Department of Education
April, 2007
Department of Education
Table of Contents
Page
I. Trends in Education...... 5
A.Major Trend of Accountability and the Standards Movement...... 5
B.Major Trend of Technology...... 9
C.Changes in Faculty...... 10
D.Changes in Enrollment...... 12
E.Changes in Employment of Graduates...... 15
H.Changes in Student Population...... 16
II.Overall Evaluation of Student and Faculty Development...... 18
A.Assessment of Students...... 18
1.Recognition of Students...... 18
2.Quality of Students...... 19
3.Recruitment of Students...... 20
4.Retention of Students...... 21
5.Enrollment Trends...... 22
6.Placement of Students...... 22
7.Summary of Exit Examination Data...... 24
B.Assessment of Faculty...... 26
1.Faculty Recognition...... 26
2.Faculty Quality...... 26
3.Faculty with Terminal Degrees...... 34
4.History of Faculty/Development...... 35
5.Faculty Stability/Turnover...... 43
III.Evaluation of Departmental Program Performance...... 44
A.Program Variables...... 44
- NCATE Standards (NCATE Accreditation Standards)……………44
- MO DESE Program Approval Checkpoints (State Certification)55
3.Program Recognition (includes accreditation, awards, etc.).56
4.Credit Production and Trends...... 60
5.Graduates in Program and Trends...... 61
6.Majors of Intended Majors and Trends...... 61
7.SCH Production...... 63
8.Student Interest and Demand for Program...... 64
9.Marketplace Demand for Graduates of Program...... 64
10.Existence of Comparable Degree Programs within Primary and
Secondary Regions...... 65
11.Service Aspects of Program in Providing Support to General
Studies of to Other Academic Programs...... 65
B. Availability of Resources...... 65
1.Library Holdings...... 65
2.Equipment...... 66
3.Operations...... 67
4.Space...... 68
5.Support Staff...... 69
C. Analysis of the Program/Programs in the Context
of the "I. Trends in the Field/Fields of study"...... 69
1.Where is the program now?...... 69
2.Summarize the actions taken in response to the
department objectives stated in your last program review..71
3.What should the State-of-the-Art program look like? ...... 73
4.Department Strengths…………………………………………………………74
5.Department Concerns…………………………………………………………74
6.Department Threats……………………………………………………………75
7.Department Opportunities…………………………………………………...77
D. Resource needs in terms of C...... 77
1.Staffing needs (same, expand, reduce) ...... 77
2.Equipment needs (needed or available for disposal) ...... 78
3. Operational expenses (increase, same, decrease)...... 78
4. Potential effect on enrollment (increase or decrease) ...... 79
IV.Data Related to Strategic Plan……………………………………………………..Appendix O
V.Appendices...... 80
A.Keynote Sessions Understanding the Complexities of Standards-Based Reform
B.“Explaining Standards: A 12 Step Talking Paper”
C.Missouri Standards for Teacher Education Programs
D.NCATE Unit Standards
E.“NCATE Unveils Standards Based Upon Performance”
F.12 Teacher Education Standards - MWSU
G.“Blogs – Catching on as a Tool for Instruction”
H.“Podcasting Craze Comes to K-12 Schools”
I.“Engaged Learning Benefits all Students”
J.“21st Century Skills, the Future of Technology and Education”
K.“Ranks of Male Teachers, Principals Shrinking”
L.“Higher Earning? Teachers Fair Better Than Many Other Professionals”
M.“Teaching-The Least Boring Job”
N.“The Millennials Come of Age”
O.NCATE Accreditation Notification Letter – April 6, 2001
P.Report of Praxis Score Discrepancy of 1999-2000
Q.Other Pertinant Data/Information Related to the Strategic Plan
R.“Many Teachers See Failure in Students Future”
S.“Uncertified Teachers Performing Well, Study Finds”
T.“Climb Every Mountain”
U.“How to Bring our Schools Out of the 20th Century”
V.“Despite Concerns, Online Elementary School Grow”
W.“Welcome to MoVIP”
X.“NCATE Accredits It’s First On-line Teacher-Training Program”
Y.“Classrooms of the Future”
Z.“World Shortage of 18 Million Teachers by 2016”
Plus additional articles
MissouriWesternState College
Department of Education
Five-Year Program Review
I.Trends in the Field of Study
Twomajor trends in teacher education dominate the field: (1) accountability, outcomes-based and the standards movement and (2) educational technology. These mega-trends have significantly defined our profession—what we do and how we do it. The discourse of the first strand of assessment and accountability is that, “something is wrong and we need to determine who is responsible so it can be fixed.” Endemic to that trend is a focus upon student learning and outcomes to hold teacher accountable and to improve standards and tools assessment tools. The secondtrend of technology is pervasive in that technology is both the way in which we assess teaching and learning and the way in which we deliver teaching and motivate learning. Neither of these are fads—they are trends that are already deeply embedded within the profession and not likely to diminish in their influence, ever.
A. Major Trend of Accountability and the Standards Movement
Low K-12 achievement test scores and complaints from business and industry about the lack of academic preparedness on the part of new hires resulted in a wave of school reform centered on accountability through high standards and testing. The accountability movement began in the 1970s when states legislated schools and districts accountable for academic results. Originally, the focus was upon attendance, graduation rates and other measurements of student participation. The thought was that accountability that held districts responsible for results would significantly impact teaching practices and thus, student learning. In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education's National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. This document spawned a wave of reform efforts and an ongoing debate about what constitutes school reform. One reform effort that gained precedence during the ensuing years was standards-based education. The standards approach seeks to identify what students should know and be able to do at particular points in their schooling and to create assessments that measure performance relative to the standards (Appendix A). Appendix B also succinctly addresses the history and paradigm of standards-based teaching and learning. Missouri K-12 schools are held accountable to the Missouri School Improvement Program (MSIP) standards as measured in part by the Missouri Assessment Plan exams (MAP). Higher Education Teacher Education Units like our own are held accountable at the state level to the Missouri Standards for Teacher Education Programs (MoSTEP) (Appendix C) and on a national level to the standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) (Appendix D). There is a great deal of alignment between the MoSTEP standards and the NCATE standards since both have embraced the second significant trend in teacher education, that of performance-based teaching and learning. A predictable outcome of the standards-based trend has now turned is to that of performance-based standards.
Similar to the way in which one can identify a leader because there are followers, performance based teacher education recognizes that a teacher education unit has been effective when its teacher candidates can demonstrate that they can positively impact the learning of P-12 students. This represents a major paradigm shift that has become more and more embedded within education since the turn of this century. Whereas earlier attempts to determine the quality or effectiveness of teacher educators focused upon teacher inputs, a performance-based paradigm analyzes the outcomes and works backwards. Under this model, a teacher educator or a teacher education unit will not be approved because they do “teacher things” or have “teacher equipment and tools,” but only because they can demonstrate results. This is now intertwined with issues of standards and assessments since both state and national standards and assessments are all becoming strongly performance-based (Appendix E). The Missouri Western Teacher Education Department’s twelve standards (Appendix F) are performance-based and aligned with national and state standards. In fact, eleven of our twelve standards are the same as the eleven Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) standards that were incorporated into the Missouri standards (MoSTEP). We added a twelfth standard addressing foundations, ethics, and school law.
We have further met the challenges of this trend by adopting three other performance-based areas of assessment for our program: research-based teacher dispositions, professional behaviors, and ways of relating. These will be elaborated on later in the report.
The refinement of ourperformance-based model has been the subject of much of the department’s attention over the span of the five years covered by this review.
B. Major Trend of Technology (Pedagogy and Delivery)
Without a doubt, standards, assessments and performance-based teaching and learning have dominated how we think about what we teach and how we teach it. But technology has given us a new set of tools to empower teachers to move the focus of teaching and learning beyond content to process. Technology has provided both teachers and students with a rich, world-wide repository of content knowledge that is quickly and easily accessible from school and home. Therefore, it makes sense that the focus has moved more to process. We no longer have to remember the value of the cosine of 30 or how to derive it if you forget; we can now spend more time on how you use the cosine of 30. We don’t have to remember key dates and events but can pull up relevant timelines and data and develop hypotheses and conduct online research that was impossible a decade or two ago. Furthermore, the use of technology is motivating—it’s fun for students and teachers alike and has infused education with a withitness that can make learning on the forward edge of society instead of stuck in the past. Students in high school English classes are blogging (Appendix G). K-12 students are creating podcasts for interviews, nature sounds, and innumerable other audio learning pieces and publishing them to the Internet for their classmates and the entire world to access (Appendix H). Wikis, del.icio.us, and many other fast emerging and evolving ways for people to connect and share are changing the way in which learning is constructed. This makes the tool of technology a valuable ally for teachers who must catch students’ attention and interest in order to motivate them to learn. But technology is not only affecting how teachers teach and how students learn; it is also changing how education in general is being repackaged and delivered.
Consider the following:
- The National Survey of Student Engagement 2006 Annual Report ( indicated that “Compared with campus-based students, distance education learners reported higher levels of academic challenge and engaged more often in deep learning activities.” (Appendix I)
- Louis Loeffler, technology coordinator for the SunPrairieAreaSchool District, suggested that teachers consider “learning objects” as a part of a broader vision of teaching and learning in the 21st century. Learning objects, as facilitated by computers and the web, would allow for learning to be constructed in ways that would be unique for each learner. (Appendix J)
- As many as 700,000 K-12 students were engaged in online courses in the 2005-2006 academic year, and the pace of enrollment only is expected to keep accelerating, according to “K-12 Online Learning: A Survey of U.S. School District Administrators”, conducted by the Sloan Consortium, an organization that facilitates online learning.
- According to the report "Virtual Schools: Trends and Issues," released a year ago by the San Francisco-based research organization WestEd, virtual schools are the "next wave" in technology-based K-12 education. (Education Week, 2003) Tens of thousands of K-12 students now attend online schools.
Technology is moving ahead of us, reshaping how teaching and learning are defined and how it is delivered. For us at Missouri Western, technology is present in all four categories of strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. The challenge is to place a premium upon creativity above (or at least equal to) tradition. IMHO (“in my humble opinion in tech talk), education in general is at a place where being safe is no longer safe. We must create safe pockets within existing structures where creativity and experimentation are not only encouraged but protected. We have to be continually looking for the leading edge and projecting and experimenting beyond or we will be left behind.
In response to the challenge of technology, the Elementary Education Department is reviewing current and future course offerings for suitability for online delivery, to include a hybrid of online plus limited class meetings. In addition, we are making adjustment in the time offerings of courses that would meet DESE’s Temporary Authorization Certificate (TAC) list of required courses so we can decrease the participation in our Alternative Certification Program (ACP) in favor of the state’s TAC which offers an umbrella protection to candidates of at least two years of certification.
In addition, with the increasing importance placed upon educational technology by the state (a new MoSTEP standard was created specifically for technology), the interim dean of Professional Studies and the Chair of the Education Department met during the spring 2007 semester with Chairs and Methods instructors of programs with teacher certification components to review the program approval requirements and to give notice that these requirements must be met within the individual programs. We do not have the discipline-specific expertise necessary to teach secondary and K-12 certification majors how to embed technology within their disciplines. For this to be done well, experts in each field must teach their majors how technology is being used for both pedagogy and delivery within their discipline.
C. Changes in Faculty
What was a major concern at the time of the last five year review has been somewhat lessened. Lessening state support for higher education across the nation has been met on the part of the publics by a more aggressive search for private funding. Increased competition for funds has become a cause for concern among private institutions. The result seems to be that more applicants are available for open positions than any time over the last ten years. For our two open positions of last summer, we had 76 applications as compared to one to three qualified applications for national searches in the past. Each of our two open positions of the 2006 AY was filled with an experienced and highly qualified professor. We were able to hire an experienced Accreditation and Program Approval specialist and an experienced science methods professor—both of which are considered in high demand and low supply. The spring of 2007 finds us once again filling two positions, one from attrition and the other a replacement of a temporary fill sitting in a full-time, tenure track position. These are critical positions to be filled because the two replacements will help us shift loads and move closer to our meeting the Conceptual Framework conditions we had prior to the addition of the Northlands courses: all of us supervising in school field placements.
All of our tenure-track faculty members have terminal degrees except for three. One of those has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at K.U. and is making progress. She is an anomaly in that she functions at the doctoral level and has earned both a national and international reputation in her field. The other is seeking admission into a doctoral program but has not yet been accepted. The temporary contract faculty member is ranked as an instructor but will be replaced by and assistant/associate professor.
One of the challenges we face is finding the best compromise between having an experienced faculty member who can help us with accreditation and program approval as opposed to one who is at an earlier point in their career. Several of our faculty members are nearing retirement at some point over the next 5-7 years. We need to have a range of faculty experience in order to maintain quality. However, our discipline typically draws applicants who are experienced. This is due in part to the fact that we require teaching experience in K-12 schools, an important piece of our Conceptual Framework. Therefore, applicants to our positions have typically taught for a few years with a bachelors degree, completed a masters degree (and sometimes a specialists degree), and then begun work on a doctoral degree. They are later in their careers by the time they come to us as compared to many that we see apply to teach mathematics or engineering. Those applicants we have hired who were early in their career have been disappointing. We work hard; they didn’t seem to have the same work ethic. They also spent a minimal time in K-12 schools before pursing their doctorates. Their lack of time spent in the schools translated into a disdain for supervision—something that is antithetical to our Conceptual Framework and our professional commitments to our K-12 partners. We will continue to be open-minded toward applicants who are early in their education professional careers but always will place a great degree of weight upon academic vitality and fit with our program.
The salary gap is another issue in hiring of faculty. For a number of years now, if we interview someone with a doctorate who is currently teaching in a K-12 environment, we find they will have to take a significant cut in pay to work at Western. If they do bite the bullet and move to higher education, they then find they are working much harder than they were at a higher salary. This does not set well with many of them. Both of these issues—higher pay and high demands and expectations from multiple quarters—are outside of our department’s control. The best we can do is to fully inform them of all the realities of our work, to include the satisfaction of multiplied effort into teacher candidates who will teach thousands of students throughout the life of their careers.
D. Changes in Enrollment
William J. Hussar, an economist for the NationalCenter for Education Statistics, predicts a need for 1.7 – 2.7 million teachers by 2008, both to replace those retiring and to meet national rising enrollments. Meanwhile, there continues to be a loss of 50% of new teachers within the first five years and decreasing numbers choosing teaching as a profession with low pay, stress from licensing requirements, and increased expectations placed upon teachers by No Child Left Behind (Peterson, 2006). Prominent among those in decreasing proportions are males who choose higher paying professions (Kossan, 2006; Appendix K). There is a true shortage in spite of the fact that the average teacher pay is above that of many other professionals (JeterFernandes, 2006; Appendix L). In fact, a recent BBC report stated that teaching was a less boring job than many and that the opportunities to interact with people and work with challenging curriculum attracted many to teaching (BBC News, 2006; Appendix M).