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case stUdYNew York UniversityDocumentation of the Teachers for a New Era Learning Network

INtrodUctIoN

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) sent a research team to New York University (NYU) on December 8-9, 2008 to conduct interviews with individuals who play important roles in the university’s teacher

preparation program. These interviews, along with additional documentation provided by NYU and identified by the AED research team, provide the basis for the case study that follows.

This case study is one of nine prepared by AED to document evidence of institutional change in teacher preparation at nine of the 30 universities that took part in the Teachers for A New Era (TNE) Learning Network, an initiative supported beginning in 2005 by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation, with additional funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. AED selected the nine universities based upon a variety of factors, including their degree of engagement in the Learning Network, and their willingness to specify a program objective and indicator(s) of change that reflected important work underway and would serve as the focus of this case study.

Institutional change, for the purposes of this study, means change that goes beyond adjusting course curricula, or degree requirements, or even holding meetings across university departments. It means change that transforms a teacher education program’s organizational structure, culture, external relationships, and ways of assessing the outcomes of its work. Such change is often based on research evidence, involves sustained partnerships with school districts and personnel, establishes cross-college and cross-departmental pathways for work and communication, increases the quality and length of time that candidates spend in school settings, and assesses its teacher candidates on their effectiveness in the classroom. Institutional change is not change for change’s sake, but a mission-driven effort to refocus the activities of the teacher education program on the effectiveness of their graduates in helping pupils learn. Based upon the nine case studies, the AED research team will prepare a cross-case study that will document and analyze evidence with bearing on four broad research questions:

1. I s there evidence of institutional change along the lines of the TNE design principles in the preparation of teachers at these institutions?

2. In what categories of change does this evidence appear?

3. Around which indicators do these appear?

4. What aspects of the Learning Network, if any, are reported to have triggered or enhanced the occurrence of change or supported its continuation?

The nine case studies will be made available to the Annenberg Foundation and to Carnegie

Corporation of New York. The cross-case study will be published as part of a major publication, also funded by the Annenberg Foundation, which will serve as a final report and recommend next steps for the TNE Learning Network.

determININg the FocUs For thIs case stUdY

University-based teacher preparation is a complex enterprise with many elements and many players, and this is especially true for universities attempting fundamental change. To provide a manageable focus for these case studies, AED staff asked the TNE Learning Network universities to select one

program objective by which they would wish to document their progress. AED asked that this objective

(1) reflect an important aspect of teacher preparation at their institution, (2) address one or more of the TNE principles, and (3) logically connect to pupil success. They were also asked to specify indicators that the change sought was occurring. The case studies would focus on that objective, indicators of change, and link to student success.

The authors of the NYU Measuring Progress statement selected as their objective:

Development of a process for assessing student teacher proficiency reliably and validly in

the domains of effective teaching, and from multiple perspectives: those of the supervisor,

cooperating teacher, and student teacher.

This objective would address the first TNE Principle, “Decisions driven by evidence,” by beginning with “a persuasive scholarly discussion of what constitutes excellence in teaching” (Carnegie

Corporation of New York, p. 9). The development of a student teacher observation instrument that would reliably and validly assess proficiency would generate credible evidence that might, in turn, be infused into program reform efforts.

This new student teacher observation instrument was to be based on a coherent set of pedagogical standards common across levels, content areas, and domains1: The authors of the NYU statement proposed as their indicators of change:

DRSTOS-R developed and validation study now underway

A majority of supervisors now trained in the assessment

All 2007 student teachers assessed. Analysis of data underway

Curriculum task force will review data in February 2008

NTC tools training for cross-section of NYU teacher educators (faculty, supervisors,

cooperating teachers) aligned with DRSTOS-R, scheduled for April 20081) Case Statement: NYU and New York City: Principles in Context.2New York University

Lastly, the authors described the relationship of their objective and indicators to student success through a renewed and enhanced focus on standards. One important aim of the student teacher assessment work, as with much of the work performed in connection to NYU’s membership in the Learning Network, was to correct what NYU faculty saw as a loss of focus, in terms of standards, in the teacher preparation program as a whole due to its size and diversity. This focus on standards in student teacher evaluation was to produce data that diverse participants might use to establish a shared vocabulary around standards, correct other problems, and serve as an important link to broader efforts in teacher education.

hIstorY oF INNovatIoN

NYU was one of thirty universities selected by the Annenberg Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York to take part in the Learning Network, whose most basic purpose was to encourage a broader circle of universities to adopt the three principles of Teachers for a New Era as the guiding directions for their work. Originally published in the Prospectus for TNE, the three design principles are: 1) decisions driven by evidence; 2) engagement with arts and sciences; and 3) teaching as an academically taught clinical practice profession.

Recent and continuing reform efforts in teacher education at NYU have been informed by four

principles that align closely with those of TNE, though they are worded slightly differently to account for the contextual factors that attend a particular university program2: 1) It takes a university to educate a teacher. That is, arts and sciences faculty are crucial to strong and effective academic preparation for aspiring teachers, and should be engaged with education faculty in a community of practice. 2) Effective teacher education programs apprentice their students to thoughtful communities of practice. School-university partnerships, manifested successfully, can provide this. 3) Effective teacher education programs operate on the basis of a coherent set of standards for teacher development that incorporate state and local standards, and reflect best practice as determined by research. These standards should articulate with those by which teacher candidates will be mentored and evaluated as novice teachers. 4) Effective teacher education programs continually monitor their effectiveness in order to ensure their standards and the teaching quality of their graduates. Information collected through these efforts should feed back into program improvement.

Founded in 1831, NYU is now the largest non-profit private university in the world, enrolling nearly 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students. NYU’s teacher preparation program is housed within the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Steinhardt was founded in 1890 as the School of Pedagogy, the first professional school devoted to teacher education established at an American university. Since then, Steinhardt’s mission has expanded to include media studies, health, and the visual and performing arts in a single graduate and undergraduate school, while maintaining a strong commitment to research and service in teacher preparation. NYU’s Department of Teaching and Learning enrolls over 1000 aspiring teachers, both undergraduate and graduate. Aspiring teachers may also enroll in graduate-level education programs 1) Case Statement: NYU and New York City: Principles in Context.3New York University

within Steinhardt’s departments of Art and Art Professions, Music and Performing Arts Professions, and Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology.

As one of the largest sources of teachers for New York City schools, NYU’s teacher preparation

program is calibrated to the unique challenges and opportunities of preparing a teacher workforce for high-needs urban schools in general and the New York City public school system in particular. New York City schools are extremely diverse, with regulations and discipline guides published in English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu. The system faces teacher shortages in all areas, but particularly in bilingual education, science, math, ESL, and special education. Most NYU graduates go on to teach in New York City schools, and field experience in city schools is an increasingly important facet of the teacher preparation program.

As the largest school district in the nation with more than 1,400 schools and 1.1 million students, school reform in New York City is closely watched by the education community. The pace of change has accelerated since Mayor Bloomberg gained control of the school system from the state legislature in 2002. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein implemented the Children First initiative in 2003 to pursue the three interrelated principles of leadership, empowerment, and accountability for schools. As part of this initiative, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) adopted a single system-wide approach for instruction in reading, writing, and math. The Chancellor has also moved to streamline bureaucratic structures and reallocate funding to the school level. Principal empowerment is a key tenet of Klein’s reforms: structural changes and the Fair Student Funding policy, launched in 2007, aim to give school principals more flexibility and autonomy in decisions around programs, personnel, and finances in return for increased accountability for pupil learning outcomes. NYU works closely with the DOE in preparing aspiring teachers for the evolving landscape of urban education in New York City.

The receipt of several high-profile grants, from the likes of the federal Teacher Quality Enhancement program, the Gates Foundation, and the Petrie Foundation, has allowed Steinhardt to pursue a program of reform that is deeply rooted in the exigencies of urban, high-needs schools. School-university partnerships are one important facet of these efforts, evidenced by the opening of

University Neighborhood High School in the nearby Lower East Side in 1999. The school was designed to provide a unique learning laboratory for NYU aspiring teachers as well as high quality college

preparatory instruction for high school pupils. NYU’s partnering work has subsequently expanded to include a network of secondary schools in the Lower East Side, Harlem, and South Bronx through the Partnership for Teacher Excellence.

Steinhardt, and Steinhardt’s dean, are now taking an increasingly visible role in national

conversations around educational reform and teacher preparation, especially with regard to increasing federal funding for educational research. In the fall of 2008, Steinhardt dean Mary

Brabeck led a briefing to congressional staff titled Teacher Quality: Research on the Science of Teaching and Learning. The briefing was hosted by the Learning and Education Academic Research Network (LEARN) Coalition, an advocacy group composed of seventeen deans from schools of education around the country concerned with federal investments into research on teaching and learning.4New York University

PlaNNINg aNd ImPlemeNtINg a stUdeNt teacher assessmeNt

In 2006 the TNE Learning Network gave a mini-grant to NYU to pilot a process for assessing student teacher proficiency from multiple perspectives. It proposed to employ a quasi-experimental, treatment-comparison group design. The framework and protocol that was to be used for assessing student teachers, drawing from Charlotte Danielson’s Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching (1996), was known as the Domain-Referenced Student Teacher Observation Scale (DRSTOS). The

framework was to be used as a summative assessment to measure both teaching skill and, in concert with other sources of data like GPA, rank, transcript data, and SAT or GRE scores, content knowledge.DRSTOS was developed to address the problem that, though there were some commonalities within disciplines in assessing student teachers, to a great extent individual student teacher supervisors “did their own thing.” DRSTOS was introduced as a common assessment measure with the intent that it would eventually be used across the teacher education program. The protocol lays out the “tools” NYU student teacher supervisors and, ideally, cooperating teachers use to observe and talk about student teachers. The instrument was first conceived of in the fall of 2003 as the Domain-Referenced Teacher Observation to assess practicing teachers, and was adapted in 2004, with faculty input, to assess student teachers. Revisions to the original instrument have led to the latest iteration, DRSTOS-R (Domain-Referenced Student Teacher Observation Scale- Revised). DRSTOS-R consists of 21 items assessing student teachers’ professional practice across four domains: 1) Planning and Preparation; 2) Classroom Environment; 3) Instruction; and 4) Professional Responsibilities. On each item, student teachers are rated on a one to four scale, one being “Not Yet Proficient,” and four, “Proficient” (the “Exemplary” category included in Danielson’s original framework was eliminated to avoid grade

inflation). Early pilots showed evidence of high inter-rater reliability, and additional supervisors and student teachers have been added to the pilot each semester since.

University supervisors, typically retired teachers or administrators, are paid $400 per student per semester to perform three formal observations for each student teacher. Over the course of these three observations they will collect evidence of effective practice and generate recommendations. Though DRSTOS-R is not yet universally employed by student teacher supervisors, those that do use it are required to attend a one-day training session in the use of DRSTOS-R, where they are asked to independently rate training videos. DRSTOS-R asks them to provide evidence in the form of specific examples of teachers’ and students’ behavior. NYU research staff from the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning (CRTL) then assess inter-rater reliability, and supervisors are required to achieve a standard of agreement. TNE Learning Network mini-grant funding has been used to finance small incentive payments to supervisors to encourage them to attend the DRSTOS- R training. As of the fall of 2008, 44 supervisors, 26 of them still in the field, had been trained in the use of DRSTOS-R. CRTL and Steinhardt’s Office of Clinical Studies in Teaching, which coordinates clinical placements for the 100 hours of field work required by New York State, are now exploring ways to sustain and scale up the training without the support of external funding.

CRTL piloted the multiple perspectives concept proposed in the Learning Network mini-grant application, but found that it was difficult to reach agreement between the cooperating teachers and the university supervisors. In an early joint DRSTOS training session for university supervisors and cooperating teachers, the cooperating teachers systematically rated training videos lower than the university raters did, largely because they were assessing samples against the standardized curriculum 5New York University