Teaching Quality

At meetings with Native American community leaders, educators in the University of Washington’s College of Education repeatedly heard the same question — what can be done to improve educational outcomes among Native learners?

In large, diverse metropolitan areas such as Seattle, students in K-12 systems can speak well over 100 primary languages.

As the cultural and linguistic diversity of the nation's schools steadily increases, Grace Blum (PhD '16) is focused on preparing future teachers to work effectively in classrooms where students may have several different primary languages.

Even as poverty-impacted schools have found success recruiting more high-ability teachers over the past two decades, fewer teachers of color are sticking with the profession. A new study from the University of Washington College of Education points to one of the biggest obstacles to closing the teacher diversity gap: teachers of color are significantly less satisfied with their jobs than white colleagues.

For perhaps a majority of voters in the United States, formal civic education takes place in a high school government course. Yet for many students, particularly those in poverty-impacted schools, government courses regularly fail to be rigorous, ambitious or engaging.

For 11 years, Stephanie Diehl has enjoyed a successful career as an early childhood educator. She's worked her way up to become director of an early childhood center in Northwest Illinois that's gold level-rated, the state's highest certification of quality.

But Diehl, like many early educators throughout the country, doesn't have a bachelor's degree in early learning. 

For years, many of the nation's secondary school students have failed to get the kind of intensive, ongoing literacy instruction they need, either to catch up in the basics or to move beyond them.

As a result, said Professor Sheila Valencia of the University of Washington College of Education, educators and students alike have found ways to work around texts.

Learning science, especially under the rigorous new Next Generation Science Standards, comes with complex linguistic demands for students.

For English language learners (ELLs) and their teachers, those demands can present a barrier to engaging in complex forms of scientific sense-making and decrease students’ future opportunities in STEM disciplines.

Too often, communities are left out of the equation in preparing future teachers.

“We’ve generally done a poor job accessing the knowledge and the assets that exist in our schools and communities,” said Ken Zeichner, Boeing professor of teacher education at the University of Washington College of Education. “There’s this idea that we’re coming in to help save schools and students.”

That’s a view that Zeichner wants to change.

While most practitioners recognize the need to better support students, especially those who have been historically underserved, many struggle in knowing, concretely, how to do so.

Kara Jackson, an assistant professor of education in the University of Washington College of Education, is working to change that and improve middle-grades mathematics teaching and learning at a district-wide scale.

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of Washington College of Education No. 8 among the nation's best education schools in its annual graduate school ratings, released March 16.

UW College of Education again ranked No. 2 among education schools at public institutions in the U.S., behind only the University of Wisconsin-Madison (at No. 4 overall) in the 2017 edition of the U.S. News ratings. This is the third consecutive year that UW has been ranked second among public institutions by U.S. News.