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With growing teacher shortages nationwide, particularly in high-need subject areas and underserved communities, educator preparation programs (EPPs) have a big task at hand: prepare more pre-service teachers to enter K-12 classrooms without compromising the quality and level of support these teachers receive.
At Valdosta State University, the opportunity and responsibility to meet this need led us to designing a more scalable, equitable, and reflective preparation model–one that leverages technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to take it to the next level.
Launching a fully-online elementary education program
In the Fall of 2022, Georgia public schools hired just over 10,000 new teachers, while the state’s public and private universities had just 5,000 students complete teacher preparation programs that year.
To help meet this shortage, Valdosta State University launched a fully-online elementary education program in the summer of 2022. This program was designed for adult learners with eight-week asynchronous classes and a flat fixed-rate tuition with no hidden fees. In particular, this program was designed with paraprofessionals in mind. We hoped to enable them to become classroom teachers in the rural areas they were already serving–the same areas that often have the most difficulty in hiring new teachers.
Our online program has proven to be overwhelmingly successful with more than 500 students currently enrolled. Because of the high demand, as well as the physical location of our pre-service teachers statewide and beyond, the traditional model of supervision of our pre-service teachers’ practicum and clinical teaching placements was not tenable.
With the need to retain our reputation of producing excellent teachers, we needed to find a way to work with these pre-service teachers to provide high-quality and feedback-rich observations of their experiences in the classroom. Supervising hundreds of pre-service teachers across dozens of school systems is not sustainable using conventional observation models alone.
To that end, we turned to technology as a thoughtful enabler of this process.
Supporting pre-service teachers with video coaching
Edthena provided our program with the technology and support needed to make high-quality observations a reality. Using the VC3 video coaching platform, our preservice teachers upload video of their classroom teaching and then receive time-stamped feedback from our clinical supervisors.
The benefits of video as a tool for teacher training are well explored through an expansive set of academic literature. However, like any observation process, there is still a considerable amount of time invested in this process: there is the time of the actual teaching in the classroom, the time of the supervisor watching the video, and the time of the pre-service teacher watching the video with the embedded feedback. The observation process, of course, is just one of the responsibilities of our clinical supervisors.
As our enrollment continued to grow, we wanted to find a way to give more time back to our clinical supervisors so they, in turn, can better support our pre-service teachers.
In steps AI.
Implementing AI as a collaborative partner to guide teachers’ self-reflection
In a stroke of perfect timing, Edthena introduced the AI Coach platform just as our clinical supervisors were really feeling a time burden. The platform’s computerized AI support model provides our pre-service teachers with the opportunity to engage in scalable, self-guided reflection.
Naturally, we had some initial skepticism about a computerized coach truly supporting pre-service teacher learning up to our rigorous program and state standards. Yet, upon investigation, we discovered this technology is not only viable, but immediately deployable.
With the platform, pre-service teachers input their own pedagogical goals for a given lesson and then reflect on video of their teaching. The AI Coach platform provides the ‘guide on the side’ feedback needed to help them determine if these goals were met, as well as tips and resources to help them improve their practice. The AI-powered process prompts our pre-service teachers to think independently and take ownership over their learning, which we continue to view as a critical goal of our pre-service teacher education experience.
While the AI Coach platform does not eliminate the need for human clinical supervision of our pre-service teacher practicum and clinical experience, it does greatly decrease the time burden on our supervisors, allowing us to continue to grow and scale the program. Part of this is because the AI coaching experience is rooted in research on teacher noticing, improvement science, and iterative practice. So now our human supervisors can read the ‘conversations’ between the pre-service teachers and the virtual coach, instead of needing to watch all the videos directly.
Pushing boundaries to meet today’s demands
As shown by the 2022 data in Georgia, traditional EPPs have not kept up with the demand in the field. Traditional EPPs also face increased competition from online solutions offering faster and cheaper results, therefore, we have to find ways to innovate to retain high-quality programming while meeting the demands of our future students.
In our case, turning to AI-driven coaching has allowed us to support our pre-service teachers while helping to push the boundary on how, what, and where we can deliver excellence to meet the needs of school systems in Georgia and beyond.
Now is the time for all EPPs to innovate and harness our collective commitment to rigorous, reflective, and research-based practices to prepare more pre-service teachers to enter the classroom.
David A. Slykhuis, Ph.D., Valdosta State University
David A. Slykhuis, Ph.D., is a 21-year veteran in higher education who holds a doctoral degree in science education, with much of his research focused on educational technology. He is currently the dean of the Dewar College of Education and Human Services at Valdosta State University in Georgia. He is the chair of the National Technology Leadership Summit and former chair of AACTE’s (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education) standing committee on innovation and technology. Slykhuis is a past president of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). He is one of the four researchers who developed the Teacher Educator Technology Competencies and was awarded the AACTE Edward C. Pomeroy award for outstanding contributions to teacher education.
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