Pre-service teacher training in Massachusetts colleges and universities: The impact of teacher education standards

Educational Reform has been a priority on both the national and state levels for the last twenty years. While standards based classrooms have become educators\u27 battle cry, what teachers must learn to do and how they must learn to do it, has been the focus of The National Commission on Teaching and America\u27s Future. There has been considerable concern that the teacher training profession has not been rigorous enough (Cruickshank, 1996) and that our future teachers will be unable to meet the demands of the twenty first century. Linda Darling-Hammond and Deborah Loewenberg Ball in speaking for the NCTAF, claim that standards for teachers must be linked to standards for students, that content knowledge must be increased, and that teachers will need greater opportunities to integrate theory and practice by extended internships. A survey was designed and distributed to the publicly operated colleges and universities in Massachusetts to discover the manner in which teaching faculty was using standards in the preparation of future teachers. The standards were those adopted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in July of 2001 which echo those advocated by National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and The National Commission on Teaching and America\u27s Future. All responding faculty did so anonymously and voluntarily. The goal of this project was to determine how teaching faculty prioritized and integrated standards in the planning and presentation of their curriculum. Participating faculty shared the accountability methods by which they were able to determine their students\u27 mastery of the standards. The results of the survey allowed the researcher to gain insight into the importance of standards in educating future teachers