Hoe kan onderzoek een bijdrage leveren tot verbetering van de lerarenopleiding? Het American Institutes for Research (AIR) leverde een rapport af met richtinggevende aanbevelingen die onderzoekers, lerarenopleidingen en schooldirecties (het afnemend werkveld) in een samenwerkingsverband brengen. Een aantrekkelijk project dat ook in Vlaamse context inspirerend kan zijn.
In April 2017, three dozen top teacher educators, researchers, and school and district leaders met
together to conceive of a new approach to designing and conducting research to improve teacher
preparation. This new approach would engage researchers and practitioners in tightly collaborative
investigations, using rigorous methods to seek answers to questions such as: What changes should
our teacher preparation program make to our candidates’ field experiences to simultaneously
maximize K–12 student learning and candidate performance? How can we improve and scale our
approach to teaching mentors to guide their candidates during in-class instruction? How can we
more efficiently teach new math teachers to lead group discussions about important content?
How can we better match our curriculum to our candidates’ preexisting strengths and limitations?
How can we assess candidates’ data literacy so that we can better understand the supports needed
to scaffold their learning?
Research that answers these and other questions is needed to ensure that new teachers are
well prepared to meet the challenges of today’s classrooms. Participants in that April meeting
identified four essential qualities of useful research for improvement: It must be actionable,
nuanced, contextualized, and formative.
