Defining Highly Qualified Teachers

Daniel Waterman
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

Highly qualified teachers help students learn at high levels. They must acquire complex skills to do this. These are teachers, as noted here www.essayvikings.com/custom-writing, who know not only their subject matter, but also how to organize and teach their lessons in ways that assure diverse students can learn those subjects.

These are teachers who can help each student reach higher academic standards, even when those students leam in different ways or have a learning disability or may not speak English as their first language. Highly qualified teachers don’t just teach well-designed, standards-based lessons: They know how and why their students leam. They work effectively with their colleagues to push and lead school improvement….

Poor children and students of color continue to receive the short end of the stick by being assigned, in large part, to the least qualified teachers. Research released by the Public Policy Institute of California revealed that minority students in high poverty schools were six times more likely not to have a fully qualified teacher than white students attending a low poverty school.

As long as federal guidelines place a premium on defining teacher quality solely by measuring subject matter competence, we will continue to experience a flood of new teachers who may know their subjects, but don’t know much else about teaching and learning. These ill-prepared teachers will flow into our most challenging schools, and the students in these schools, who desperately need expert teaching, will continue to be victimized.

The good news is that the federal government is now pushing for a national standard for teachers and for the creation of a public reporting system that drives consumer demand for competent, caring, qualified teachers. To accomplish its audacious teacher quality goals, the federal government needs to draw upon professional education organizations, which in turn have drawn upon both research and proven practices to craft a system for defining both qualified and highly qualified teachers.

The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) have developed specified standards for the prepared novice teacher, and the NBPTS has developed standards for accomplished practice. The National Board’s assessments focus on content-specific teaching knowledge as well as on the teachers’ ability to assess how and why specific students leam academic content and to determine what kind of teaching strategies need to be employed.

However, as the experience of the NBPTS demonstrates, measuring quality in teaching and teachers is not an inexpensive proposition ($2300 per candidate). To scale up what we know about assessing teacher quality for three million teachers (including 250,000 new hires a year) will not be a simple task.

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