Standard 2

Conclusion and Next Steps

Looking across the findings from the self-study conducted by the preliminary administrative services, reading/literacy specialist, school counseling, and school nursing programs highlights that, based on the available data sources, overall, program completers are prepared to adapt to working in a variety of contexts and grow as professionals.

Areas of Strength:
Although the existing data sources program faculty used to examine how well program completers are prepared for their roles as administrators, reading/literacy specialists, school nurses, and school counselors primarily allowed us to examine work that is done while candidates are in the program, the findings of the analysis highlighted some specific areas of strength in the work our programs do.

One area in particular in which the self-study demonstrated our programs excel is in preparing our candidates to engage in their school communities through their work in their field placements. In the case of the Preliminary Administrative Services Credential (PASC) program, the Reading/Literacy Specialist program, and the School Nursing program, this is, in part, because candidates complete their field placements in contexts where they are already employed. Still, as the findings demonstrated, the expectations of the field placement experiences are that candidates will take on new roles in those contexts that are in line with the credential towards which they are working. In these new roles, they have the opportunity to apply what they are learning from their programs and engage with colleagues in new ways. Similarly, in the School Counseling program, candidates are expected to take on an active role in the school site where they are placed, providing candidates the opportunity to practice what will be expected of them when they take on the role of a school counselor in the future.

Like in our findings to Standard 1, our analyses of the data in response to the Standard 2 Aspects again highlighted the work our programs do to prepare our completers to engage in culturally responsive practices with diverse learners. Given our educational unit’s stated goal to prepare educators who will serve as leaders in a culturally and linguistically diverse society, this finding is not particularly surprising, though it is helpful to have it validated by the data, as was particularly the case in the findings from the Reading/Literacy Specialist and School Nursing programs in response to Standard 2B.

Another area of strength for our programs was in preparing candidates to establish their own goals to guide their professional learning, with opportunities for self-assessment and reflection. Results from the CalAPA, in particular, highlighted the ways PASC candidates are prepared to assess themselves and create goals based on their understandings of their own particular needs. Similarly, the School Nursing program’s process of inviting candidates to complete a Knowledge-Base Questionnaire at the beginning of the program as a way to determine specific areas of strength and weakness, followed by a reflective assignment to establish specific goals based on that self-assessment, clearly supports candidates in engaging in the necessary self-analysis and reflection.

Finally, across programs, findings from the data analysis demonstrated our programs do, in fact, prepare candidates to collaborate with colleagues to support their professional learning. Within the School Counseling Program, this was demonstrated by the ways in which candidates worked collaboratively to complete key assignments in the program, a process that mimics how they will work together with future colleagues. Similarly, tasks within the CalAPA call on candidates to collaborate with colleagues at their school sites. The findings from the assessments associated with these tasks demonstrate that candidates are, indeed, developing their skills in these areas. 

These areas of strength very much align with our priorities as an educational unit, as we explicitly work to prepare our candidates to be engaged in their school communities and to be able to collaborate with all stakeholders--students, families, colleagues, and community members--to help support the education of all learners. As they do so, we believe strongly in the need to continually self-assess, reflect, and make plans for future improvements in a quest for continuous improvement.

Areas for Growth:
While our analyses did highlight strengths in the work we do, we also discovered some areas for growth that we intend to address as we move forward. Below, please find specific next steps articulated by each program that program faculty are committed to pursuing. We also highlighted unit-wide areas for growth, synthesized from across the programs’ findings.

In particular, one area in which all programs have room to improve was in ensuring that completers are prepared to support students’ growth in international and global perspectives. While our programs emphasize the use of culturally sustaining pedagogies and always incorporating multiple cultural perspectives, that does not always extend to an international or global scale. Moving forward, program faculty will work together to analyze syllabi to consider where and how to incorporate an emphasis on international and global perspectives. Additionally, we will reach out to our campus International Faculty Organization to consider how they might support our candidates in not only developing their own international perspectives but also how they might bring that knowledge into their future work contexts. A starting point for this work is to think explicitly about commonalities in some of the educational issues across the world, such as the role of globalization and internet-based technologies in connecting markets, impacting lived experiences, and influencing human migration. From there, we can work to guide our candidates in how they might incorporate international and global perspectives into their work with their students.

Like we highlighted in our responses to Standard 1, another challenge faculty had while working to engage in their self-study in relation to the Standard 2 Aspects was a lack of data sources, particularly data sources from a variety of perspectives that would allow for triangulation of findings. As previously discussed, most of the data sources used in the responses to Standard 2 come from when candidates were still in the program or just as they finished. We understand that, if we truly want to know about the impact of our programs on our completers once they are in the field, we need to collect data from them at that point in their trajectory. Additionally, we also need to gather the perspective of their employers and/or supervisors to learn more about how well they believe we prepared their administrators, reading/literacy specialists, school counselors, and school nurses.

Moving forward, as we articulated in Standard 1, we intend to develop unit-wide surveys that can be administered annually to completers who finished our programs in the past five years and their employers that will include both general programs about the work our institution does as a whole and program-specific questions. The hope is that this will allow us to collect data that will be useful at both levels. Additionally, at the individual program level, programs plan to begin holding focus group discussions with program alumni to learn more about areas in which the program prepared them well and areas in which they would have liked more preparation. These focus group discussions will also provide opportunities for program faculty to learn more about current issues in the field and ensure that our current candidates are being prepared to address those issues. 

Finally, again as discussed in Standard 1, in order to then make the necessary changes to program practices, program faculty plan to spend time examining current coursework, assessments, and evaluation tools to ensure that coursework aligns with expected outcomes, that assessments provide a valid way for candidates to demonstrate mastery of those outcomes, and to ensure that the tools used for evaluation actually measure what they are intended to measure. If we want to make sure our completers are successful for their work in their future roles, we need to make sure our programs include the coursework that will prepare them to be. As they do so, faculty will also engage in inquiry, examining student work across courses to ensure the validity and reliability of both the assignments used and the tools used to evaluate those assignments. We envision that this work will take time and be ongoing as program faculty will need to try new approaches, examine their effectiveness, make revisions, and then implement those revisions. 

Standard 2: Completer Professional Competence & Growth Program Next Steps