Virtually all teachers enter the profession with the goal of enabling young people to reach their greatest potential. It is typically teachers’ ability to meet this goal that offers the intrinsic satisfaction that is most important to keeping them motivated and committed to a career in teaching.
Yet teachers encounter many challenges in realizing this dream. If they are attentive, they quickly realize that each child is a complex individual with many talents, potentials, and unique needs across many domains of development that deserve attention—and that these talents and needs are deeply connected to the contexts that have been constructed both inside the school and in the home, community, and society beyond the school. They strive to find the keys to create a productive context for each child in the classroom and in the school—and they realize that they need an enormous amount of knowledge and skill to do so. They may also have realized that society’s conditions and, often, the school itself pose unnecessary obstacles for many children based on their race, class, language, immigration status, sexual orientation, and/or dis/abilities. And they want to know how to be a positive force for change under this set of conditions.
The preparation that educators receive for the important work they do serves them best when it can offer a strong foundation for them to develop students’ potential and meet the needs of the children they will serve, and, with their colleagues and children’s families, successfully confront the challenges that emerge in the course of doing so.
This is a very tall order. Although there is no panacea, there is a growing body of knowledge on which to build productive possibilities. The knowledge base for education, built on the science of learning and development, has evolved considerably in the last 2 decades, as the new tools of neuroscience have made it clear how brain architecture develops; how important aspects of the environment—including cultural contexts—are for learning; and how interconnected the social, emotional, physical, and academic elements of development are.
These new insights are relevant both to the education of children and youth and to the education of adults, including teachers—and imply important changes in how both schools and educator preparation programs are designed to support learning most productively. Taking account of such advances in knowledge is something that professions explicitly commit to do. Expert professions are rooted in at least three commitments:
- To act in the best interests of the client
- To identify, master, and continue to advance a shared body of knowledge that is used to make decisions that further the client’s welfare
- To develop shared standards of practice that evolve as knowledge evolves in the profession
This report identifies design principles for teacher preparation built on recent syntheses of this emerging research and on the wisdom of practice that is found in many leading-edge preparation programs. It is intended to inform ongoing efforts by individual programs to strengthen the ways in which they prepare candidates for teaching and efforts by accrediting bodies and licensing agencies to frame the expectations for teacher preparation. Further, these principles provide the foundation for a related set of principles for leader preparation so that teachers can be supported by system leaders who understand how to develop organizational settings that enable successful practices.
This report follows on the heels of a companion effort by a body of researchers and practitioners to define design principles for schools that seek to enact insights from the science of learning and development. That report is titled Design Principles for Schools: Putting the Science of Learning and Development Into Action and begins with the following preface:
Imagine a world in which every child’s life is a succession of positive opportunities for development—opportunities through which a child can come to know who they are and discover the wide range of possibilities for what they can become. Imagine different types of learning settings in which those kinds of opportunities are also intentionally built and optimized, regardless of where a child lives or attends school. Imagine, too, that educators can identify each child’s talents, interests, and aspirations and align them with learning opportunities designed to promote them and build on them to create new competencies.
This is not the world in which we currently live, but it is one that we can now begin to create. Building on new knowledge from the science of learning and development, coupled with a commitment to advancing equity for all students, schools and community partners can bring these opportunities to bear for every child.
The need is great. ... During the pandemic, the dramatic inequalities in the conditions of living in America have been exposed, along with the dramatic inequalities in the conditions of learning in America.
For the past century, the U.S. education system has primarily focused on the delivery of subject matter content—especially in math and English language arts—using approaches that presume a bell curve of student ability, with instruction targeted to a mythical “average student.” It is a system that was not designed to unlock the potential in each and every child or to develop the whole child across the multiple domains of development. The resulting structures and practices in many schools are not adaptable to the variation in how different students learn. They do not use differentiated and personalized approaches, and they are not attuned to the development of deeper learning skills or to the habits and mindsets that support the creativity and resilience demanded in the 21st century.
In addition, the U.S. education system was not designed for equity; it was designed for inequitable access to rich learning opportunities, which has disadvantaged marginalized groups based on race, income, gender, language, and culture. Indeed, it was designed to select and sort, rather than to develop potential, and—through segregation, unequal school funding, and tracking systems—institutionalized racism and classism are baked into the design of the system itself. This system reinforces beliefs about who has potential and who is worthy of opportunity that we now know are false, harmful, and discriminatory on both scientific and moral grounds. Such beliefs risk squandering the potential of millions of students each year, and growing inequality in our society.