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Many would say that while there are two ways to enter the teaching profession—traditional and alternative—there seems to be a common way to leave it: quickly. Across the board, more than half of beginning teachers leave teaching before their fifth year, and that percentage is even higher in urban public schools and for those prepared by some alternative programs.
In this article we argue that there is a model superior to both traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs in both the skills and the staying power of the teachers it trains. Alverno College graduates enter the classroom as effective beginning teachers; moreover, in studies conducted over the past 10 years, we have documented that after five years, 85 percent of our graduates are still active in K-12 settings.
Ours is not a highly selective program at entry; most of our candidates are first-generation college students. But our program—founded on a strong set of liberal arts and teacher education learning goals, situated within a larger continuous assessment system, and using extensive and scaffolded field-based training—develops teachers' confidence and competence to an extraordinary degree.
Here we briefly explore the difference between three very different approaches to teacher preparation using a set of metaphors outlined in Table 1. The first we call the “armchair tourist” model, the second the “survivor” model, and the third the “expeditionary-learning” model.
Mary E. Diez is a professor and dean of the School of Education at Alverno College. For ten years in the 1960s and 1970s, she taught English, French, humanities, speech, and journalism in middle and secondary classrooms in rural settings with a wide range of students.
Nancy Athanasiou is an associate professor and associate dean of Alverno's School of Education. An elementary education major at Alverno in the 1980s, she taught middle school for several years in the Milwaukee public schools and also served as an instructional technology resource teacher in Germantown, WI.
Desiree Pointer Mace is an assistant professor and associate dean in the School of Education at Alverno. She entered Teach for America in the early 1990s and taught in the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts for several years as a Spanish bilingual elementary teacher.
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