Getting to Day-One-Ready: Conversations on Transforming Teacher Preparation in Arkansas
In 2015, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and Walton Family Foundation established Forward Arkansas, a nonprofit committed to improving outcomes for Arkansas students. Over the years since its founding, Forward Arkansas has developed a three part agenda to improve public education in the state by- 1) Transforming Student Learning; 2) Building Educator Capacity; and 3) Creating Equitable Systems and Policies. In a quest to directly impact the quantity, quality, and diversity of Arkansas’ teacher workforce, Forward Arkanasas established the Educator Preparation Program Design Collaborative, a competitive grant program and community of practice to identify and support universities committed to addressing issues surrounding educator preparation and retention. Of the sixteen EPPs that applied for the Design Collaborative, eight were chosen to participate, receiving resources and guidance from 2Revolutions and US Prep to develop Phase II plans for transformation.
As part of this selection process, TPI-US performed audits of the EPPs; these audits identified many strengths, but they also brought into focus the need for continuing improvement. For the leaders at Southern Arkansas University and University of Arkansas Little Rock, it was precisely these snapshots of their programs that catalyzed a powerful journey–one that passed through the milestone of selection as recipients of Phase II grants.
When Dr. Neelie Dobbins, Chair of the Department of Education at Southern Arkansas University, and her colleagues got the results of the Educator Preparation Program’s audit from TPI-US, they responded characteristically with resilience and a “get it done” attitude. “It was ‘fail fast, fix fast,’” she observed. “We were immediately able to make some changes to start the transformation. Although some changes will obviously take longer than others.”
Over the next three years, their grants will provide direct funding and comprehensive ongoing technical assistance from 2Revolutions, US Prep and other partners to realize the vision laid out in their plans for transformation.
For the EPPs at Southern Arkansas University and University of Arkansas Little Rock, it was precisely these snapshots of their programs that catalyzed a powerful journey…
The need for efforts like the Design Collaborative is pressing for Arkansas, not only to grow a sustainable and diverse field of well-prepared teachers, but also to stem the attrition of new teachers and capitalize on the experience and skills of veteran teachers. We also strongly believe that efforts like this one create new and different programmatic models to spread revolution across the field of educator preparation.
Both UA Little Rock and Southern Arkansas University are diving deeply into transformation- focused on their curricula, district partnerships, and pedagogy. Each school is striving to ensure that their students are “day-one-ready” when they enter their first teaching roles. The vehicle that will get them there is a fully learner-centered experience, but the roads they are taking are unique to each EPP, their students, and the communities that they serve.
Over the course of a few weeks in early 2023, we had a rich set of conversations with a set of leaders in both educator preparation programs. This piece provides their insights in transforming two Arkansas institutions.
Neelie Dobbins, SAU: Biography
Lynze Greathouse, SAU: Biography
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: Contact Information
Lundon Pinneo, UA Little Rock: Contact Information
Sarah Beth Estes, UA Little Rock : Biography
Can you give a broad overview of what is happening in your program right now?
Lynze Greathouse, SAU: We’re using the phrase “total transformation.” We’re moving to a year-long residency model and are making changes to the intensive fieldwork piece, but we are also revamping all of the coursework. None of the programs will look anything like they do now when we’re done–that’s not the goal but we know this will happen. Right now, we have a very siloed system. Candidates take content courses and then have a field experience course after all of their coursework. We’re moving toward a model where, instead of having a stand-alone field experience, all of the courses will have integrated field work.
Neelie Dobbins, SAU: We are completely transforming our programs to better meet the needs of students in our region. We are implementing a pilot this spring with a semester-long residency program. The full-year residency will be implemented in the fall. As well, our programs are moving to job embedded experiences.
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: This journey really took off in the spring of 2022 when our EPP agreed to begin operating like a professional learning community (PLC); we went all the way back to the basics of the PLC, we ordered textbooks for faculty and we went to required state meetings about what PLCs were and how they work. Faculty also dove into the existing research on PLCs so that we were keenly aware of the extant literature as we moved forward. By the end of the spring semester, faculty had agreed that we would adopt a model of consensus building for our future work. We are currently planning to start our pilots in Fall 2023 at two school districts with elementary education and middle childhood interns.
Lundon Pinneo, UA Little Rock: I view the PLC as the vehicle for the change. It’s the way, but not the actual change in the program. We had to make changes to operate as a PLC, but we’ve been doing that for almost two years now, and I would say we’re all really comfortable with the model. But the biggest change is that we’ve moved away from a siloed mentality. Instead of “elementary ed, middle ed, secondary, and special ed,” everything is now simply the School of Education. What can we do for all of our students within the School of Education? How can what another instructor is doing in their classes benefit my students, and vice versa? What resources can we share? What processes can we streamline? In what ways can we co-teach? [...] So we're working as a team now more than ever before, in my opinion.
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: One of the major changes that will occur in this semester is how we collect data. I think we’re going to learn that the data we’ve been collecting is not the data that we need to be collecting. The shared governance model [that we’re moving toward] will have us collecting data from our interns, that will in turn inform us whether or not we're teaching the right knowledge and skills in our classes. The formative assessments completed during our new shared governance model will tell us what our teacher candidates can and can’t do. The curriculum mapping process that we’re starting will allow us to say, “We need to go back to the course and fix this. So where else do we teach this? Do we introduce this artifact in this course, or do we actually practice it in a field experience?”
How much of this change is being driven by the needs in your partner communities? What are you hearing from the districts?
Neelie Dobbins, SAU: [The changes are] based on feedback from our partner districts. We hear that our candidates struggle with relationship-building skills, not content skills. How do you work with diverse populations? How do you work with English language learners? This has been the driver of what we’re doing. When we have candidates who are struggling in the field, they are often either in an underrepresented group themselves or they’re having trouble relating to underrepresented groups.
Lynze Greathouse, SAU: We’re definitely working with partner districts to design things. We pulled demographic data for our top 12 partner districts. Some of them are 30% ELL, and we weren’t addressing that at all. We have one district that is 48% Hispanic. And next year, [districts] are looking at K-12 inclusion. To do that, teachers will need to be certified in special education, so we’re looking to add coursework so that our candidates can get dually certified in both general and special education.
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: Building mutually beneficial partnerships is a totally different process and set of constructs than how we built most of our relationships with districts in the past. In our current conversations, there’s a point at which everyone realizes that this process is going to be different- “a real partnership”, that is really beneficial for each part of the equation- the school district, the educator preparation program, and most importantly, to the intern who will soon become a teacher. Building administrators and teachers in collaboration with teacher education faculty will talk openly about college curriculum that guide our programs, about program policies that impact our field students and interns, about changes that we and/or they may need to consider to improve student learning. Everyone will be steering the process.
It seems like the field experience of teacher candidates is at the heart of these changes. Can you talk more about your partnerships and the role that they play in making sure that your graduates are “day-one ready”?
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: Well, first of all, let's talk about the notion of a partner school. We currently support “surface level relationships” with a number of different districts across Arkansas. We place field students and interns in roughly 52 school districts in Arkansas. But, you know, the kind of shared governance and partnership that we're talking about establishing is much deeper and robust, in terms of the relationship that you develop with the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the principals and the teachers in the schools. And so, even though I can say that we have 52 district partnerships right now, they're not at the level that we're going to have with the districts we’ll be working with going forward.
Sarah Beth Estes, UA Little Rock: Just to illustrate partnership–when we were first applying to be in the design collaborative, the four superintendents of the four districts in our region all wrote letters of support, because they obviously know the challenges of placement and hiring and teacher turnover and attrition, too. So the idea here is generally tightening up what we do in EPPs in concert with the districts to produce stronger pathways to ensure that when teachers start that job on day one, they're going to stay because they feel supported. They know how to do the job. And then how do we learn collaboratively with our district partners? How do we make improvements in our EPP through that placement?
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: One change is that we'll have a site coordinator who is university-based but who lives in the [partner] school, not on the university campus. Instead of having a university supervisor who just shows up two or three times, there will be a full-time person at the school who is managing the interns and field students. This greatly extends the work that we do with our school partner to a much different level and it actually puts them in a stronger position, too; their teachers will be working with the site coordinator, who will be working with our faculty to bring it all together so that we have meaningful changes, not just perception data based on a survey completed by our field students and interns.
Lundon Pinneo, UA Little Rock: This really moves the classroom teachers into the driver's seat and values their input so much more. It utilizes their experience and expertise, and leverages their knowledge base to complement what we're doing. Because in our previous model, it was disjointed–the student was the go-between, rather than the teachers and us sitting at the table and designing the experience for our students based on what our students need, and informed by the formative data we are getting.
Neelie Dobbins, SAU: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from residents and their mentors. We recently met with a group of mentors who were really into their role, and they wanted to give specific feedback. They were very interested in working together as a team. We’re doing co-teaching and critical conversation training with mentors and candidates. We’re new in this process and we don’t know exactly what they need, so we’re asking them. The district Human Resource Manager was also in conversation with the mentors so he could ask them what they needed and what he could do from a district perspective.
“All of the things that were previously disjointed are coming together–it has become super collaborative. What can we do as a university? What can they do as a district? What’s working? What’s not? That didn't happen previously.”
Lynze Greathouse, SAU: We’re excited about the mentor progress report. A lot of issues with candidates are not about content, pedagogy, or instruction. It’s often things like relationship building, showing up on time, communicating, being a professional. We ask the mentors to assess the candidates’ dispositions- are they showing up on time? Are they establishing relationships with the students? This will give us more timely and effective data so we can better support, and ultimately integrate our learning to improve our content, pedagogy or instruction.
Neelie Dobbins, SAU: We were seeing that a specific population of candidates was having problems with field experiences and we needed to look at where the problem lay–was it them or was it a bad match? We’re becoming much more intentional about who we’re placing our candidates with. You can’t place them in a classroom that will not set them up for success.
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: For years we’ve used survey data from our district partners and scheduled annual meetings for cooperating teachers and administrators to attend from which to gain input on how to better structure our teacher education programs. While these conversations have been useful, they don’t begin to provide the depth of real time data, nor essential relationship building, that comes from mutually beneficial partnerships like we’re now developing with our partner schools. Having site coordinators working day to day with our interns, field students, and their mentor teachers, along with the constant attention to formative assessment data will create much stronger conditions for preparing teachers who are “day-one ready” to teach.
What would you say to EPPs that don’t have the resources or institutional support to undertake the changes that you’ve made? Are there steps they can take anyway?
Lynze Greathouse, SAU: We want other institutions to know that even without grant funding, transformation is still possible. It is a question of pace, not possibility- the grant dollars accelerate our process and allow us to move multiple elements at the same time, which is a huge benefit. We are thankful for the funding but want other universities to be aware there are still many changes they can implement in a cost-effective manner.
When we look backwards, many of the changes we’ve made in the past year have cost very little. Our team is deeply motivated to improve student learning, and we know this can happen by having “day-one ready” completers.
We are also very excited that our partner districts are very dedicated to these changes and have chosen to pay our candidates for year-long residencies.
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: An important aspect of our grant funding was making changes that are sustainable. Over the past 40 years, I’ve seen professional development schools and teacher induction programs come and go. While the two institutions-school districts and educator preparation programs- worked collaboratively, they remained as two silos. The mutually beneficial aspect of this work keeps us all in the same silo working together to prepare “day-one ready” teachers, but with the ultimate goal of improving student learning through more effective teaching. With innovative thinking and strategic allocation of resources and seriously rethinking how “we’ve always done it”, everyone can share in the success of our work in Arkansas. Also, ForwARd Arkansas has already invited all nineteen EPPs in the state to attend our regional meetings to spur cross-institutional learning, including our partner schools.
Can you share what drives you personally in this work?
Lundon Pinneo, UA Little Rock: I'm excited to work with classroom teachers again more closely. I've always worked really closely with my colleagues and my college students, but I couldn’t always with the classroom teachers and administrators. So that's what I'm most excited about.
Sarah Beth Estes, UA Little Rock: As dean, I have a lot of other responsibilities in addition to the School of Education. So, throughout this year as we’ve spent so much time [on the grant], I would think to myself, “How can I justify spending this disproportionate amount of time on this?” But over time, with the challenges that teachers are facing, and being in a state that has a bigger academic gap to close than most others, it began to feel like a smart expenditure of time. If we can have outcomes that include greater student literacy and mathematical achievement, then how much better off are we as a state?
Neelie Dobbins, SAU: What drives me are the inequities in south Arkansas and us finding a way to help eliminate the barriers as best we can. It's interesting to look around and see that, in many ways, segregation is still here. If we can provide quality teachers for all children, then we’re doing better.
Lynze Greathouse, SAU: I grew up in south Arkansas, so for me it’s personal. I wish there were a better phrase than “meeting the needs of all students,” but that’s what’s most critical. Education is one key to changing your circumstances. I’m driven by how we can better provide access to that.
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: For the better part of 40 years, the following mantra has guided my life’s work: “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.” If we look at the current state of educator preparation programs across the nation today, we have to accept the reality that we’re part of the problem and recognize our opportunity of also being part of the solution. Yet, we can’t keep doing educator preparation the same way and expect different outcomes. Right? The work and support of ForwARd Arkansas, US Prep, and 2Revolution opens new doors for us to succeed in mutually beneficial collaboration with our partner schools. We can prepare “day-one ready” teachers; we can effectively address student learning; and we can be part of the solution.
Is there anything else that you want people to know?
Lynze Greathouse, SAU: Be prepared to deal with all learners. Don’t just focus on the middle of the bell curve. We want our graduates to be prepared to provide quality education to all learners, and the goal for the year-long residency is to provide the most preparation possible.
Neelie Dobbins, SAU: Use the data to identify the immediate needs of your candidates. What are the big holes in their learning? Right now the districts spend a lot of time and energy helping graduates during that first year of teaching. Now the EPP will be able to do a lot of that support ahead of time.
Kent Layton, UA Little Rock: Our excitement about the transformative work ahead of us reminds me of a past colleague’s insight on innovation. “Rebuilding programs will be interesting and challenging. I remember opening a brand new school in the 1960s. It was an incredible opportunity. We kept reaching for things that weren’t there because of what we were used to in the places we had come from.” With the technical support of US Prep and 2Revolutions, we look forward to innovating systemic change to prepare day-one ready teachers in collaboration with our partner schools.
With gratitude to faculty members from University of Arkansas Little Rock and Southern Arkansas University: Dr. Neelie Dobbins, Chair, SAU Department of Education; Dr. Sarah Beth Estes, UA Little Rock Dean and Vice Provost for Careers and Extended Education; Dr. Lynze Greathouse, SAU Assistant Professor of Education and MAT Director; Dr. Kent Layton, UA Little Rock Interim Director, School of Education and Center for Literacy; Dr. Lundon Pinneo, UA Little Rock Assistant Professor of Middle Childhood Education; and Dr. Leslie Sharp, UA Little Rock Assistant Professor of Elementary Education.
For more information about the Forward Arkansas' Educator Preparation Program Design Collaborative, contact Dr. Malachi Nichols (mnichols@forwardarkansas.org) ; for more information about the changes at each of these transforming EPPs, contact Dr. Sarah Beth Estes, Dean and Vice Provost for Careers and Extended Education (sbestes@ualr.edu) at University of Arkansas Little Rock and Dr. Neelie Dobbins, Chair, Department of Education (cndobbins@saumag.edu) at Southern Arkansas University.