At a recent TeachingWorks workshop for teacher educators, a participant wrote something in the final survey that has stayed with me:
“Thank you to TeachingWorks for continuing to offer high-quality professional development for teacher educators. I feel the winds of change are blowing through teacher prep and beginning to prioritize workforce models and partnerships between LEAs/EPPs—which are great!—but conversations about quality preparation are quickly being left behind. We truly value this space, and we encourage every partner to attend.”
We are grateful for this comment—not only because it affirms the value of the professional learning spaces we work to create, but also because it names something important about the current moment in teacher education. The winds are changing. Across the country, policymakers, school districts, educator preparation programs, and community partners are working urgently to develop new models for preparing teachers. Grow-your-own programs, residency models, apprenticeships, district-based pathways, and other workforce development approaches are expanding rapidly. Many of these efforts are designed to address real and serious problems: persistent teacher shortages, the high cost of teacher preparation, and the need to recruit and support teachers in rural and urban communities and in hard-to-staff areas such as special education, mathematics, science, and bilingual education.
These problems demand action. We need preparation pathways that are affordable for prospective teachers. We need models that allow people already working in schools and communities to become certified teachers without taking on impossible financial burdens. We need stronger partnerships between local education agencies and educator preparation programs. And we need to design pathways that respond to the needs of particular communities, especially those that have long been underserved by existing systems. In short: the push to rethink teacher preparation is necessary.
But the survey comment points to a danger we cannot afford to ignore. In the urgency to solve workforce problems, conversations about the quality of teacher preparation can too easily become secondary—or disappear altogether. If the central question becomes only “How can we prepare more teachers, faster, and at lower cost?” we risk losing sight of another question that is just as urgent: “What must teachers know and be able to do in order to support children’s learning, participation, and flourishing?”
There is no substitute for high-quality preparation. Teaching is complex, relational, intellectually demanding work. Teachers need deep knowledge of the subjects they teach, not only so they can “cover” content, but also so they can unpack it, represent it, connect it to students’ ideas and experiences, and respond when students make sense of it in unexpected ways. They need to understand children and adolescents, families and communities, culture and language, identity and power. They need opportunities to learn, practice, receive feedback, and improve the actual work of teaching before they are responsible for classrooms on their own.
This is where the TeachingWorks high-leverage practices matter. Skillful teaching requires being able to lead a group discussion, explain and model content, elicit and respond to student thinking, provide useful feedback, interpret student work, build respectful relationships, communicate with families, cultivate a safe and productive learning environment, and more. These are not decorative add-ons to preparation. They are the core work of teaching. And they cannot be learned well through coursework alone, nor through goodwill, nor simply by spending time in schools. They require deliberate study, repeated practice, close coaching, and careful attention to the purposes of instruction.
None of this means that new pathways into teaching cannot be efficient, affordable, or innovative. They can and should be. But efficiency cannot mean thin preparation. Affordability cannot mean shifting the cost of under-preparation onto children, families, schools, and novice teachers themselves. Workforce development models must be designed around a serious theory of teacher learning: one that specifies what teachers need to know and be able to do, how they will learn it, how their developing practice will be supported, and how programs will know whether candidates are ready for the responsibilities they are taking on.
In fact, the best workforce models and the best quality-focused models should not be in competition. Strong partnerships between districts and preparation programs can make clinical learning more coherent and more connected to local needs. Grow-your-own pathways can recruit teachers who know and are committed to the communities they will serve. Apprenticeship and residency models can create sustained opportunities for novices to learn alongside skilled teachers. But these models only fulfill their promise if they are built around rich preparation—not if they bypass it.
So we want to echo our workshop participant’s concern and extend it as a call to action. As the field moves quickly to address teacher shortages and redesign pathways into teaching, we must keep quality preparation at the center of the conversation. We need models that are accessible and rigorous, efficient and educative, responsive to workforce needs and grounded in what we know about teaching and teacher learning. The future of teacher preparation should not force a choice between getting more teachers into classrooms and preparing them well. Children deserve both. So do beginning teachers.
We would love to hear from others working in this space. How are you thinking about the relationship between workforce development and high-quality preparation? What models are you seeing that hold both commitments together? What risks are you noticing, and what possibilities are emerging? We invite your comments, questions, and perspectives as we continue this conversation together.