ABSTRACT
How can a faculty learning community gauge impact on its preservice teachers at a programmatic level? Over time, what changes can be noted among preservice teachers within and across cohorts? As our efforts at the University of Connecticut (UConn) have progressed, these questions have come to the forefront, and there has been a corresponding shift in our focus to document program-level changes and establish the extent to which these changes permeate entire cohorts of teacher candidates. Our emphasis on program-level data has been motivated by two key factors. First, as noted in Chapter 2, this project developed out of a larger effort to use assessment results to focus our continuous improvement effort. Exit surveys administered to graduates of the teacher education program revealed that graduates did not feel adequately prepared to work effectively with emergent bilingual students. As a result, we initiated the faculty learning community with the intent of bringing about program-wide change that would have a long-term impact on the practice of the teachers we graduate. Such data-driven, programmatic-level work is consistent with our ongoing accreditation activity.
