Teacher Educators: Let’s Give Our Syllabi a Glow-Up

Avatar photo Francesca Forzani July 8, 2025


The National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has been lambasted for the approach it takes to evaluating teacher preparation programs since it released its first report in June 2013. Teacher educators throughout the country immediately took issue with the organization’s lack of transparency and reliance on course syllabi to conduct its review (see, for example, Linda Darling-Hammond’s response at the time in The Washington Post). So it was no surprise to hear teacher educators in California dismissing NCTQ’s recent criticism of the way that state prepares elementary math teachers and faulting the organization’s methodology:

“The California State University rejects the recent grading from the National Council on Teacher Quality about our high-quality teacher training programs,” the CSU wrote in a statement. The council “relies on a narrow and flawed methodology, heavily dependent on document reviews, rather than on dialogue with program faculty, students and employers or a systematic review of meaningful program outcomes.”

In response, Heather Peske, NCTQ president, called this a “really weak critique.”

This debate misses an important point: designing professional training that prepares teachers for the complicated work of classroom instruction is really hard…and representing it so that others can understand it—in documents and elsewhere—might be even harder. When others discount the practice of teaching as well as the importance of professional training, we should take the opportunity to make the complexity of both teaching and teacher education visible.

Let’s think first about what we need new teachers to learn—in other words, what we mean by good teaching. This is what we’re trying to teach, and how we’re planning to teach it is what should be on our syllabi (or our course plans, websites, or wherever we communicate publicly about our teaching).

Our conception of good teaching should be driven in part by our goals for student learning, and our goals for student learning should be high for all students, many of whom are underserved by school. We’ve come to view students’ ideas as a central resource in academically ambitious classroom teaching, and the teacher’s job in large part as responding to and extending student thinking, all while consistently working to disrupt inequitable patterns in who gets access to learning opportunities. This work is multifaceted, encompassing relational, intellectual, practical, and ethical tasks. These tasks draw on many kinds of knowledge, including content knowledge for teaching—understanding subject matter well enough to help students learn it and to hear the insights and questions in their responses to that subject matter. And of course they require instructional skill—not just the work of representing content to students and structuring their interactions with it, but of building productive relationships with students and helping them interact in supportive ways with one another, among other things. The work is partially improvisational, dependent upon not only special knowledge but also constant, principled judgment. 

Given all of this, the task for teacher educators is large. We have to support teacher candidates to develop:

  • specialized knowledge in several domains;
  • instructional skill that spans one-on-one interactions, classroom discussions, and interactions with caregivers and colleagues;
  • the knowledge and skill needed to promote equitable access to learning in the classroom; and
  • the judgment to make constant, on-the-fly decisions about how to do all of this. 

No one part of this is more important than another part; excellent, equitable teaching requires knowledge, skill, commitments, and judgment likely in equal measure.

So how do we design excellent preparation that will help novice teachers get where they need to be on their first day in the classroom? What might it look like on a syllabus, and how can we use our syllabi to make our work more visible? At TeachingWorks, we’ve been helping teacher educators design practice-based teacher education for more than a decade, and we’re well known for advocating for an approach that “layers” work on content, practice, and equity. For example, consider a class meeting in which teacher candidates are learning to lead a class discussion of a fictional text in which they are expected to engage in character analysis. The instructional activities in a three-hour class might look something like this:

  • Study a third-grade lesson plan calling for a text-based discussion, and then read and discuss the text in the lesson. Consider what it means to make inferences about a character, and do some of that work together.
  • Watch and analyze a video of a similar discussion taking place in a classroom, taking care to identify the moves the teacher makes to launch, orchestrate, and conclude the discussion, including equity moves such as ensuring that all students have the opportunity to participate in the discussion and strategically acknowledging student competence. 
  • Practice leading a discussion of the third-grade text with each other, through a pedagogy we call rehearsal, while receiving close coaching and feedback from the teacher educators—feedback which might help build content knowledge for teaching while also helping candidates hone their skill at, say, orienting students to one another’s thinking.

Disentangling what teacher candidates are working on when in this lesson is tough, because they are constantly building a mix of content knowledge and practical skill, sometimes all at once. Creating a syllabus or course plan that reflects this is tough, too. It’s a lot of work, and it can be difficult to label what’s happening when. But just because it’s tough doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. As the preparers of our nation’s public school teachers, we shouldn’t be affronted by requests to make clear what we do and how we do it. 

Is the best way to do that in a syllabus? It’s certainly the case that people mean different things by a “syllabus” and that syllabi are used in different ways and take different forms. Perhaps what we need aren’t better syllabi but better or more public—or better and more public—course plans or something similar. Whatever we call it, we need professional representation of our incredibly complex work, and professional review is an important aspect of that. Better syllabi or other written records of our courses would help us talk more with each other, share best practices, and continue to improve what we are doing. Yes, it will take some time, but let’s use this summer to give our syllabi—or course plans or whatever we call them—a glow-up. As teacher educators, no one should take instruction more seriously than we do, and developing a shareable course plan that represents the work of excellent teacher preparation would be time well spent.