EIU Media Relations

EIU Leading State Project to Assess New Teachers, Improve Education

Eastern Illinois University is heading up a new statewide project designed to improve the quality of children's education by better preparing new teachers.

The project, Teacher Graduate Assessment, will survey new public high school teachers in the year following their graduation from Illinois ' 12 public colleges and universities.

Using opinions from the teachers and their supervisors, the project will gauge how well college prepared the teachers for their jobs and how to improve that effort.

"We're trying to provide a snapshot of what teacher preparation is like," said project director Andrew Wall from EIU's College of Education and Professional Studies. "Teacher education is obviously very important because the quality of teachers is directly linked to the quality of education students get in the classroom."

The goal is to better prepare teachers for classroom work and to alter new teachers' first-year experiences to better address their needs. The program is intended to extend beyond one year.

"I think Illinois wants to be a leader in the country ... in trying to advance teacher education," Wall said. "Certainly, on a federal level, with the No Child Left Behind Act, there's been an effort to have greater scrutiny on teacher education, and Illinois is taking a proactive step to try to address that issue."

The project was modeled after a similar assessment in California, and Wall traveled there with Charles Rohn, dean of EIU's College of Education and Professional Studies, to visit with the coordinators before launching the Illinois effort.

"Dean Rohn has been out front providing the leadership in this, both in terms of organizing everyone as well as trying to solidify state and foundation support," Wall said. "This points to the stature of Eastern's College of Education and Professional Studies in the state ... and the general capacity of Eastern to take a leadership role in the state."

Rohn said the data will benefit each individual university, but by working together, the joint effort will produce even larger dividends.

"Collectively, we can do it much more efficiently and also much more completely than any one of us could have done by ourselves," Rohn said. "While Eastern is heading up the project, it is a cooperative, ... major statewide effort. We're very happy and very excited to be a part of it. I think that it's a significant pat on the back that the other 11 institutions have the confidence to put their trust and information in our hands."

The Joyce Foundation -- a multi-purpose philanthropic organization -- has committed $120,000 for the first year of the project, which will also be funded with $40,000 from the Illinois Board of Higher Education, $10,000 from the Illinois State Board of Education and contributions from deans from each participating university and college. Previously, each entity also provided thousands of dollars to fund planning of the project.

The list of new teachers was obtained from the University of Illinois ' Teacher Data Warehouse, which Wall said was a central component of the collaborative effort.

Each college will receive information from its graduates' surveys so it can improve its own teacher-education program.

"I firmly believe that it will provide a verification of what we hear all the time" from graduates and their employers, which is that Eastern's education graduates are well-prepared, Rohn said.

In addition, aggregate information - without a school-by-school breakdown - will be reported to the state and to the Joyce Foundation.

The project will also include a separate analysis of Chicago public school teachers, as requested by the Joyce Foundation.

The surveys are to be sent out in late March or early April. A symposium is being planned for the fall to highlight the findings and to provide a forum for discussion of teacher education in Illinois.

"It's exciting to be part of a state project like this," Wall said. "There's a lot of opportunity to have this assessment be meaningful and to be used to improve education in the state of Illinois."