CONVERSATIONS THAT RENEW

As this editorial goes to press, we are in the final push of the spring semester, heading into graduation season where we celebrate our students moving out into the profession as full-fledged members. Our stacks of summer reading and plans for summer writing and syllabi retooling lie before us. As this issue arrives in your mailbox, summer has just ended and our recent graduates are preparing for their first days of school. Now the burst of energy to launch the fall semester is upon us, as is the earnest work of building programs, day by day. We hope that you made good headway in your list of reading, and that you found a few productive tangents to explore as well. We hope you took risks in refining or developing syllabi. Although summer reading and writing often revitalize us as individuals, it is the shared work of ongoing renewal to which we all contribute during the academic year. In recent years, the term program renewal has tended to emphasize analyses of exit surveys, employer surveys, admission demographics, and other assessments collected to evaluate a program's impact. This review of data should inform goals for program improvement. Although we support data-driven analyses, the essence of program renewal lies, we find, in the conversations we are willing to enter into and sustain with our colleagues. Renewal, for us, is primarily about developing shared understandings of our intellectual commitments and our visions of good teaching, and grappling with the daily struggles to enact them. We believe that dialogue is the medium through which program mission and coherence are forged. In this editorial, we offer three themes that faculty might choose to wrestle with during the academic year. The themes we pose focus on thorny dilemmas in teacher education. Although we readily acknowledge these are not the only substantive issues that might initiate sustained discussion, we selected them because they reconnect us with values that inspired many of us who chose teacher education as our life's work. For each theme, we offer a brief commentary and questions and readings to jumpstart what we hope will be a vigorous exchange of views on important issues and how these relate to the daily work of preparing teachers. In the relentless pace of a typical semester, we hope you are able to carve out space with colleagues to engage in conversations that renew your commitments to robust and inspiring teacher preparation. TEACHING WITH INTEGRITY IN THE CONTEXT OF ACCOUNTABILITY AND STANDARDIZATION The dominant presence of achievement tests to measure the effectiveness of teachers, schools, and, by extension, teacher preparation programs will not likely diminish in the coming years. As our program graduates tell us, standardized tests and curricula influence many aspects of their work. For example, in many districts, particularly urban ones with high student-mobility rates, administrators increasingly choose to adopt common, sometimes scripted, curricula and to develop pacing charts or benchmark assessments to keep teachers focused on student learning and keep children "on track." There are some who challenge tests and standardized curricula on the grounds that they unduly narrow conceptions of learning and deskill teachers. Others express concern that large-scale tests do not adequately assess the knowledge and skills of English language learners and may push low-scoring adolescents out of school. Districts' pragmatic decisions to define and align curricula have potential to bring coherence to large systems while allowing teachers some measure of independence with regard to how they teach specific content. However, this balance is not always achieved. Although we find laudable the goal of equity that drives the current testing regime and concomitant press for standardization, the unintended consequences of an overemphasis on tests raise critical questions for beginning teachers and teacher educators. This testing landscape creates dilemmas for our work in preparing teachers. …