Tell us about teacher preparation programs

Editor's note: This is a guest post from The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a nonpartisan research and policy group committed to restructuring the teaching profession, led by our vision that every child deserves effective teachers. NCTQ advocates for reforms in a broad range of teacher policies at the federal, state, and local levels in order to increase the number of effective teachers. Please feel free to share the survey with other colleagues.

We are conducting a national review of teacher preparation programs which we will publish next year in U.S. News & World Report and want to hear from teachers about the preparation they received before they became teachers. The review will carefully examine the nuts and bolts of programs — what do their student teaching programs look like? do they make sure teachers know effective techniques to teach reading? and so forth —  to see which programs set their teachers up for success in the classroom.

We want to make sure that we get the answers that prospective teachers need. So we’ve launched a survey to find out from teachers what they learned in teacher prep and what they want us to focus on.

Here’s the link to the survey.

As a token of our gratitude, we'll be holding a drawing until Friday September 23d for anyone who completes this very brief survey. Every day we'll choose two respondents to give $25 Amazon.com gift cards.

We know teaching is hard work. We want to find out how to make it easier by shining a spotlight on high-quality teacher preparation programs. Please help NCTQ hear from teachers like you!