Intelligent Professional Responsibility in Teacher Education

• In Event: 51.055 - Intelligent Accountability: An Evidence-Based, Trustworthy, and Persuasive Alternative to the Status Quo

Abstract

In the U.S., “holding teacher education accountable” has been the major approach to reforming teacher education for the last two decades. This approach is based on the assumption that improving teacher quality depends on improving teacher education quality, which depends on vigilant public evaluation and monitoring of outcomes related to teacher education institutions, programs, and candidates. However, there is mounting evidence that the dominant accountability paradigm in teacher education has prompted uniformity and compliance, redefined how teacher educators understand their roles, emphasized narrow outcomes, and subtracted from the spaces in the teacher education curriculum for discussion and action related to equity, social justice, and democratic education (Au, 2016; Cochran-Smith et al, 2018; Scott, 2016).

Objectives, perspectives and modes of inquiry
This paper conceptualizes intelligent professional responsibility in teacher education, a concept that braids together and adapts key ideas from three larger frameworks: intelligent accountability, democratic evaluation based on dialogue and deliberation, and professional accountability. O’Neill (2002) suggests that intelligent accountability begins with trust, presuming that the people who do the work in a given profession or policy sector have knowledge about that work and generally want to be better at it. Deliberative democratic evaluation (House and Howe, 2000), which includes all those with legitimate interests in an evaluation, features inclusion, dialogue, and deliberation. Finally, Fullan, Rincon-Gallardo, and Hargreaves (2015) argue that external accountability in K-12 schools should be replaced by internal professional accountability with the priority for policymakers creating the conditions for strong professional accountability by capacity building and stakeholder collaboration.

Analysis, results and contributions
Building on a critical policy analysis of the four major accountability initiatives in U.S. teacher education (Cochran-Smith, et. al., 2016), this paper argues that we need to reject the dominant accountability paradigm in teacher education, but not reject accountability itself. Rather the paper asserts that teacher education needs a new approach— democratic accountability in teacher education. The paper conceptualizes intelligent professional responsibility, wherein teachers and teacher educators take responsibility for students’ learning, including their learning of democratic perspectives and civic skills (Gutmann, 1999; Michelli & Keizer, 2005), as an umbrella term for reforming initial teacher education. The concept is intended to signal that democratic accountability is grounded in trust of the profession, builds on professionals’ knowledge and collective commitments to local and larger goals, and yields useful and usable information concerning program improvement. The paper argues that in order to initiate and maintain intelligent professional responsibility in teacher education, there must be balance and equality of power across stakeholders who jointly determine accountability mechanisms, processes, and content through rational consideration of individual and common interests. This requires a generative and reciprocal relationship between internal and external accountability (Carnoy, Elmore, & Siskin, 2003). The paper theorizes the idea of intelligent professional responsibility as part of the larger concept of democratic accountability in teacher education, raising theoretical and practical issues and connecting this to multiple promising practices from a variety of nations, including the U.S., Australia, and Scotland.

Authors

• Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Boston College

• Elizabeth Stringer Keefe, Stonehill College

• Molly Cummings Carney, Boston College