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This chapter traces the career trajectories of the teachHOUSTON science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers since the inception of the program. It asks whether the National Science Foundation (NSF) investment of millions of dollars in STEM education produced more STEM teachers of high quality for the diverse, urban area. The chapter is filled with descriptive statistics and stories. Two major findings are that the teachHOUSTON program produced double-digit physics teachers when the Greater Houston area had not had a freshly prepared physics teacher in over a decade. Additionally, teachHOUSTON graduates have distinguished themselves by being named recipients of several awards such as beginning teacher of the year awards, district teacher of the year awards, among other distinctions. teachHOUSTON alumni are also serving in a variety of leadership capacities for high-need public school districts. The chapter ends with a discussion of the program's strengths as well as the areas in which it continues to grow. Three new NSF grants allow for continued improvement and transition this work into two additional books proposed in this three-volume series.

Learning through formal and informal experiences is critical for building content knowledge, pedagogical skills, and self-efficacy/confidence for preservice teachers. teachHOUSTON offers numerous teacher enhancement opportunities outside the teacher education courses which allows preservice teachers to connect to the real world which includes being able to relate to a diverse population of students and to understand how the course content can be related to them, their families, and communities in their everyday experiences. Through formal and informal experiences such as professional development workshops, discipline specific courses, research experiences, and internships, preservice teachers have the opportunity to engage in hands-on science activities they can use with their students, develop lessons, and gain knowledge on how to deliver this content while managing their classroom. This chapter will give an overview of the formal and informal experiences offered through teachHOUSTON with a highlight on the structure and content of the six week Noyce Internship Program which engaged interns as counselors and teaching assistants in a summer STEM camp for underserved middle school students and introduces the interns to interactive sessions that model promising practices for teaching.

In order to teach science effectively, teachers need a strong background in science content as well as an understanding of productive methods of teaching. This includes inquiry-based learning that will cultivate conceptual development of science concepts with their students. Furthermore, it is imperative to use student-focused activities in high-needs schools to engage all students, particularly students of color, in the learning process. As a result, faculty from the teachHOUSTON Program and the Department of Physics at the University of Houston produced a Physics by Inquiry course to engage middle school and high school preservice teachers in interactive, inquiry-based teaching pedagogies for physics. This chapter provides an overview of the course. It also highlights the benefits of including such a course in a STEM teacher education program.

Enacted in August 2008, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA), PL 110-315, represents a landmark public policy effort on behalf of students with disabilities and a natural outgrowth of the impact of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This chapter examines the myriad new provisions in HEOA intended to improve access to higher education for students with disabilities as well as HEOA's provisions related to preparing teachers to effectively instruct students with disabilities in the K-12 environment. Multiple new provisions reflect an invigorated commitment to developing a workforce for today's schools – schools with unprecedented diversity – and to addressing the critical teacher shortages, including special education. This chapter is organized around three themes: access to higher education for students with disabilities, investing in the capacity of higher education to serve students with disabilities, and strengthening the preparation of teachers of students with disabilities, including accountability for this preparation.

A primary goal of the Collaboration and Resources for Encouraging and Supporting Transformations in Education (CREST-Ed) program was to increase the number of highly qualified, minoritized teachers committed to teaching in minority-serving, high-need school districts. This study's purpose was to evaluate the CREST-Ed program's impact on teacher residency outcomes using multiple sources of program evaluation data collected during the five-year grant.

This study of a federal Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grant at Georgia State University (GSU), a minority-serving institution (MSI) and research university, shows teacher residency programs can improve the diverse teacher pipeline. The grant, CREST-Ed, provided professional development schools (PDS) support for four urban and 23 rural school districts through partnerships with GSU, Albany State University (ASU) and Columbus State University (CSU).

The study findings suggest that teacher preparation grants can be leveraged to recruit traditionally minoritized teachers of color to increase the diverse teacher pipeline and strengthen PDS partnerships.

Both urban and rural PDSs could benefit from teacher residency programs like the CREST-Ed model that catered to the unique needs of each school and partnership district.

Teacher education reform in the United States has been an ongoing theme over the past 100 years, particularly since A Nation at Risk in the 1980s, when education became increasingly politicized and less of a public good with which the American public did not tinker. These reforms have four different themes: (1) strengthening the clinical component of teacher education, (2) preparing educators with the tools needed for equity and social justice, (3) participating in heightened accountability demands, and (4) expanding alternative certification. This chapter explores these four strands of reform and concludes they are colliding forces in which the country pours time, resources, and energy. Ongoing collisions on the reform landscape produce increasingly negative consequences for teacher education, teacher recruitment, and retention and America's public schools.

Teacher education in the United States has been widely criticized for its uneven and often poorly supported approach to preparing novices for clinical practice. In 2010, the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning (commissioned by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) released a report titled “Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers.” The report called for teacher education to “be turned upside down,” a dramatic shift from traditional approaches to preparing teachers to “programs that are fully grounded in clinical practice and interwoven with academic content and professional courses” (p. ii). Many preparation programs in the United States are engaged in efforts to become more clinically rich in their approach to teacher preparation. This chapter will examine the call for more clinically rich approaches to English language arts teacher education, and will highlight how such a shift is integral to more socially just teacher preparation programs. Particular features of two clinically rich English language arts teacher preparation programs, one in California the other in New York, will be described and research focusing on the programs will be highlighted in an effort to share lessons learned.

This study aims to examine seven challenging schools in the US and the practices their principals employed in leading these schools to a measure of success in terms of student performance.

Uses a case study methodology, a two‐stage framework is used to analyze the data. First, uses Leithwood and Riehl's three core leadership practices to determine whether these leaders were demonstrating the necessary practices for success, then develops and describes three principles that enabled these leaders to translate their core practices into school success: accountability, caring and learning.

The principals formed a diverse group, varying in gender, race, experience and education. But they shared some common characteristics, most notably, all seven demonstrated facility with the core leadership practices of direction setting, developing people and redesigning the organization. They were leaders who managed to set and maintain a sense of purpose and direction for their schools and generally exerted a positive influence on people's willingness to follow their lead, even in the face of challenging conditions.

Provides recommendations for the preparation and practice of school leaders.

This study uses the most recent national data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), 2011–2012 and Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS), 2012–2013 to investigate attrition trends among Black teachers, and Black female teachers in particular, to inform a qualitative analysis of proposed and adopted teacher retention policy interventions. This study asks: Why do Black teachers report leaving, and what would bring them back to the classroom? What working conditions are associated with Black teacher attrition? What policy interventions can meet the needs of Black teachers in having successful and supported teaching experiences? How have these interventions been successful, and what are the considerations for applying them more broadly? We find that Black teacher turnover rates are significantly higher than those of other teachers and that there are several substantive differences in their preparation, school characteristics, and reasons for leaving. We describe policy interventions that target these conditions, such as teacher residencies, loan forgiveness, mentoring and induction, and principal training programs. We include in that discussion the relative benefits and challenges of each implications for policymaking.

The ever-increasing pressure for school improvement has led to a related increase in research-practice partnerships (RPPs) that address problems of practice. Yet, little research has centered on how the myriad challenges to such partnerships can be overcome, such as bridging the cultural divide between universities and their school-based partners. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine how social capital was developed among the members of a steering committee in a RPP between a university and a 12-district consortium of predominantly rural, high-poverty school districts to develop and implement a professional development initiative for rural school leaders.

Data for this phenomenological single case study were collected over a one-year period through participant observations, document analysis and semi-structured interviews with ten steering committee members. Data were inductively and deductively coded through multiple rounds of analysis, which drew on the structural and cognitive elements of social capital (Uphoff, 2000). Findings were triangulated and member checked for trustworthiness.

The analysis of the data revealed three key ways in which social capital was developed among members of the steering committee to overcome the cultural challenges of RPPs to develop and implement a professional development initiative for rural school leaders: providing an open but focused structure, ensuring inclusive and respectful discussion and negotiating roles and ideas.

The findings provide a fine-grained illustration of how intentional efforts to develop social capital among members in a co-design team can assist in bridging the cultural boundaries often encountered in RPPs.