Teacher Prep Review Open Comment Survey
Clinical Practice Standard

Introduction
Thank you for your interest in providing feedback to inform a revised Teacher Prep Review Clinical Practice standard.

Your feedback will help ensure that this revised standard is valid and reliable, that it fairly reflects current research based practices in teacher preparation programs, and that it provides clear and actionable feedback to programs.

Your responses are anonymous. We will not collect any identifying information.

You can submit feedback as an individual or as an organization.

About the Teacher Prep Review
The Teacher Prep Review (TPR) evaluates the quality of preservice preparation provided to future teachers. The first TPR was released in 2013, although the development of standards dates back nearly a decade before that. The TPR considers a range of factors for which high quality evidence supports a clear standard. The TPR examines approximately 1,200 traditional undergraduate and graduate elementary teacher preparation programs.

About the Clinical Practice standard
This standard evaluates whether programs have set guidelines and policies to ensure that candidates have a high-quality, research-aligned clinical practice experience. The standard does not look at the performance of individual candidates, but rather at the policies and practices the teacher prep program has put in place so that all candidates have the opportunity to learn and practice essential skills.

For the Clinical Practice standard, NCTQ intends to evaluate preparation programs against the following claim: “Educator preparation programs provide elementary teacher candidates with robust and well-supported opportunities to practice teaching in authentic classroom settings, under the supervision of an instructionally effective cooperating teacher, with ongoing monitoring by the prep program.”

This standard will be used to evaluate traditional undergraduate and graduate programs.

NCTQ gathers documents that describe fieldwork, student teaching requirements, and program policies for teacher candidates pursuing an elementary teaching credential through submissions by teacher preparation programs and a review of publicly available material. The intent is to evaluate the requirements against research and expert insights on clinical practice.

For a detailed description of the content, data sources, and evaluation criteria for this proposed standard, including how it differs from NCTQ's earlier Clinical Practice standard, please visit the Clinical Practice Standard Revision page. The background information on this page will be useful for responding to the following questions.

Section 1: Identifying the appropriate aspects of clinical practice for the Teacher Prep Review to measure

The Clinical Practice Framework (2024) sets out the six focus areas of clinical practice backed by research and supported by the field as the most important to build a quality clinical practice experience. NCTQ worked with our expert advisory panel to identify elements from the Framework that were not only important to a high-quality clinical experience, but also likely to be visible in extant program documents, such that they could be included in the revised Clinical Practice Standard, and plausibly within the control of prep programs.