Earlier this month, the US Department of Education released an unusual marketing blitz. Includes a television advertisement that encourages people to enter teaching, especially to promote greater diversity in the teaching profession.
“Experience the unique joy of helping students thrive,” the PSA says, as it shows a variety of people working with students. “Teaching is a journey that shapes life. Are you ready?”
The national campaign comes at a time of concern about teacher shortages in many schools and districts. And it’s not just a problem today: there are concerns that the number of new teachers being trained is also falling.
This is because since 2010 the number of students enrolled in teacher preparation programs at universities has fallen by more than a third, from approximately 900,000 students in 2010-11 to just 600,000 in the 2018-19 academic year, according to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. and the group found that in fall 2020-21, 20 percent of undergraduate teacher education programs had experienced enrollment declines of 11 percent or more due to the pandemic.
So how are teacher preparation programs responding? Can more people (and more people from diverse backgrounds) be convinced to join the teaching profession at this particularly difficult time? We address those questions on this week’s EdSurge podcast.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript, edited for clarity, below.
For much of their history, schools of education didn’t have to think much about recruiting.
“We used to have a lot of students in our program and we didn’t worry too much about it. We just said, ‘Here we are, come, we’re ready to welcome you,’” says Stan Harward, associate dean of the College of Education at Utah Valley University.
However, in the last two or three years, this school of education has begun working with area high schools to introduce its program to students and sell them on the profession. The program brings high school students to campus for a half-day to tour the school of education and meet with officials.
“They visit our creative learning studio and work with robots, so we show them what we do and what future teachers learn at our school,” Harward says, adding that there are even “prizes and raffles” for future students.
Meanwhile, he adds, high schools across the state have been adding classes for aspiring teachers, in partnership with the Utah State Board of Education, called Teaching as a profession. One of those classes is offered as a concurrent enrollment course with Utah Valley, so students can begin earning college credits toward a teaching degree even in high school. “We’re trying to create a path for them to be able to take these classes and connect with them early, and maybe even enroll them in our program early,” Harward adds.
And that’s just part of what’s happening across the country. For example, a program called Educators on the rise has chapters in high schools for students who might be interested in teaching, which also provide information and organize tours of schools of education, says Jacqueline King, research, policy and advocacy consultant for the American Association of Colleges for Education. Teacher Training.
This outreach could be especially important for attracting teachers from groups that are underrepresented in teaching. “As we know, white women dominate K-12 teaching, especially in the elementary school,” says Maureen Kelleher, editorial director at Georgetown University. FutureEd. She says research by the Center for the Development of Black Educators found that the first time white girls hear the message that they should be teachers comes as early as third grade. “But for black men,” she says, “maybe no one told them that before or after college, so the idea isn’t even there when they think ‘what do I want to be when I grow up?’”
It turns out that the decline in interest in teacher preparation programs began even before the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, many experts say that one of the main causes was the 2008 financial crisis.
“I think it had a lot to do with changes in people’s finances,” King says. “Students were not willing to consider taking on the amount of debt they would have to take on to earn a bachelor’s degree to enter a field where compensation was much lower than other fields.”
However, increased outreach efforts by schools of education may be beginning to bear fruit.
Nationally, King says, enrollment at many schools has stabilized after the pandemic and, in some cases, even increased a little. “So it seems like we’ve hit rock bottom in terms of interest,” she says. “We have our fingers crossed that’s the case.”
And at Utah Valley University, Harward says his school has seen a slight drop in enrollment, which he described as “probably a couple percent,” but that officials haven’t seen the big drops other schools have seen. of Education.
“Now we have a lot of students who are taking introductory education, so we are up there in those classes. So we hope to see a little bit of improvement here,” she says. “But we don’t take anything for granted.”
