A National Council on Teacher Equality report has caused a stir in higher education.
Murray State University’s College of Education Dean David Whaley like many teaching trainers in higher education is taking the NCTQ’s report with more than just a grain of salt. He says the group did not conduct any interviews with students or visit classrooms in their research of more than 600 institutions.
“I have to tell you NCTQ collected this information off of, it was merely a paper screening and primarily off of course syllabi,” he says. “And, you know, with course syllabi you can’t always put everything you want to do or plan to do within a course.”
NCTQ President Kate Walsh says the research was conducted that way to analyze the structure of education programs all over the nation, not to necessarily measure their success.
NCTQ gave MSU’s elementary and secondary education programs a one and two star rating respectively. That’s on a four star scale. The report gave no stars for M-S-U’s training in early reading and classroom management in addition to its student teaching methods.
Whaley doesn’t agree with those findings, but is still taking them into consideration.
“Even though that the scores were not at the level that we wanted and that we feel accurately reflect the quality of our program and our students, we really want to take a look at what’s here and see if there area elements that we can improve within our program,” he says. “And it will be a major topic of discussion within this college.”
