Attracting, Preparing, and Retaining Teachers in High Need Areas: A Science as Inquiry Model of Teacher Education
In urban centers in the United States, it is difficult—if not impossible—to fill secondary science positions with teachers who have the requisite content area knowledge, skills and dispositions. To remedy this situation, a new model of teacher education h
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Attracting, Preparing, and Retaining Teachers in High Need Areas: A Science as Inquiry Model of Teacher Education Cheryl J. Craig, Paige Evans, Simon Bott, Donna Stokes and Bobby Abrol
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Introduction
In Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, teacher retention and attrition is an increasing problem. The theme appears often in the literature from the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, the United States, Israel and Norway, among other nations. Even Finland with its leading Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores and focus on teacher professionalism has retention and attrition issues. According to a background Australian Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) report, “… teaching is becoming … a career of ‘movement in and out’ and the ‘out’ may be permanent” (Skilbeck and Connell 2003, pp. 32–33). Perhaps nowhere in the world is the teacher attrition problem more advanced than in the United States. Major urban centers like Houston and Philadelphia lose 50–70% of beginning teachers in 4–6 years, baby boomer teachers are retiring earlier than anticipated, and the most recent teacher satisfaction survey indicates that one-third of those teachers remaining in the workforce plan to leave soon C.J. Craig (&) Texas A&M University, College Station, USA e-mail: [email protected] P. Evans D. Stokes B. Abrol University of Houston, Houston, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. Stokes e-mail: [email protected] B. Abrol e-mail: [email protected] S. Bott Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 M.A. Peters et al. (eds.), A Companion to Research in Teacher Education, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_30
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(Craig 2014). Additionally, the cost of teacher attrition to the American economy exceeds $2.2 billion dollars per year. The cost to the state of Texas’s economy alone is over $800 million (Keigher 2010, in Craig 2014). The aforementioned factors, among others, contribute to the U.S.’s teaching crisis. The annual replacement of one-third of the country’s teaching workforce, mostly by newcomers, is an inadequate approach to meeting societal demands. Also, alternate forms of teacher certification/evaluation (26 competing service providers in Greater Houston alone) and value-added approaches to accountability appear not to be working. While Americans agree that teachers are vital to students’ academic performance and the country’s economic status, they are rancorously split about how to address the national teaching calamity and similarly at odds concerning what constitutes teacher quality. Against this backdrop, a different model of secondary science teacher education has emerged within the existing higher education structure at the University of Houston. The model, teachHOUSTON, is a replication of the UTeach program birthed at the University of Texas at Austin. In this chapter, we feature the teachHOUSTON model for two important reasons. The first reason is that pr
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