Beyond the Teacher Certification Program Debate From Models to Features

This theme issue of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) considers the impact of various program and policy features on teacher education and professional development. In publishing this issue, the editorial team aims to challenge the field to shift attention from general debates about traditional versus alternative certification programs toward more nuanced conversations about specific features of programs (whether traditional or alternative, preservice or inservice) that appear to hold particular promise. Of the four articles that comprise the issue, two articles (Conklin; Kennedy & Archambault) explore the impact of aspects of initial certification programs on pre-service and beginning teachers' development. Two additional articles (Atkinson; Matsumura, Gamier, & Spybrook) investigate relationships between characteristics of professional development programs or policies and teacher-participants' thinking and practice. In the first article, "Company Men: Tracing Learning from Divergent Teacher Education Pathways Into Practice in Middle Grades Classrooms," Hilary Conklin compares two models for middle school social studies teacher education, one that focuses on social studies content knowledge and another that focuses on knowledge of young adolescents. Through longitudinal case studies of beginning teachers from each kind of program, this study identifies characteristics of the teachers' practice and, where feasible, tracks differences back to specific features of the teachers' preparation programs. Conklin's conclusion is that neither model adequately prepared the teachers to engage students in challenging, meaningful work. By focusing on either subject matter or adolescent development, she argues that the programs missed opportunities to help beginning teachers integrate these areas of knowledge and develop practices that were rich in content and appropriately flamed for adolescent learners. Kathryn Kennedy and Leanna Archambault explore the preparation of teachers for K-12 online learning environments in the second article, "Offering Preservice Teachers Field Experiences in K-12 Online Learning: A National Survey of Teacher Education Programs." Although several states now require K-12 students to complete an online experience before graduating from high school, and it is projected that 50% of high school classes will be offered online by 2020, the authors found that very few teacher education programs in the United States have field placements for teacher education candidates in virtual schools or online learning environments. They argue that teacher candidates who plan to work in online contexts will need to understand the pedagogy of online learning, instructional design for online learning, and online learning theory to engage learners successfully in these environments. The third article in this issue examines the assumption that teachers' use of student test data will result in improved instructional practices and yield higher test scores. In "Target Practice: Reader Response Theory and Teachers' Interpretations of Students' SAT 10 Scores in Data-Based Professional Development," Becky Atkinson reports an analysis of how elementary teachers read, interpret, and make decisions based on test score data. …