About the TEI
Executive Summary
Few issues in the United States are more important than improving the learning of p-12 students. Yet though teachers play a pivotal role in students’ learning, no reliable system of teacher education exists in the U.S. The Teacher Education Initiative (TEI) is a major project at the University of Michigan School of Education to redesign how teachers are prepared for practice. We aim not only to rebuild teacher education at the University of Michigan, but to do so in ways that contribute to the professional education of teachers more broadly. Our goal is to design a program that helps student teachers develop disciplinary knowledge and skill that are flexible in the special ways that teaching requires, and learn to attend to and build upon diverse pupils’ ideas, interpretations, and solutions in the complex environment of schools.
The TEI consists of four core components :
- Making professional practice the centerpiece of teacher education;
- Recruiting a large and diverse applicant pool to teaching;
- Preparing faculty members, doctoral students, and practitioners to provide practice-focused teacher education and to conduct research on teaching and teacher education;
- Creating the infrastructure for the Initiative’s work, including budget, facilities development and remodeling, marketing and communications.
At the center of this work is the development of curriculum and pedagogy that focuses on preparing beginning teachers for practice. Our graduates must be able to carry out the core tasks of teaching . They must be able to engage youth in complex academic work, develop their interests and skills, and represent complicated ideas in accessible ways. This involves skills in making judgments, taking action , and assessing the results . It entails deliberate attention to who students are, and to how culture, race, and gender shape what students bring to the classroom and how they interpret and respond to instruction. In short, teachers must learn to do complex relational, psychological, social, and intellectual work, not just talk about doing it.
To build a program that can do this we are engaging in three major lines of work: building a curriculum organized around the core domains of teachers’ work; designing activities and tools, including digital materials, that will help teachers achieve competent performance in these domains; and creating a system of performance assessments to use throughout our program. In addition, we are building special school and classroom settings that will serve simultaneously as laboratories for the study of teaching and learning and as sites purposefully designed for learning teaching. Like the surgical theaters common in medical schools, these physical environments will be set up to support close observation and interaction, as well as videotaping and other forms of record-making. Practitioners who work in these settings will be skillful in making practice visible to novices, and in making its elements available for their learning. These laboratories will serve not only student teachers, but also faculty members and doctoral students who are conducting research on teaching and learning, preparing to become teacher educators, and studying their own teacher education practice.
We are actively building the infrastructure to support this work. This includes hiring new faculty and staff members, crafting research agendas and designing new organizational structures, and creating strategies for marketing, budgeting, and communications. Each of these efforts is in the service of our chief goal: To prepare teachers, teacher educators, and education researchers who understand the nature and purpose of their practice and can perform it competently.
