What Business Leaders Can Do To Help Change Teacher Education. Second Edition. AACTE Forum Series.

Overview & Synopsis

This publication offers suggestions for business leaders on how they can help support the reform of teacher education and, in the process, create the diverse, qualified, and culturally responsive teaching force that is needed. Through grant making, technical assistance, and cooperative effort, corporate officials can help to reformulate the job of teacher development from a continuous, systems perspective, i.e., teachers should not be produced by one sector (teacher education schools) to be consumed by a different, unrelated sector (schools). Education can learn much from business about managing diversity and developing human potential. Yet business leaders must first learn the education issues and under what conditions and with what success they can be addressed. Second, they must choose options or entry points best suited to educational expectations, needs, and resources. Third, they must develop a clearly focused strategy, monitor its progress, and record its effectiveness. Specific opportunities for business leaders include: supporting efforts to recruit top students into teaching, promoting efforts to improve teachers' content knowledge, helping teachers to learn a variety of ways to teach students, and supporting and advocating the redesign of teacher education. Business has the power to bring difficult education issues to the attention of state and local officials and to influence creative approaches to solving them. Financial support for path-breaking reforms in teacher education is critical, and the opportunities for corporate investment are great as evidenced by cited examples of existing business support for teacher education. A list of organizations working on teacher education is appended. (NAV)