A commitment to engagement. We long ago learned that a vital and responsive teacher-education effort requires continuous engagement with the communities of professional practice that we serve. Accordingly, 15 years ago, former Dean John Taylor created the Professional Preparation Board (PPB). This group of 40-50 includes:

We meet monthly throughout the academic year to study issues of mutual interest and to examine the effectiveness of our teacher-education programs. On May 6, Nic Clement, then Flowing Wells School District superintendent, published an opinion piece in the Arizona Daily Star about the PPB and about a survey the PPB conducted that documented districts' satisfaction with teachers they have hired from the University of Arizona. The PPB remains an important element of our educator- preparation enterprise, ensuring that our programs respond to the changing landscape of P-12 education in our region.

A commitment to diversity. Across the nation and in our local community, children and adolescents represent the broad spectrum of diversity: racial, ethnic, linguistic; sexual orientation; and special needs and abilities. Our teacher-education programs prepare graduates to work with blind and visually impaired children, adolescents, and adults; deaf and hard-of-hearing children, adolescents, and adults; children and adolescents with severe and profound disabilities; and children and adolescents with cross-categorical special needs. As with all of our programs, prospective teachers are placed in schools that serve diverse populations in which they learn to differentiate instruction according to individual talents and the incredible knowledge that all children, adolescents, and their families bring to schools. Our students, faculty, and mentor teachers continually strive against deficit views of teaching and learning.

In addition, our faculty is diverse. We have considerable linguistic diversity (see below about our bilingual faculty) and racial and ethnic diversity. We also strive to recruit a diverse student population. Our recruiters and advisors work closely with Pima and Maricopa Community Colleges and with the UA Office of Admissions to provide academic guidance at all points of the recruiting and admissions process. We work with the UA Office of Financial Aid to be informed of funding resources for our students, and we work with our amazing donors to create even more resources within the college.

A commitment to innovation and improvement. Nothing stays the same. Everything changes and evolves. This is certainly true of our society and the schools that serve us. It is no less true of our teacher-education programs. For example, we have moved our secondary teacher-education programs in the College of Education to a fifth-year, master's program, called Teach Arizona. We are committed to ensuring that all of our secondary teacher-education students have demonstrated content mastery and have achieved high grade-point averages prior to beginning their teacher-education programs and working with adolescents.

We also know that successful innovation in education requires solid research and evaluation. In our elementary teacher-education program, we have a major grant from the National Science Foundation, under the direction of Professor and Department Head Bruce Johnson and his colleagues, to help design and test approaches to science and math education (affectionately named by NSF as STEM --- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics --- education). In collaboration with the Tucson Unified School District, this program, Beyond Bridging, leads to improvements in our teacher-education efforts and serves as a major source of professional development opportunities for the teachers in the participating schools. A similar research-based redesign effort is in our early childhood teacher-education program. This effort, CREATE, directed by Associate Dean Renee Clift and her colleagues, represents a collaboration among Tucson, Sunnyside, and Flowing Wells School Districts. During four semesters, prospective teachers work closely with experienced mentor teachers, families, and community organizations to improve the quality of early childhood education and teacher education.

A commitment to extensive clinical practice. People learn to drive by first learning the rules of the road and then getting into a car and driving in a variety of situations, under the guidance of a knowledgeable instructor. Teachers learn to teach by understanding the relationship between theory-driven, research-based instruction and by planning, implementing, and assessing the effects of instruction in real classrooms, under the shared guidance of university instructors and accomplished mentor teachers. Our Teach Arizona students work in the same classrooms for a full year, co-teaching with talented and dedicated middle-school and high-school mentors. Our prospective elementary teachers work in schools for three of the four semesters in their programs, co-teaching with skilled, committed mentor teachers who provide guidance and support for learning about students' learning. Our early childhood students work and learn in birth through pre-k settings for one year and in a kindergarten through third-grade setting in the second year of the program. Mentor teachers and university faculty and staff work together to learn from one another and provide opportunities for prospective teachers to enact what they learn through coursework.

A commitment to quality. The University of Arizona is a great research university with internationally renowned faculty members. More than half of our current faculty was appointed during the past 10 years, joining an outstanding group of senior faculty who are education-thought leaders in Arizona and beyond. These faculty members are smart, committed, and innovative. They have terrific experience in a range of education settings, and they renew their knowledge through research, teaching, and service. Many are English/Spanish bilinguals, reflecting the circumstances of education in our impressively diverse community. In addition to tenure-line faculty, we have a talented group of faculty in our practice track, hired primarily to lead and teach in our professional programs. Included in this group are our teachers-in-residence whom we bring to the college for short, two-year periods. These fine educators are teachers of outstanding ability in local schools, who return to their schools after helping us prepare the next generation of teachers.

Our students are smart (their average GPA prior to admission to teacher education is 3.2), committed to their students, and successful. In the study I referred to earlier, Nic Clement and his colleagues on the PPB found that more than 25 percent of all new teachers in the districts participating in the study were graduates of the UA. The district human-resources directors reported that our graduates were well prepared and would be retained in their jobs in the subsequent year. Moreover, for the past two years, the Arizona Department of Education has surveyed all principals in the state who had new teachers in their schools, asking them how well those novice teachers were prepared for their jobs. When graduates of UA teacher-education programs were compared with all the new teachers in the state, they exceeded the state average. The Arizona Department of Education's data show that the vast majority of our graduates were rated as "well prepared" or "very well prepared" on all dimensions of teaching performance. Teacher preparation makes an important difference.

During the next year, I will address many topics regarding teacher education and what we are doing at the University of Arizona to ensure quality.