Disrupting Teacher Preparation: Lessons in Collaboration and Innovation across the Learning to Teach Community of Practice

Abstract

How can a community of practice comprised of diverse teacher preparation leaders from across the country collaborate to disrupt the teacher preparation field? The single most important school-based factor in a child’s education is the quality of his or her teachers--so important, in fact, that a series of good teachers can overcome the effects of poverty. Yet our schools of education are struggling to prepare teachers for today’s classrooms, even as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called for a “sea change” in the way we train new teachers. This capstone focuses on how the NewSchools Venture Fund (NewSchools), a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm focused on transforming the preparation of beginning teachers in America, uses convening as a tool for fostering innovation and enabling disruption in the teacher preparation market. The scope of the capstone project involved planning and executing on two convenings of diverse leaders from institutes of higher education, teacher preparation programs, school operators, and critical support providers. My paper subsequently analyzes the effectiveness of NewSchools’ efforts to design teaming opportunities, referred to as “Design Teams,” for leaders to work together in piloting new solutions for ongoing problems of practice that impact the teacher preparation field. Finally, I consider what the potential impact of the Design Teams could be, beyond NewSchools, as a means of accelerating new research and generating novel ideas across the education sector as a whole. These considerations raise implications for how NewSchools’ new model for collaboration could lend insight to the field as to how to bring people together from different perspectives to work on issues of strategic importance such as teacher preparation.