The effects of COVID-19 on teacher preparation

When K-12 education went online, aspiring teachers missed out on expected student teaching experiences. What will that mean for the current cohort of new teachers? 

 

Since March 2020, when nearly all public school buildings in the United States shut down due to the spread of COVID-19, the media have devoted enormous amounts of attention to the effects of school closures on the nation’s K-12 students. Much less widely discussed, but important all the same, have been the pandemic’s effects on the preparation of tomorrow’s teachers. 

When schools closed, clinical practice (or student teaching) experiences were severely curtailed for tens of thousands of teacher candidates. Typically, this is when aspiring teachers get their initial opportunities to lead a classroom, taking on the formal roles and responsibilities of their new profession for the first time. Clinical practice has long been viewed as “a key component — even ‘the most important component’ — of pre-service teacher preparation” (Anderson & Stillman, 2013, p. 3), and recent empirical research findings have begun to clarify just how foundational this experience is to the development of teaching skills (e.g., Goldhaber & Ronfeldt, 2020).  

It will be years before we know precisely what effects COVID-19 has had on the career decisions and development of the current generation of aspiring teachers. But we can already make some educated guesses, based on the ways in which states and teacher education programs (TEPs) have responded to the pandemic so far.  

Almost every state passed emergency legislation that eased or delayed the usual certification requirements for teacher candidates. And according to a member survey conducted by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), every single TEP that responded — 188 of them, across 47 states — reported that they transitioned at least partly to remote learning in spring 2020, with 98% indicating that the preparation of new teachers moved entirely online (AACTE, 2020).  

Teacher preparation in Washington state 

On March 30, 2020, our home state of Washington became one of the first states to begin closing its public schools. At the time, many teacher candidates had not yet completed their student teaching requirement, which often takes place during the spring quarter or semester and is connected to the requirement that teacher candidates pass the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of their teaching. 

Given the situation, the state’s Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB) issued guidelines allowing TEPs to temporarily modify their teacher certification and graduation requirements and admissions process. These modifications allowed programs to relax some of their candidate coursework, field experiences, and edTPA portfolio requirements and deadlines, and to issue emergency certificates to current candidates and conditional acceptances to incoming students. As of early 2021, PESB has continued to make modifications, such as extending the expiration date on emergency certificates from June 2020 to June 2021; allowing teachers (including student teachers) to teach outside their endorsement area, and piloting alternatives to the required edTPA performance assessment (Professional Educator Standards Board, 2021). 

To find out how the COVID-19 crisis might be affecting the teacher preparation pipeline in Washington, we surveyed 29 state-accredited TEPs from April to June 2020. The survey was initially sent to the dean or associate dean of the university, but in some cases was completed by an administrator or faculty member. The response rate was quite high, over 95%, suggesting that  teacher educators were strongly motivated to share their views on the effects of the pandemic on TEP programming. As we explain below, we saw no major short-term change in enrollments in teacher preparation programs, but we did find reasons to be concerned about the how the shift to remote learning likely affected the developmental experiences of teacher candidates. 

Predictable yet concerning effects on teacher candidates 

Not surprisingly, the survey findings revealed that the pandemic had dramatic effects on clinical practice this past spring. More than 80% of TEPs reported they had waived or reduced the length of time required for student teaching for either their undergraduate or graduate programs or both, even when asked to consider in-person and remote/virtual learning student teaching time as equivalent. And in each type of program, the average student teaching time was cut by at least 20%. (Figure 1 shows TEPs’ estimates of the reduction in required student teaching time for candidates in their programs last spring.)   

Such reductions affected a significant percentage of teacher candidates, and even more were affected by the switch to a virtual learning environment, as shown in Figure 2. Undergraduates at public universities saw the greatest shift to virtual student teaching, while private universities saw the greatest shift for graduate students. 

TEPs also reported that once schools shifted to remote learning, the amount of time student teachers got to spend in their cooperating teachers’ classrooms varied greatly from district to district (which isn’t surprising given that individual districts had some leeway to decide how to implement the state’s COVID-19 guidelines). In some cases, partner districts were unable to accommodate their teacher candidates in virtual classrooms at all, which is particularly troubling, since it meant that those candidates missed out on opportunities to complete their student teaching and receive formal feedback, which tends to be of great value to beginning teachers (Cohen et al., 2020; Papay et al., 2020). 

For the teacher candidates who were able to continue student teaching virtually, about 75% of TEPs reported that field supervisors had modified the way they provided feedback: In some cases, teaching supervisors were able to observe and assess candidates in virtual settings, but they didn’t always provide those candidates with individual feedback. Often, they relied on group feedback activities, in which prospective teachers critiqued each other’s teaching, with reflection activities based on previously videotaped experiences or ATLAS videos of National Board-Certified Teachers.  

Anecdotal follow-up with specific TEPs suggests that these issues have persisted even into 2021. For instance, one TEP made its first out-of-state student teaching placement, due to the difficulty of finding a placement in Washington. And another TEP noted that a district’s decision to expand in-person instruction led its student teachers to trade placements, so that a candidate with health risks would not have to teach in person. This same TEP purchased thousands of dollars of personal protective equipment because the district did not supply it to student teachers.  

Minimal short-term changes to applications and enrollments

Past crises such as the Great Recession have had far-reaching effects on both the supply and demand of higher education (Long, 2014a), and researchers have speculated that teacher education program enrollment tends to increase when the unemployment rate grows (Long, 2004b), especially among 16- to 24-year-olds who tend to have more limited employment opportunities (Bell & Blanchflower, 2011). Over the past five years, however, enrollments in Washington TEPs have remained steady, as measured by Title II data showing the number of program completers.  

We asked TEPs if they had seen a significant (“more than a 10% year-to-year change”) change in the number of new applicants to their programs since the start of the pandemic, relative to the previous couple of years. Half reported no change (see Figure 3). Of those that did see a significant change, undergraduate programs tended to report an increase in the number of applicants, while graduate programs reported a decrease. 

Under normal circumstances, aspiring teachers would need to take the Washington Educator Skills Test (WEST-B) for admittance to a teacher education program. However, because many testing sites have been closed during the pandemic, the state guidance now allows TEPs to offer conditional acceptance to candidates who have not yet taken the test. Half of the TEPs we surveyed said that more that 10% of their fall 2020 students were conditionally accepted. This was more common among small programs than large ones.

  

Significant uncertainties going forward  

In June 2020, Washington state leaders issued guidance for reopening in-person instruction at higher education institutions in the fall, while also leaving it up to individual institutions to decide whether college students could return to campus (Higher Education Re-Opening Workgroup, 2020). For K-12 schools, the Washington State Department of Health (2020), in partnership with the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, created a framework to help school administrators and community stakeholders evaluate the readiness of their school and health systems to monitor and respond to COVID-19, should they return to in-person learning. Yet, as of February 2021, just under 21% of Washington K-12 students were receiving in-person instruction on an average day (Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 2021). This means that most students were still receiving remote instruction, and teacher education programs had to continue adapting to this reality. 

In our survey, we asked TEPs what new strategies they were using to support the development of their teacher candidates in response to COVID-19 and what their single largest concern was about how the crisis would affect their program. Their responses can be grouped into three broad categories, including concerns about 1) the implementation of new virtual components into the TEP curricula; 2) the needs of teacher candidates who didn’t have a regular student teaching experience but are likely to teach in the state’s K-12 schools next year, and 3) the needs of the 2020-21 teacher candidate cohort, which was prepared in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. 

A new focus on virtual instruction. When asked about new and different approaches to their curricula, TEPs mostly mentioned adding and expanding virtual components. More than 90% said they planned to adopt such approaches in 2020-21, regardless of whether instruction at schools and universities was in person or virtual. Strategies under consideration included virtual coaching for teacher candidates by cooperating teachers and professors, online education subscription offerings, online case studies, use of videos from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and online peer support among candidates.  

Various respondents also said they had created task forces to examine the issue of virtual clinical practice and create a hybrid virtual-traditional model. One TEP noted that it was having to implement and expand the use of virtual instruction through online platforms like Mursion without any additional funding: “Providing all virtual classes, virtual coaching, virtual community building . . . development of virtual and in-person edTPA supports for Emergency Certified teachers, additional induction supports for Emergency Certified teachers, Mursion virtual classroom, etc. Again, no additional resources are coming to support these changes.”  

Providing teacher education virtually also presented new and unexpected logistical challenges. One TEP reported that, because its clinical experiences were being recorded for coaching purposes, their student teachers were now required to collect written consent from families. Producing the forms in the required 20 languages was expensive, and the signatures were sometimes difficult to obtain. 

New teachers who’ve had little student teaching experience. Respondents expressed serious concerns about the preparation of the spring 2020 graduating teacher candidates, who would be entering classrooms in 2020-21 with less than the typical preparation. As one respondent stated, “The biggest concern I have is for those who graduate with no face-to-face contact with students since March 13, and then get hired and begin their first year of teaching in uncharted territory.” Pending the release of this year’s school data, though, it is still too early to say whether, or to what extent, the 2020-21 cohort of new teachers has struggled relative to previous cohorts. 

The TEPs also expressed the concern that new teachers who missed critical student teaching experiences would need additional support in their first year, and they wondered how these new teachers would satisfy deferred state requirements, such as the edTPA, once they were no longer part of a teacher education program that can guide them through the process. According to one TEP, it will be challenging to support students working with emergency certificates, especially with reduced program funding: “How is edTPA support required by the TEP ‘funded’ for candidates issued emergency certificates, when the state is requiring a 15% cut to budgets?” Another respondent echoed that concern: “It appears that 40% of new teachers will be working on an emergency certificate and needing to complete the edTPA. How will programs and the K-12 system support them? So far, responses are not looking at the system impacts — this is very, very concerning.”  

The needs of the next cohort. In spring 2020, while they were in the process of developing new virtual components for the following academic year, survey respondents said they were concerned that teacher candidates from the 2020-21 cohort might not be prepared for face-to-face teaching when they graduate. In particular, they noted difficulties in finding high-quality student teaching placements and mentors. As one respondent noted, teacher candidates need to have “that direct contact with students to manage a classroom and plan lessons according to specific student needs when in a classroom.”  

On an optimistic note, however, when we followed up with respondents five months into the 2020-21 school year, we heard from a number of them that some of their current student teachers are having productive and rich internship experiences, despite these challenges. One said their student teachers have been leading community outreach for their assigned schools and assisting with bringing students back into the classroom.  

Implications for the profession 

The local concerns raised by TEPs in Washington mirror the broader concerns that have been aired about the pandemic’s effects on teacher education across the country. For instance, Dan Goldhaber and Matthew Ronfeldt (2020) note that “If student teaching experiences are constrained by the pandemic, teacher candidates will lose valuable experiences and schools will lose the opportunity to shape and evaluate prospective hires.” Given that field placements rely on the cooperation of local districts and specific teachers within these districts, managing these challenges cannot be easy. Indeed, for many K-12 districts and teachers, supervising student teachers may seem like a significant distraction from their primary goal of educating their own students. As one respondent stated, “Cooperating teachers are rightly focused on the needs of their students. Student teachers are not a priority right now.” 

We hope that, instead of ignoring the current crop of student teachers, schools will view them as valuable resources who can help them in the midst of the pandemic (Goldhaber & Ronfeldt, 2020). Schools can benefit from the availability of additional talent (and we suspect that new teacher candidates tend to be more familiar with education technology platforms than many in-service teachers). And, even if 2021 graduates obtain emergency credentials, they will benefit from the opportunity to work with students and begin assembling their edTPA portfolios (or prepare for other licensure exams) while still under the guidance of a TEP.  

Of course, some teacher candidates with emergency credentials who obtain jobs are likely to be judged to be quite effective teachers. The state will have to carefully consider how these teachers will be handled over the next few years as at least some successful teachers are likely to fail to pass one or more deferred licensure requirements, despite seeing success in the classroom.  

Although our assessment of enrollments in teacher education programs suggests little short-term effect on the new teacher pipeline, the long-term effects remain unclear. The pandemic hit at a time when many aspiring teachers had already submitted their applications for fall 2020. And when we conducted our survey, universities and colleges were optimistic that their 2020-21 classes would be held in person. However, many TEPs later reversed course (Nadworny, 2020), and our data do not capture the effects of that decision on enrollment rates. 

It is also unclear what effect the pandemic will have on students’ desire to enter the teaching profession. However, evidence suggests that students tend to consider early-career wages and employment prospects when deciding which degrees to pursue (Long, Goldhaber, & Huntington-Klein, 2015; Nagler, Piopiunik, & West, 2020). And unless Congress agrees to a federal bailout of state and local governments, significant teacher layoffs seem likely, which may lead aspiring teachers to rethink their plans. Given all of these moving parts, though, it’s hard to make even an initial prediction about how the pandemic will affect the early teacher pipeline over the coming years. 

As for what teacher education should look like in the future, the pandemic has illustrated the need to prepare teachers for a world where teachers and students interact in various formats, and not always in the same place. The online supervision of teacher candidates may be a short-term necessity, dictated by the pandemic, but it also provides opportunities for TEPs to rethink how and where they place their student teachers. Typically, most teacher candidates complete their clinical practice in schools near their college or university, and those schools tend to be relatively advantaged. Fewer do their student teaching in rural and disadvantaged schools, which tend to struggle to hire teachers (Goldhaber, Krieg, & Theobald, 2021). Thus, when in-person instruction and supervision resume, it seems prudent to continue to look for ways to incorporate online and hybridized models of education and student teaching supervision, both to expand student teachers’ experiences with different forms of instruction and to expand the reach of teacher education programs.   

References 

American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. (2020, April). Member survey on the coronavirus impact & response. AACTE. 

Anderson, L.M. & Stillman, J.A. (2013). Student teaching’s contribution to preservice teacher development. Review of Educational Research, 83 (1), 3-69.  

Bell, D.N.F. & Blanchflower, D.G. (2011). Young people and the Great Recession. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 27 (2), 241-267.  

Cohen, J., Wong, V., Krishnamachari, A., & Berlin, R. (2020). Teacher coaching in a simulated environment. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42 (2), 208-231. 

Goldhaber, D. & Ronfeldt, M. (2020, July). Sustaining teacher training in a shifting environment. Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. 

Goldhaber, D., Krieg, J., & Theobald, R. (2021, February 8). Rethinking the geography of student-teaching placements in a post-COVID-19 world. The Brookings Institution.  

Higher Education Re-Opening Workgroup. (2020, June 24). Campus reopening guide. Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, Washington State Council of Presidents, & Independent Colleges of Washington. 

Long, B.T. (2014a). The financial crisis and college enrollment: How have students and their families responded? In J.R. Borwn & C.M. Hoxby (Eds.), How the financial crisis and great recession affected higher education (pp. 209-233). University of Chicago Press. 

Long, B.T. (2004b). Does the format of an aid program matter? The effect of in-kind tuition subsidies. Review of Economics and Statistics, 86 (3), 767-782.  

Long, M.C., Goldhaber, D., & Huntington-Klein, N. (2015). Do completed college majors respond to changes in wages? Economics of Education Review, 49, 1–14.  

Nadworny, E.N. (2020, July 22). Colleges spent months planning for fall, but a COVID-19 surge is changing everything. National Public Radio (NPR). 

Nagler, M., Piopiunik, M., & West, M.R. (2020). Weak markets, strong teachers: Recession at career start and teacher effectiveness. Journal of Labor Economics, 38 (2), 453-500.  

Papay, J., Taylor, E.S., Tyler, J.H., & Laski, M. (2020). Learning job skills from colleagues at work: Evidence from a field experiment using teacher performance data. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 12 (1), 359-388. 

Professional Educator Standards Board. (2021, January 28). COVID-19 resources. www.pesb.wa.gov/about-us/covid-19-resources 

Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. (2021, February 9). School reopening data. www.k12.wa.us/about-ospi/press-releases/novel-coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-resources/school-reopening-data 

Washington State Department of Health. (2020, August 5). Decision tree for provision of in-person learning among K-12 students at public and private schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/DecisionTree-K12schools.pdf