I. Mission

The faculty and academic staff of the UW-Madison School of Education are committed to the three tenets of the Wisconsin Idea: 1) research; 2) teaching; and 3) service as they prepare educators for careers in WI, the nation, and the world. The UW-Madison School of Education embodies cutting edge practices in the education of teachers; and serves as a laboratory for the study of teacher education and the process of learning to teach.

II. Vision

The certification programs of the School of Education of the University of Wisconsin-Madison are guided by the following purposes:

1. To help education personnel (teachers, administrators, counselors, etc.) become leaders in improving education by obtaining the knowledge and beliefs that will enable them to provide learning environments that are intellectually challenging; that are nurturing; that include stimulating, important, and socially relevant content; that are instrumental in assisting all children and adults to become academically productive; and that allow educational personnel to become "classroom researchers," continually analyzing methods and seeking better ways of teaching and learning.

2. To provide an environment where research and inquiry increase knowledge about the preparation of education personnel and about the processes of education and learning.

3. To prepare future leaders in education by providing opportunities for graduate students to study and develop university education experiences for prospective teachers and other education personnel, and to participate in these university programs as supervisors, part-time lecturers (e.g. in methods courses and student teaching seminars), and as collaborators with faculty in research on teacher education, teaching, and learning.

4. To prepare future leaders in education who participate as interns in such fields as school psychology, school administration, counseling, in positions linking education and work and/or who study processes of education and learning.

III. Goals

Within the four-point vision defined above, there are eight common themes across the School of Education's teacher education and other certification programs. The eight themes are equally important. Thus, they are shown below in alphabetical order, not hierarchical order:

1. Assessment - Educators must be prepared to carry out authentic assessments of their student's abilities, attitudes and understanding, and of the strengths and needs for improvement of various educational programs and curricula.

2. Collaboration - Educators must be prepared to seek out and engage in collaborative relationships (e.g., with families, social and community agencies) in order to provide students with contextualized and experiential learning and to improve the professional expertise of the educator.

3. Constructivism - Educators must be prepared to structure learning environments that enable students to construct knowledge and to connect knowledge acquired at school with knowledge acquired at home and in the community.

4. Diversity - Educators must be prepared to recognize, accept and teach to diversity, addressing both groups of students and individuals, recognizing different perspectives and voices that represent various groups and interests, recognizing shared interests that create common purposes for individuals and groups.

5. Educational Technology - Educators must be prepared to use educational technology to extend and enhance their ability to provide their students with varied experiences, with powerful tools for learning, as well as to prepare students for entry into a workforce that is technologically sophisticated.

6. Intellectually Challenging Instruction - Educators must be prepared to provide their students with curriculum and instruction that is both intellectually challenging and educationally worthwhile, that recognizes the problematic and socially constructed nature of knowledge, the ways that beliefs and interpretations change in response to different and competing views within disciplines, the ways that problems are formed within and across disciplines and solutions invented, tried and evaluated.

7. Reflective Teaching - Educators must be prepared to search for the meanings and consequences of their own knowledge and beliefs, of their teaching, of schooling; they must be prepared to use the resulting understanding to choose among professional alternatives, continually re-examining professional goals and professional actions.

8. School Governance/Curriculum Decisions - Educators must be prepared to participate in the type of discussion and negotiation with other teachers, school staff, family members, students, and administrators that produces decisions about curriculum and school and school-community programs.

IV. Strategies

Strategies that guide the faculty and academic staff in its work to prepare education practitioners are as follows:

1. Research and Inquiry into Education - The faculty and academic staff are committed to programs of research and inquiry that can generate new knowledge about human development, learning, processes of instruction and their social contexts, for the purpose of improving teacher education and school and community education programs.

2. Integration and Coherence of Courses - The faculty and academic staff are committed to assuring coherence in required courses both within and between departments and through collaboration across appropriate schools and colleges of the university.

3. Intellectually Challenging Instruction - The faculty and academic staff are committed to providing education courses that are stimulating, informed by current thought and research, and intellectually challenging to students.

4. Collaboration with Schools and Communities - The faculty and academic staff are committed to maintaining close collaborative relationships with schools and other educational agencies in communities, both through initial and continuing professional programs, and to identifying and searching for resolutions of issues and problems of professional education and of the education to children and adults.

5. Preparing Future Leaders in Education - The faculty and academic staff are committed to preparing undergraduate and graduate students for leadership positions in education, as scholars and teachers in universities and as members of school district or other educational agency staffs.

V. History

The UW-Madison School of Education mission statement was influenced by the modern school reform movement, a movement that progressed in three distinct phases across three decades. The first phase grew out of A Nation at Risk, a report published in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education that focused on issues such as school climate, length of the school year, and number of academic courses. The second phase began in the 1990s with a shift in focus to strengthening and validating academic standards. The third phase originated from the 1996 publication of What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, published by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.

In the early 1990's, during the second phase of the modern school reform movement, the UW-Madison School of Education adopted a mission statement that was used as the foundation for the development of the UW-Madison Teacher Education Standards. Over a period of several years, the UW-Madison Coordinating Council for Teacher Education (CCTE), which is composed of faculty and/or academic staff from all of the departments in the School of Education and an Associate Dean from both Education and Letters & Science, developed the UW-Madison Teacher Education Standards (see below) in consultation with the faculty, academic staff, students, and two advisory committees composed of cooperating teachers and administrators: 1) the Clinical Associates Committee (CAC), and 2) The Student Teaching Advisory Council (STAC).

Members of the CCTE, CAC, and STAC examined the INTASC standards in relation to the newly developed UW-Madison School of Education mission statement, vision, goals, and strategies and decided that the INTASC standards did not place enough emphasis on important concepts such as technology, social influences, and cultural diversity. As a result, it was decided to pursue Option # 3 offered by the WI Department of Public Instruction which was to develop standards unique to the UW-Madison School of Education.

The standards were then developed through the coordination of a subcommittee of the CCTE and then were discussed and debated by members of the CAC and STAC. Each UW-Madison School of Education department formally voted on the adoption of the standards. Finally the standards were discussed and approved by the UW-Madison School of Education's Academic Planning Council. Following the adoption of the standards, each UW-Madison Teacher Education Certification Program worked for several years to define the knowledge and performance indicators that will be assessed within each standard as well as defining where each of the indicators will be covered and assessed in the respective program.

The documents that follow outline the entrance and exit criteria and knowledge and performance indicators for each of our initial teacher certification programs. The UW-Madison School of Education has incorporated dispositions within performances and has not defined dispositions separately. All of the Teacher Standards in WI PI34 Legislative Rules are contained within the UW-Madison Teacher Education Standards. The enclosed Correspondence Table shows how the PI34 Standards are embedded in the UW-Madison Standards.