[NOTE: This article appeared in the 1999 report by the Alabama Task Force on Teaching and Student Achievement, Teaching and Learning: Meeting the Challenge of High Standards. Samford University is a private, Baptist-supported liberal arts university in Birmingham, Alabama. Dr. Ruth Ash can be reached by e-mail at rcash@samford.edu] You'll also find an article about Samford's innovative "Chief Learning Officer" approach to principal training.

In 2000, Samford's teacher education program was selected by the U.S. Department of Education for the first National Award for Effective Teacher Preparation.


Transforming Teacher Education:
The Samford University Example


by John Norton

If Samford University should ever decide to carve a maxim above the entrance to its School of Education, this would be a good one:

Improvement flows from a growth in understanding.

Samford education dean Ruth Ash and her faculty embraced that maxim in 1992 when they decided to borrow a page from restructuring industries and apply the principles of "total quality management" to transform their teacher education program.

The results Samford is achieving are not only a testament to the hard work of its education faculty and staff but positive proof that a well-designed university program can prepare graduates who can "hit the ground running"-ready to teach and manage today's students effectively.

At a time when some critics are questioning whether university-based teacher education programs have the will or capacity to reform themselves, Samford's example is an important one - not only to its students and the Birmingham-area schools that hire many of its graduates, but to everyone involved in making decisions about teacher policy.

The evidence of Samford's success can be found in interviews with its graduates- "they taught us how to solve problems for ourselves and they gave us the skills to cope with the real world," says one first-year teacher. Advanced-degree students also underscore Samford's emphasis on practical knowledge and skills. "They gave us the tools we needed to start solving our own instructional problems," says Julie Hannah, an assistant principal at Cahaba Heights Elementary School, where a group of teachers took Samford graduate classes together.

For those who require more empirical evidence, the employment rate of Samford's new teacher graduates has increased from 80 percent to over 96 percent in the six years since the university first made its commitment to total quality improvement.

Samford recently earned re-accreditation under the NCATE accrediting organization's tougher new standards. The NCATE reviewers identified 19 specific strengths in the program, an "unheard of" number, according to Dr. Richard Dudley, who led the NCATE team. Samford's reforms are "integrated into the heart and soul of [its] programs and the work of the faculty," Dr. Dudley said in his comments about the team's accreditation visit. "This is an extraordinary program."

The "Total Quality" Education Program

The "quality" philosophy is simple, Dean Ash says, if challenging to implement. "You gather good data from your customers, and you use that data to make all your decisions. And the process is continuous-you never really finish the work; you're constantly transforming yourself."
Early on, Samford sorted its "customers" into three groups-current students, graduates, and employers. "We realized that, first, we needed to ask the employers what our graduates needed to be able to do and what they needed to know when they graduated," Dr. Ash explains. "And second, we needed to talk to our students when they graduated and went on to teach and ask them what was most helpful and what they needed that we had not provided them."

The surveys and focus groups with principals and alumni provided very specific feedback on a range of skills and knowledge that new teacher graduates needed:

Classroom management: "We heard our students and our clients telling us that our graduates needed more help with classroom management, so we changed our classroom management instruction," Ash says. Samford moved these classes to the late afternoon, "so that practicing teachers can come in and we can deal with real situations." Samford also gave students more time to learn classroom management in real classrooms by observing and assisting master teachers.

Working with Parents: "One group of graduates told us that they were not comfortable holding parent conferences," says Ash, so the college included classes with visiting teachers who talked about effective parent/teacher communication. Additional feedback prompted the faculty to make the classes a permanent part of the curriculum.

Technology: "One district told us that they would no longer hire any graduate of any school who was not just knowledgeable and aware of technology but able to use technology effectively in instruction," says Dr. Elizabeth Offutt, director of the college's educational technology center. Samford has fully integrated technology into its curriculum and actually offers some courses to students over the Internet and through e-mail. Every Samford graduate is a skilled user of educational and other software. "In addtion to our technology class," says Samford student Andi Wood, "we have a thread running through all of our classes so that when we have our own classrooms, we will approach technology as just a basic piece of what we do every day as teachers."

Special needs: "With inclusion more and more common in our schools, every graduate and every employer stressed the importance of having teachers who could handle special needs children in the regular classroom," Ash says. Samford responded by incorporating special needs coursework into every class and requiring two additional special education classes and six weeks of clinical experience in special needs classrooms. All elementary and early childhood education graduates will also be certified in special education.

Teaching and Assessment: "Administrators told us they wanted teachers to be able to prepare high-quality tests based on what was taught and what children needed to know," says Ash. Samford's faculty decided to completely revise their own methods of assessing teacher education students "so that their own practices matched the best classroom assessment practices. Samford students now learn (and personally experience) a more comprehensive assessment system. They learn many different ways to measure what students are learning, including systematically examining samples of student work and making necessary adjustments in their teaching.

The surveys of administrators and teachers were not a one-time event. "This data-gathering is a permanent part of our process," Ash says. "This is how we find out what we need to teach and how we need to improve."

The feedback is not always easy to hear, says Dr. Jean Ann Box, Samford's director of teacher education. "The first year, in particular, we had to work with our faculty to not be defensive when we heard constructive criticism. But I think we all came to see that what we were doing was what we expect our students to be able to do.

"Whether you're a college teacher or a public school teacher, the issue is the same," Box says. "How do you know what to teach? Do you rely on a textbook to tell you, or do you measure your results, gather information about how well you're reaching your goals, and use that information to design and improve what you teach?"

Problem-Based Learning

"Continuous improvement" is just what it says - continuous. The Samford program "will never be perfect or complete," Ash says. "It will change as needs in the schools change." A case in point: after several years of using feedback and other data to make adjustments in their existing program, Samford administrators and faculty decided it was time to make more fundamental changes.

With the help of a $1 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the education school (and several other university programs) began to explore a new education strategy: problem-based learning. Their search for answers took them to medical and veterinary schools, and even to Denmark, where problem-based learning is commonplace. They invited lecturers to campus, held retreats, and hosted international visitors. With all this research in hand, the Samford faculty began to fashion their own unique approach.

"The schools that employ our graduates told us that our new teachers need to be able to immediately solve real problems when they come into the classroom," Ash says. "That's what lead to our decision ultimately to build our program around problem-based learning."

In a nutshell, problem-based teaching shifts the responsibility for learning from the instructor to the student. For example, students who are learning how a teacher manages instruction in a classroom with both regular and "special needs" students might be given a case study that paints a detailed portrait of such a classroom. The students, often working in teams, are expected to find answers to the problems presented in the case study through their own research, aided by faculty coaching and regular opportunities to spend time in classrooms with teachers who manage this kind of instruction effectively.

"We are not abandoning our teaching role," says Ash. "We still do some lecturing, we still give tests and grade papers and provide feedback. But we push our students to find the answers for themselves."

The problem-based approach mimics the way we learn in real life, says Jean Ann Box. No one learns to use the Internet, for example, by simply sitting in a classroom and listening to a lecture. To gain proficiency, a computer user signs onto the Internet with a specific goal in mind and learns by trial and error, seeking out additional help and information as the need arises. Over time proficiency grows as more problems arise and the user gains more skills and "insider knowledge" about the complex workings of the global computer network.

"Teaching is an immensely complex task," says Carol Dean, director of Samford's Problem-Based Learning Center, "and it's not something we should expect students to learn just by listening. But that's the system we've relied on the past, and it's the system that many teacher education programs still rely on too much."

Samford will soon teach most, if not all, of its classes using the problem-based method. As layer upon layer is added, Box says, students gain confidence in their ability to organize what many new teachers perceive as "the chaos of the real classroom." As a result, new graduates are more likely to be effective in their first few years of teaching and more likely to remain in the profession.
Samford is also integrating its quality- and problem-based approaches to learning into its graduate and outreach programs. Through its Center for Quality Education, over 3,000 Alabama teachers and administrators have already participated in quality-oriented professional development experiences.

Students find PBL challenging but rewarding

Shifting from traditional teaching to problem-based learning is challenging for Samford's faculty members - and for its students. Presenting a problem and then allowing students to struggle towards a solution can be painful, Box says. Ash compares it to raising a small child, reaching a stage in the child's development where you know you have to step back and let them work through their own frustration. "We always want to step in and make it easier for them," she says. "But as good parents we know they have to learn for themselves. Good teachers have the same outlook."

Samford student Sarah Sprouse recalls her first encounter with a PBL class this way. "Our professor assigned our projects, and we got in our groups, and we were starting to work on it. We got so frustrated! 'How in the world do we do this?,' we asked her. We wanted her to just tell us what to do. But she wouldn't. 'I've given you the guidelines and you have to come up with your own way of doing it,' she said. We really struggled for the first couple of weeks trying to figure out what we were going to do, how we were going to do it. But eventually we really learned from it - as she said, we learned more than she could have presented to us."

Andi Wood, one of Sprouse's classmates, remembers her first observation of problem-based learning in an actual classroom. "At first it seems chaotic and crazy. You're saying, like, what's going on? Then you begin to see that students are really learning, and you see that the teacher plays a critical role as a coach and guide in the process. She still has to provide the content and be responsible for what happens. It's opened my eyes up to the fact that there is more than one style of teaching and that we shouldn't limit ourselves as educators and we shouldn't limit our students."

To support the further development of problem-based teaching and learning, Samford has established its Problem-Based Learning Center. The center will support faculty and students as they refine their problem-based teaching methods and will also provide outreach to working teachers and administrators in Samford's graduate programs. The center also supports a website that further describes the PBL approach.

More time in real classrooms

From the earliest days of Samford's journey, it was clear from the data that students needed to spend more time in real classrooms with successful teachers. "If you go into schools and talk to teachers about teacher education, that's the one thing you'll hear time and time again," says Ash. "Undergraduates need more exposure to the real world."

Samford's decision to embrace problem-based learning made "clinical experiences" all the more important. Samford, like most teacher education programs, had begun some years before to give students opportunities to visit schools prior to their student teaching experience. In fact, Samford had gone a step further, requiring all students to complete a 45-hour field experience in inner city classrooms as aides to a master teacher.

But Ash and her faculty decided the 18 weeks or so that students spent in schools was both insuffient and inadequately focused. Beginning this school year, Samford students will spend a total of 30 weeks in school classrooms, with more faculty and teacher support than ever before. Students will spend a total of 10 weeks in clinicals in connection with various education courses, six continuous weeks of student teaching with special needs children, and 14 continuous weeks of student teaching in regular classrooms. In many instances, working teachers and principals will serve as adjunct professors and supervise the student teaching on a daily basis.

"This is a powerful piece of our new program," says Ash. "Having a supervisor on site every day is extremely valuable to our students, and it shares the ownership of teacher education with the schools themselves, which is the way it ought to be."

Market-driven teacher education

The Samford program begins with "good raw material" - students must have a 2.65 grade point average to enter and remain in teacher education and to be recommended for certification. Their average ACT college entrance examination score is 24.4, well above the average for all Alabama students who plan to major in teacher education (19.4).

But to use the business parlance of today, it's the "value-added" dimension that appears most important about Samford's increasingly fine-tuned and sharply focused teacher education program.
To help assure that value is added, every Samford senior goes through an "exit assessment" and must pass a national teachers' examination. The NCATE accreditation team described the exit model as "quite excellent" because it assures "that young people have knowledge and background in their specialty areas that they will be teaching" as well as how to teach each specialty.

"Market-driven" is another business term that seems to describe Samford's teacher education design, although administrators and faculty are a little uncomfortable talking about their program quite that way. But the expression seems to fit.

"The reason we are doing almost everything we are doing is because we wanted all of our students to be able to be employed in their chosen field and to be completely successful when they were employed," says Dean Ash. "And we began by listening to the employers." To insure that they keep listening, Samford educators have created a "Quality Council" that includes school administrators and teachers and provides regular feedback.

"We do listen to our market," says Jean Ann Box. "But we're also driven by what's best for children in our schools.What holds our faculty together, as different as they are, is that they all care about children improving their learning. And for that to happen, we have to prepare our students to be the best teachers they can be."

It appears to be working. In their exit interview, the NCATE assessors said this to Ruth Ash and her staff: "We clearly wish that you could have heard the broad audience that we had a chance to interview talk about the quality of your students -- and how well-prepared they are to do their jobs professionally."

END