning—as a critical attribute of a high-quality teacher.

The brief argues that the best way to measure teacher effectiveness is to measure the amount of growth a student makes over time. Other methodologies are weighed as well, including benchmark exams and measuring teacher knowledge and skill. The brief is available on the Alliance website.

Trainee teachers in New Zealand will be forced into an extra year of on-the-job training under a proposal going to the Cabinet this month. This proposal follows an eight-month examination of the quality of teacher education which has raised serious concerns over the standards of those entering teacher training and the competence of those graduating.

The review drew more than 100 submissions from the education sector, many of them attacking the quality of trainee teachers and training providers. “I have sat on intake panels and have been horrified as to who has been selected for [teacher training] college,” one submission read. Read more about the proposal in The New Zealand Herald online.

Usually, nothing gets the attention of Oregon policymakers quite so fast as getting a big, fat “F” on a national report card. So, it was par for the course when Republican lawmakers in Salem pounced recently on a national survey done by the research center affiliated with Education Week, the well-respected weekly newspaper, that assigned a “F” to Oregon over teacher licensing, preparation, training and evaluation.

To address that, a bill is being pushed to set aside $400,000 in public money to create an oversight commission, to track and promote the best professional development opportunities for teachers. But the effort has encountered some pushback, including questions about whether the survey made implicit value judgments, favoring state-imposed mandates on how money should be spent over Oregon’s time-honored tradition of local control for each of its 198 school districts. Read more at OregonLive.com

An unusual new graduate program backed by Dallas businessman Randy Best is signing up Texas teachers in droves as they seek to earn a fast, inexpensive master’s degree. School districts reward teachers who earn master’s degrees by paying them more and considering them for administrative promotions.

Lamar University’s new program sets itself apart in convenience and cost: Students take one five-week course at a time and finish a dozen required courses in 18 months, shorter than many traditional master’s programs designed for working teachers. They take all their courses on a computer—watching videos of lectures and doing assignments—and pay just $4,950, less than half the price of most education master’s degrees in Texas. Read about the new program in The Dallas Morning News online.

All teachers in Wales should have one year off out of every seven on full pay, as part of continuing professional development, union leaders said yesterday.

The National Union of Teachers Cymru (Wales) said that the option of a sabbatical year every seven years would allow the 36,000 teachers in maintained schools to share experience, study, and bring best practice to classrooms.

Business people and independent schools last night warned the scheme would cost millions of pounds and may be perceived as “greedy,” despite conceding it could be beneficial. But union secretary David Evans said, “Continuing professional development should be seen as a right not a privilege.” Read more about the idea at icWales.co.uk.

About 30 professionals and tradespeople will enter the classroom as qualified teachers this week, as the Victorian State Government in Australia tries to plug the growing teacher shortage. While some critics have dismissed the scheme—which targets professionals working in math and science-related fields to teach in hard-to-staff state schools—as a temporary solution, many of the former scientists, plumbers, chefs, and builders argue that teaching has been the perfect career change.

Among them is 47-year-old Ken Johnsen, a former electrical fitter, who will begin his second career today at St. Alban’s Brimbank College as an electrical technology teacher. He was among a group of 30 professionals who completed a two-year course last year and are undertaking full-time teaching at schools across the state. Read about the innovative project in The Age.

 About 2,900 public-school teachers in Hawaii are not considered qualified by the federal government, according to a private consultant. That means about 22% of the state’s 13,000 public-school teachers do not qualify under the No Child Left Behind law. The law defines highly qualified teachers as those with a bachelor’s degree, a state license, and proven competency in every subject they teach.

Oregon-based School Synergy has a $250,000 contract with the state Department of Education to identify unqualified teachers and help them improve their credentials. Under the NCLB law, states were supposed to have all teachers highly qualified by the 2005-06 school year. None made it, so the federal Education Department demanded new state plans. School Synergy says Hawaii needs to graduate more teachers from universities, encourage high school students to become teachers, and develop incentives for teachers to become highly qualified. Read about the situation in The Honolulu Star Bulletin online.

New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests. The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.

While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public.

The effort comes as educators nationwide are struggling to figure out how to find, train and measure good teachers. Many education experts say that until teacher quality improves in urban schools, student performance is likely to stagnate and the achievement gap between white and minority students will never be closed. Read more in The New York Times online.

The profile of teacher evaluation—in many school districts almost a pro forma exercise—is getting a boost. A new report will warn that schools risk stalling the campaign to raise teacher quality if they do not take evaluation seriously.

“The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring, and largely ignored, problem in public education,” argued Thomas Toch, a co-director of the think tank Education Sector. “It’s a lever of teacher and school improvement that’s being squandered.”

Toch is the author, along with Robert Rothman, of a report on the subject due out later this month. Toch decried the single classroom visit made by school administrators, checklist in hand, that too often constitutes teacher evaluation today. Because teachers are overwhelmingly paid on the basis of their years of experience and education, and rarely encounter any consequences from the evaluations, the evaluations have largely deteriorated into, in Toch’s words, “superficial, capricious, and often meaningless” exercises. Read more in Education Week online.

Largely lost in the debate about last year’s budget reconciliation legislation that increased the maximum Pell Grant and financed that and other new spending by slashing federal payments to student loan providers was a new program that seeks to encourage students to enter the teaching profession.

The Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education Grant Program (TEACH) provides up to $4,000 a year in grant aid to college students who plan to become teachers, as well as current teachers who pursue graduate degrees. Grant recipients agree to serve as a full-time teacher in a “high need” school and teach a “high need” subject for at least four academic years within eight years of finishing the program for which the person received the aid.

Legislators have long searched for ways to increase the number of qualified teachers and prolong their stay in the profession, and the TEACH program, set to be funded at $325 million over five years starting this summer, is a move in that direction. Read more in Inside Higher Ed online.

Spending his days as a substitute teacher isn’t what Bob Ritchie planned to be doing as he approached his 67th birthday. But after retiring from working in 4-H at Purdue University about six years ago, he didn’t want to just sit around. Instead, he now spends nearly every day filling in at McCutcheon High School in Lafayette, Indiana.

“I could count on my hand the number of days I could have been there and wasn’t,” he said. “The other day I didn’t get a call, and I thought, ‘What do I do now?’ ” Attracting and retaining committed substitutes such as Ritchie is a challenge for local schools. Between the number of teachers getting sick, taking personal days and participating in professional development, the demand for substitutes has grown. The pool of subs hasn’t. Read about the shortage in The Journal & Courier online.

As an elementary school principal in Washington, Sheila Ford had to adapt to the haphazard D.C. public school bureaucracy. So when she decided to retire in 2005 and help start a nonprofit organization to train teachers, it didn’t shock her that school officials authorized nearly $3 million for her Teachers Institute on a single day, shortly after she made a half-hour presentation. Nor was she surprised when she picked up the first check—for $1 million—and there was no contract laying out the agreement.

When Ford went back for documentation, she received a single-page expense voucher. “We didn’t know—what should we do with this? What do you call this?” said Richard Spigler, the institute’s chairman. “The issue to us was, it is not a contract. What are we going to do?”

The institute considered giving back the money but ultimately kept it and went ahead training DC schoolteachers in a new method of reading and writing instruction. The organization, which has two employees and operates rent-free out of the attic of a school building, has received more than $5.5 million from the DC schools since mid-2005. Read more in The Washington Post.

"Far too many of America's 1,200-plus schools of education are mired in methods that isolate education from the arts and sciences, segregate the theory and practice of teaching, and provide insufficient time and support for future teachers to learn to work in real classrooms," writes Grace Rubenstein on the George Lucas Education Foundation website, Edutopia.org. But reform is happening, she says, and at its heart are "innovations that provide extensive field experience and link theory more closely with practice." For further information, read the full article.

Entry scores for future teachers in Australia are predicted to fall despite criticism they are already too low, as demand for teaching places plummets across the nation. Applications for teaching places had plunged by 30% over two years in Queensland, and Western Australia is unlikely to fill places for the coming year. A leading educator, University of Queensland academic Ken Wiltshire, said teaching wasn’t “attracting enough knowledgeable or intelligent people.” “It’s a crisis. The tertiary entrance ranks are too low. The status of the profession is too low. We need to be talking it up and offering performance pay,” said Professor Wiltshire, who ran the Queensland Government’s curriculum review. Read more about the impending teacher shortage in The Australian online.

The second in the series of "Lessons Learned" reports on new teachers conducted by Public Agenda and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality raises questions about the support given to those who come to the profession through alternate routes. Working Without a Net finds alternate route teachers are especially motivated by the desire to help disadvantaged children, but at the same time they are more disheartened by the conditions they find in the classroom.

Working Without a Net focuses on new teachers in high-needs schools, comparing the perspectives of those from traditional teacher education versus those from three alternate-route programs: Teach for America, Troops to Teachers and The New Teacher Project.

To find out more and download the full report, visit the following page on the Public Agenda website.

Teaching is attracting better-qualified people than it did just a few years ago, according to a report released December 11, 2007, by the Educational Testing Service. Prospective teachers who took state teacher licensing exams from 2002 to 2005 scored higher on SATs in high school and earned higher grades in college than their counterparts who took the exams in the mid-1990s, the report said.

On the other hand, the report found that those attracted to the profession continued to make up a strikingly homogeneous group—prospective teachers were overwhelmingly white and female—at a time when the proportion of public school students nationwide who are black, Hispanic or other minorities was nearly half and rising.

The finding that the academic qualifications of teachers had risen significantly was encouraging news for federal and state education policymakers after a period of hand-wringing over teacher quality in the nation’s 90,000 public schools. The most successful educational systems in the world, like those in Singapore and Finland, recruit teachers from among the top third of their college graduates. By contrast, some studies over the years have found that the United States recruits from the bottom third. Read the article in The New York Times online.

California has done an impressive job filling schools with at least nominally qualified teachers. The next challenge—a tougher one—is to retain them by vastly changing the way they are trained, evaluated and rewarded.

In 2000, one in seven teachers (42,400 out of 310,000) in California lacked a teaching credential; by this year, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning found, that had dropped to one in 20—about 16,000. And the remaining 5% consists mainly of first– and second–year teachers who are working on credentials at night.

Despite that good news, gaps and inequities remain, and the turnover of young teachers remains high. One in five teachers quits the profession nationwide within four years; in low–income schools, it’s two out of five. Read more of what California is doing in terms of professional development in this editorial in The San Jose Mercury News.

The State Board of Education says Alaska teachers will NOT for now have to take a course on teaching reading to students, according to The Associated Press. Meeting in Anchorage, the board on Friday, December 7, 2007, decided not to require the course. The board instead asked the Department of Education and Early Development to go back and work with Alaskans on revisions to the course. The course is intended to show teachers how to improve student reading skills. Earlier, The Anchorage Daily News had reported that teachers and others called the plan an unfunded mandate and a waste of most teachers’ time. According to comments submitted to the state, Anchorage high school choir teacher Liesl Davenport-Wheeler found it "punitive and way out of bounds." She says it would take away from the time she has to use for her own class content.

Midway to the Millennium Development Goals set in 2000, several West African countries have made vast efforts to achieve universal education and gender parity in primary schools by 2015. But education officials and teachers’ unions say the push for increased access to education has come at a cost. While enrollment numbers have improved, retention and graduation rates remain a serious problem and, in some cases, have even decreased.

Officials in many West African countries say tens of thousands of unqualified teachers have a lot to do with it. In Senegal, teachers’ training has been reduced from four years to six months, and in some cases, does not even exist. “Teachers are put directly into the classroom” and trained during the holidays, said Alpha Oumar Diallo, secretary-general of the Union of Professors of Senegal (SYPROS). In Guinea “we recruit peanut vendors and woodworkers as teachers,” said Louis M’Bemba Soumah, secretary-general of the Union of Teachers and Researchers in Guinea (SLECG). “It has completely screwed up the education system.”

The United States is providing $1 million over the next two years to improve children’s literacy in Dominica at the primary school level. The program offers training to primary teachers with a view to making them better reading instructors. They will be trained through the Caribbean Centres of Excellence in Teacher Training (C-CETT), which have been set up in seven other Caribbean countries by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Teachers who have already gone through the program will also get follow-up support. Five reading specialists will be assigned to the program from the curriculum staff of the ministry of education. Read more at caribbean360.com.

A proposal to require all Alaska teachers to take a special course in how to teach reading has triggered an outpouring of protests from teachers, principals and others. The proposal is aimed at addressing a chronic problem: Too many children have poor reading skills that hamper them in all their classwork, from language arts to science, math and social studies. But teachers and others call the plan an unfunded mandate that is a waste of most teachers’ time. “That every teacher take this one reading course is unrealistic,” Anchorage teacher union president Ron Fuhrer said. “It doesn’t address specific school goals ... it does not address the needs of each individual teacher.” Read more about the controversy in The Anchorage Daily News.

A study that scrutinizes 22 teacher-preparation programs in Louisiana says that it is possible to prepare new teachers who are as effective as, or sometimes more effective than, their experienced colleagues. Experts say the study, the first of its kind to come out of a state that has implemented a multi-pronged approach to improving its teacher training, shows that it is possible for states and universities to work hand in hand with teacher–educators to produce higher-quality teachers and consequently raise the bar for the profession. Read the article in Education Week online.

The writing is on the wall for schoolchildren—a report says nearly 60% of teachers do not teach writing effectively in all the areas they should. The New Zealand Education Review Office findings follow a report last year warning that writing levels for nearly half the country’s secondary school pupils were at the expected level of primary school children. The primary teachers’ union, the NZEI, says the latest report shows improvements are needed to ensure all pupils receive a good grounding in core subjects. It wants more on-the-job teacher training. Read the article at stuff.co.nz online.

Saadia Jan, 19, bites her nails uncertainly, as she perches on the window sill of her parent’s house in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Till a few days ago, Saadia had her future neatly chalked out in her mind. “I had decided to become a teacher. In fact, since I was 12 years old, I knew I wanted to be one,” she told IRIN. But, Saadia’s plans are now in shreds. “My family says it is too unsafe to teach and that I should opt for something else,” she said. The reason for her concern is the killing of a local teacher, Khatoon Bibi, 40, who was killed September 29 in the Mohmand Agency. According to eyewitness accounts, the teacher, who taught at a girls’ community school in the Atokhel area, was shot dead on her way home from school by unidentified assailants on a motorcycle. Read about the situation at IRIN News.

New teachers are being blamed for the decline in reading scores in Connecticut. Elaine Zimmerman, executive director of the state Commission on Children, says new teachers either don’t know or haven’t followed proven techniques for teaching reading. Doris J. Kurtz, New Britain superintendent of schools, decries new teachers’ lack of preparedness in literacy skills as “disgraceful.” A quick glance at third–grade reading scores, however, shows that higher scores come from wealthy towns and lower ones from poor cities. Poverty has long been associated with low scores across academic disciplines. Leaders ignore greater societal ills as they point their fingers at those who lack the protection of tenure. Read more of this opinion piece at courant.com.

Teachers in Kenya no longer will be required to travel to Nairobi over job-related matters. The Teachers Service Commission has unveiled a new mobile phone short text message (SMS) service, through which its employees countrywide can obtain services from its Nairobi headquarters. An estimated 7,000 teachers visit the offices every month on job-related issues, according to TSC chief executive Gabriel Lengoiboni. The service is seen as a breakthrough in efforts to bring about efficient communication with the largest employer of public servants. Read more at allAfrica.com.

The education department in South Africa is drawing up a set of guidelines for teachers to help them assess pupils’ reading skills, and to present various methods used to teach reading, the education department said May 25. The “toolkit” was still being finalized and would be piloted in some of South Africa’s poorest schools and in six languages in July, said Palesa Tyobeka, deputy director-general of general education and training. The guideline booklet explains methods used to teach reading, from the use of phonemes to vocabulary and how to build sentences. “We can't keep on making the assumption that teachers have been taught how to teach reading skills, when our children are not doing well,” Tyobeka said. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

About 40 tutors who will implement adult literacy programs in the Musanze District of Rwanda signed contracts after a one–month training program. The contracts bind the tutors to educate at least 3,500 adult learners on literacy and basic rights awareness. Presiding over the contract–signing ceremony at the district hall, Rachael Muyoboke, district coordinator of Profemmes–Twese hamwe, a women’s rights organization, called for integration of the adult literacy program into poverty reduction strategies. “There is need to integrate adult literacy programs with poverty reduction strategies because of the connection between the two,” Muyoboke said. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

Graduates of teacher education programs will have to meet uniform standards of literacy and numeracy for the first time under a national system to accredit education courses. The draft framework, approved by state and territory teacher registration boards, sets out mandatory requirements that education courses must meet for teachers to be registered in government, Catholic or independent schools across the nation. The framework, developed by the Australasian Forum of Teacher Registration and Accreditation Authorities, will specify required levels of literacy and numeracy as well as content to be taught in teacher education courses—a minimum four years of full-time study and a minimum amount of practical classroom experience. Read more at The Australian website.

At a school district in Washington, an initiative to strengthen students’ reading skills has lead teams of administrators to observe the classroom work of literacy coaches and teachers. Like athletes watching game film with their coaches to improve their performance, literacy coaches and teacher are improving their classroom performance through the feedback they receive. Read more about this approach in this article from The Seattle Times.

With K–12 schools pressured to meet academic performance standards under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, colleges have come under increasing scrutiny for how they prepare teachers. In a report released last fall by the Education Schools Project, Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, said, “Teacher education is the Dodge City of the education world. Like the fabled Wild West town, it is unruly and chaotic.” Read how professional development schools in Pennsylvania are working to narrow the gap between the ivory tower and the real world of K–12 education in this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and president emeritus of Teachers College, Columbia University, decries the chaotic state of teacher education in America and calls on U.S. universities to hold prospective teachers to a higher standard: “If we are to see substantial performance improvements from [our] students, we need better performance from their teachers.” Find Levine’s essay in The Boston Globe.

 The Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse, jointly sponsored by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, is open for business, according to director Nancy L. Shanklin. The Clearinghouse is designed to provide information to literacy/reading coaches, teachers, administrators, other educators, and policymakers about factors contributing to the success of literacy coaching programs across the country.

Located at www.literacycoachingonline.org, the Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse provides access to research and best practice, enhancing the knowledge base coaches rely on as they work within schools and districts to create excellent reading instruction in all classrooms. Among the site’s features are professional standards for literacy/instructional coaches, issue briefs, a library, and a blog. Beginning in November, the Clearinghouse will begin a forum series, available to all interested parties through a free log-on. Each forum will focus on one topic and will be hosted by a member of the Clearinghouse’s National Advisory Board.

See joint IRA–NCTE news release for more information.

A Japanese teacher of English recounts having to learn her first words in an utterly foreign language — Ukrainian — and the insights that process provided her into the experience of being a language learner. Find this article in the Daily Yomiuri (Japan).

UNESCO and its partners worldwide will be celebrating World Teachers’ Day on October 5 to commemorate the signing of the UNESCO/ILO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers on October 5, 1966. More than 100 countries currently celebrate World Teachers’ Day. Learn more at UNESCO’s Higher Education website.

Despite efforts initiated in 2001 to raise reading levels in primary schools, a “shockingly high number” of South African school children are unable to read at the appropriate grade and age level. While new curriculum guidelines have allocated sufficient time for language instruction, including teaching children how to read, teachers need more and better training in effective reading instruction. Get details in the
Sunday Independent.

An $844,000 grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving will provide training to improve reading instruction for teachers at five elementary schools in Hartford, Connecticut. The pilot project will provide training in a teaching model that emphasizes skills such as phonics, awareness of sounds within words, vocabulary, spelling, fluency and comprehension.

Population grown and rising school enrollment is credited with spurring a doctoral program in reading at a Texas university.

A new breed of corporate entrepreneurs is offering “customized and streamlined” teacher-training packages designed “to tap the demand for quality education” both in India and overseas. Learn more at The India Times.

Japan’s Central Council for Education released a report Monday recommending about 1 million teachers working in classes from kindergartens to high schools be required to renew their licenses to improve teacher quality. The present license is valid for life, but after the new system is introduced, the new license will be valid for 10 years. Teachers will have to take at least 30 hours of training courses before their licenses expire to renew it. Find more information at the Daily Yomiuri website.

In the face of mounting teacher opposition and training delays, a controversial new curriculum scheduled to take effect in Western Australia next year faces an uncertain future. Get details in The Australian.

None of the interviewees in a new Education Week online article claimed education schools were perfect, but they did have some doubts about the recent National Council on Teacher Quality report questioning the general quality of those schools. Some questioned its near-exclusive focus on whether the programs examined mentioned the big five—phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension—in descriptions of their course materials. Others said the five components identified by the National Reading Panel in 2000 as key elements of reading education might be addressed in coursework, even if they were not mentioned in the materials reviewed, or might have been included in recent program changes.

The provincial government has provided more than $23 million to teachers’ groups and school boards to help them deliver more professional development to Ontario teachers. Professional development opportunities will include workshops on topics such as differentiated instruction, primary and junior literacy and numeracy, and effective kindergarten instruction. Get details at Canada Newswire.

In an effort to boost professional development among teachers, Singapore’s Education Ministry is encouraging the formation of “learning communities” within and across schools. These informal groups allow educators to share information and ideas that will help them become better teachers. One sign of their growing popularity: There are some 1,000 learning communities in Singapore schools today, up from just 8 in 1998. Find this story at Channel News Asia.

Are schools of education providing adequate information about the National Reading Panel's "big five" essential components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension? A new report says no.

In a book to be published later this year, an expert in education statistics at the University of York claims that initial teacher training in England and Wales is effectively a rubberstamp — virtually everyone who survives the course qualifies. Read more in The Guardian.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, MO, will be offering a teachers’ workshop from June 19–23, 2006, for elementary and secondary school teachers to help them bring Twain’s writings into the classroom. For more information contact Henry Sweets at henry.sweets@marktwainmuseum.org. Telephone 573–221–9010.

Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator Nicholas Kristof wants to remove “bureaucratic barriers” that make it unnecessarily difficult for highly-skilled professionals in other fields to become teachers. Find Kristof’s essay in The Detroit News.

A landmark study of Australia’s primary schools has revealed that all prep and grade 1 teachers tend to teach the same literacy activities, such as shared book reading, modeled writing, and phonics. But the most effective teachers — those whose students made the biggest literacy gains over the year — drew on a much wider repertoire of teaching practices. They explained activities more clearly, had deeper subject knowledge, maintained a high level of intellectual challenge for their students, and had more fun than did less-effective teachers. Learn more about the study in The Age.

A study comparing the licensing and training processes of elementary and secondary teachers in the United States and five Asian nations has revealed some significant differences in the countries’ understanding of who is qualified to teach. Read about this ongoing study in Education Week.

Aided by a large grant, teachers in an Indiana township are helped by coaches and each other to explore new strategies to boost their students' literacy skills.

Looming teacher shortages could prevent sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab States from achieving the goal of universal primary education, according to a UNESCO report scheduled for release next week. The report on global teacher demand and supply also highlights shortages of specialized teachers in developed countries such as Ireland, Spain, and the United States. Find details at the UNESCO Media Services website.

A new study from Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) has found that focused, sustained professional development for teachers can have a positive impact on student achievement. Too often, however, teacher professional development programs do not reflect the characteristics most associated with improving student learning. Find the report at the McREL website.

In 2001, North Cedar Elementary was designated a problem school, but five years of intensive teacher training have made it an award winner today.

A pair of long-term studies presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association challenge longstanding policies in 48 states that require teachers to pass standardized exams to get jobs. Scores on these tests do not correlate with teachers’ later job performance or with their students’ scores on standardized tests. The studies are reported in USA Today.

 With few states, if any, expected to reach full compliance with the teacher-quality provisions of No Child Left Behind by the end of this school year, the Department of Education plans to allow an extra year to states that have shown a good-faith effort. Others could lose millions of dollars in aid if federal officials don’t see enough progress. Learn more in The Boston Globe.

 The International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English have announced the appointment of Nancy Shanklin as director of the new Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse. A joint project of IRA and NCTE, the Clearinghouse is designed to provide information to teachers, administrators, and other educators about factors contributing to literacy program success at diverse schools across the country. See joint IRA–NCTE press release for details.

With a U.S. teacher shortfall mounting, a inquiry finds that fewer new teachers are entering the field, and many who do enter leave soon after.

The Teaching Commission, the nonprofit advocacy organization founded by former IBM chairman and CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., has released a final report titled Teaching at Risk: Progress and Potholes. The report cites progress and challenges in four crucial areas relating to teaching: Transforming Teacher Compensation, Reinventing Teacher Preparation, Overhauling Licensing and Certification, and Strengthening Leadership and Support.

For further information, visit the Teaching Commission's website.

The Global Campaign for Education has announced the theme of the next GCE Global Action Week, April 24–30, 2006. “Every Child Needs a Teacher” is designed to draw attention to the dire shortage of qualified teachers around the world and to get the governments of wealthier nations to fulfill their committments to provide a quality education for every child. Find more information on the campaign at the Global Campaign for Education website.

An educator from the Philippines argues that teacher training must improve if the nation is to have teachers capable of bringing out their students' potential.

Teaching and research are not mutually exclusive propositions the way Indian universities make them out to be, says teacher Ardhendu Chatterjee. Read her essay, “Always a Student,” in The Statesman (India).

Many of those who come to teaching after a career in another field receive “on the job” training through the government-sponsored Graduate Teacher Programme. Sadly, many of them are not being taught well enough, the educational watchdog agency Ofsted has said. Get details at the BBC News website.

The chairman of an Australian inquiry into reading says teachers often complained they had not received training in teaching phonics and that they felt this hampered their effectiveness.

A high priority Initiative on Teacher Training in Africa was officially introduced at a high-level meeting of experts at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris this week. The initiative seeks to address the shortage of teachers that is particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa. Find details at UNESCO’s Education for All website.

The six-year-old Troops to Teachers program recruits and prepares former members of the armed services to teach in public school. A new report on the 7,500 teachers who have gone through the program from Virginia’s Old Dominion University reveals that nine of every ten principals surveyed say the former troops are unusually effective, particularly in areas of greatest need. An article about this program appears in USA Today.

Growing awareness of the importance of early childhood education has in turn focused attention on the role of kindergarten teachers — and revealed it to be the weak link in Germany’s education system. Get details in this article from Deutsche Welle (Germany).

Good teachers form the foundation of good schools, and improving teachers’ skills and knowledge is one of the most important investments of time and money that local, state, and national leaders make in education. Yet with the wide variety of professional development options available, which methods have the most impact on student learning? Find a survey of recent research on the topic in Research Points, the quarterly research brief on education published by the American Educational Research Association.

"Good teachers form the foundation of good schools, and improving teachers' skills and knowledge is one of the most important investments of time and money that local, state, and national leaders make in education. Yet with the wide variety of professional development options available, which methods have the most impact on student learning?"

These are the opening lines from Teaching Teachers: Professional Development to Improve Student Achievement, a new Research Points report from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Click here to access the full report.

The quality of teachers entering the profession is in decline, according to South African teachers’ unions, which are calling for reform of the nation’s teacher education system. The changing face of teaching in South Africa, and especially the rise of multiculturalism, requires a different set of skills from those typically offered by general universities. Read more in Independent Online (South Africa).

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has released a new book, Studying Teacher Education:The Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education, which it describes as "a study on teacher education research [that] provides a comprehensive picture of what is known on quality teacher education, what is not known, and what needs more study." For more information, visit AERA's website.

In the face of accusations against teachers and their unions, an official of the General Teaching Council (GTC) of Scotland defends his organization’s record of maintaining the highest professional standards for teachers. Find out more in this article from The Scotsman (U.K.).

The Prince of Wales has announced plans to set up a year-round center to provide discussions and short courses for history and English teachers. The center would be an extension of a summer training program for teachers that has been held in different parts of the U.K. during the last four years. Read about the prince’s ideas for reaffirming “the timeless principles of teaching” at BBC News.