Feedback for Teaching Candidates From Mentor Teachers and University Supervisors

• In Event: Preservice Courses, Student Teaching Experiences, and Beginning Teacher Outcomes

Abstract

Objective. Over the past decade, aligned with research showing the influence of individual teachers, there have been widespread efforts at the state and federal levels to reform the evaluation of practicing teachers. This was motivated by a perceived lack of rigor of evaluation systems and evidence of little variation in evaluations. While research has been conducted on the evaluation of such teachers, there has been less scholarship on pre-service teacher evaluation. The clinical practice (i.e., student teaching) that prospective teachers complete as a requirement for earning a teaching certificate (in most states) is one of the first opportunities for them to receive authentic feedback about their instruction, and it is widely considered to be foundational to their development (AACTE, 2018, NCATE, 2010). Indeed, student teaching has been identified as “a key component—even “the most important” component—of pre-service teacher preparation” (Anderson & Stillman, 2013, p.3).
Perspective. Mentor teachers play a key role in the development of teacher candidates and an emerging body of research connects mentor quality to the future effectiveness and performance of teacher candidates who become teachers (Goldhaber, Krieg, & Theobald, 2020; Ronfeldt, Brockman, & Campbell, 2018). For example, Ronfeldt et al. (2018) conducted an experimental study of the impact of assigning candidates to more effective mentors; they found that candidates report that mentors viewed as more instructionally effective also provide higher-quality and more frequent feedback and coaching. At the same time, there is little large-scale quantitative evidence on the nature of the feedback that teacher candidates receive during their student teaching.
Data and Methods. Many teacher education programs require formal evaluations (“clinical assessments”) during the internship that are similar to the classroom observations required of in-service teachers. While case study research has examined feedback for candidates, we know little from large-scale data about the import of mentor teachers for the development of teacher candidates during their clinical practice. In this study, we use unique data from a teacher education program (TEP) randomized control trial at two universities where teacher candidates are placed into algorithmically-determined higher- or lower-quality placements (where quality is mostly determined based on attributes of mentor teachers).
Findings. We link data on random assignment to the clinical evaluations received by candidates in order to (a) describe the level, distribution, and change of clinical assessments over the course of the internship; (b) detail the degree of alignment in clinical evaluation ratings between mentor teachers (who supervise clinical experiences on the district size) and field instructors (who supervise such experiences on the teacher education program side); and (c) make use of the randomization of teacher candidates to mentor quality to assess whether internship placements affect the clinical observation ratings that teacher candidates receive from field instructors.

Authors

• Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

• Matthew Ronfeldt, University of Michigan

• James Cowan, American Institutes for Research

• Emanuele Bardelli, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• L. Joy Johnson, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Hannah Mullman, University of Michigan

• Chris Tien, University of Washington