School districts throughout the United States, particularly large urban ones, have steadily increased diversity in race, ethnicity, language, religion, and national origin in the last few decades (Council of the Great City Schools, 2003). This poses numerous challenges to teacher educators who must update the preparation they provide to aspiring teachers, as well as the ongoing support they give to those already in the workforce. Notably, new teachers abandon the profession entirely at alarming rates (Ingersoll, 1997; Ingersoll & Smith, 2003), more so when they begin to teach in urban, low-income, diverse settings. A potential explanation for such poor retention of novice teachers may be linked to the types of curriculum, instruction, and assessments teacher education programs employ to teach and gauge their candidates’ readiness for such settings.  The skills that pre-service teachers (PT) ought to acquire to work effectively with diverse urban pupils need to be nurtured and monitored not only throughout the completion of basic preparation but also during the first years of teaching. Concomitantly, the processes and tools with which such preparation and induction outcomes are monitored remain a relevant area of inquiry. This pursuit does not deny the importance of continuing efforts to diversify the teacher pool, which remains relatively homogeneous when compared with the increasing diversity of the K-12 student population.

Au and Blake (2003) provide a specific definition of diverse students in the United States, which includes those who differ from their English speaking, White middle-class mainstream counterparts in three aspects: family socioeconomic background, race/ethnicity, and language used at home. Diversity encompasses much more than those three markers; given their incidence and impact in urban school settings, however, these three social markers warrant particular attention.

Metropolitan areas in the United States house growing groups of linguistic and cultural diversity. The largest 65 urban school districts enroll 15 percent of all schoolchildren and over 31 percent of all children who speak a language other than English at home (Council of the Great City Schools, 2005). Segregation of Latino and African-American groups in urban schools is high (Council of the Great City Schools, 2003). Yet, the challenge is far from involving the education of the longest settled minority groups alone, as metropolitan school districts report student bodies representative of myriad linguistic backgrounds, which include Spanish but also languages less traditional in U.S. schools such as Somali, Serbo-Croatian, and Hmong (Antunez, 2003). Most compellingly, whereas almost 40 percent of the public school students come from low socioeconomic backgrounds nationwide (as determined by their eligibility for free or reduced lunch), the number rises to over 62 percent when considering the largest urban school districts alone (Council of the Great City Schools, 2003). The complexity of urban work settings inevitably poses a challenge to teacher educators in charge of preparing future generations of teachers that can effectively instruct students who come from such a variety of socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds.    

In contrast with the increasing diversity of the K-12 student body, 86 percent of those pursuing a career in teaching are White according to American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (1996) and the National Education Assocation (1997) reports. Those numbers are consistent with an earlier study by Zimpher (1989), who depicted the typical PT’s as females of approximately 21 years of age, born in English-speaking suburban homes, attending nearby colleges, and having expressed a preference for teaching in schools whose children exhibited similar social markers. Current research indicates that fewer than six percent of those graduating from education programs wish to work in under-served, multicultural urban settings (National Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching, 2000).     

A significant number of conceptual and empirical studies have investigated aspects related to the multicultural education of teachers (Boyle-Baise, 2002; Dilworth, 1998; Irvine, 2003; Murrell, 2001; Vavrus, 2002; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Reviews of research in multicultural teacher education (Bennett, 2001; Sleeter, 2001)  and “reviews of reviews” in the area (Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, 2002) have also been published in prestigious venues.     

Two efforts specifically linking a multicultural curriculum to teacher retention in diverse settings can be highlighted. On one hand, a large number of teacher education programs take the “one-course-approach” to teaching about diversity, with varying results (Brown, 2004; Marshall, 1999). On the other, Center X, a two-year teacher education program at the University of California- Los Angeles (UCLA) with a strong diversity component, has endeavored to examine the career pathways followed by over 1000 teachers who received specialized multicultural education through its teacher preparation program. Unlike the typical PT population nationwide, Center X boasts an extremely diverse pool of students--35 percent White, 32 percent Asian, 25 percent Latino, 6 percent Black (Quartz et al., 2005). After rigorous coursework and fieldwork during the first year, Center X students are employed as full-time teachers in some of the high poverty schools of Los Angeles during their second year in the program, while completing additional coursework. Preliminary studies suggest that Center X’s students remain in teaching after five years in the profession at a rate of 71 percent, in comparison to the 54 percent retention rate of a nationwide sample, and that a large percentage of their Latino and White graduates stay teaching in urban, diverse schools (Lyons, 2005). Center X-related research appears to confirm the link between the type of curriculum and assessment afforded to PT’s and their increased retention in multicultural, urban schools, although its highly diverse roster and graduate program’s length constitute an anomaly when compared to nationwide trends.

To assess multicultural learning in teacher education, researchers have relied on inquiry centered on teacher beliefs, concentrating on (a) the initial beliefs about diverse populations with which candidates arrive at a given program and the potential sources of such beliefs (Dee & Henkin, 2002); (b) the effectiveness of diversity-related courses in altering beliefs, particularly those that rely on deficit perspectives of diverse students, and the likelihood of belief system change (Brown, 2004; Larke, 1990; Marshall, 1999; Sleeter, 1995); (c) the effectiveness of diversity-related courses in altering practices as prospective teachers complete field placements in diverse settings (Abbate-Vaughn, 2005; Boyle-Baise, 1998; McAllister, 2002; Murrell, 2001); (d) factors that contribute to PT’s development of multicultural skills and dispositions (Garmon, 2004); and (e) other related factors that affect practice of multicultural education in schools, such as cooperating teachers’ own perspectives and habits of practice (Sudzina, 1997; Vavrus & Ozcan, 1995). 

Scholars have produced useful models to assess PTs’ awareness of and learning about diversity that include continua of racial awareness (Helms, 1990) and multicultural acceptance (Diaz-Rico, 1998), and a host of surveys to measure attitudes towards diversity. Although useful in yielding information regarding diversity learning previous to graduation, those efforts shed no light on what happens after degrees are conferred. The model I propose in the next section is a composite of practices at several teacher preparation programs that attempt to conceptualize multicultural curriculum, instruction, and assessment as a long-term, interdisciplinary endeavor beyond completion of a program.

Clinical supervisors can play a key role in the development of diversity awareness in PTs, as they are the ones who most typically monitor PTs’ practice in schools. When clinical supervision is assigned to adjunct faculty and/or doctoral students, efforts must be made to incorporate training that enables them to keep up-to-date with the instructional strategies and interventions that multicultural education faculty teach in courses. Culturally-relevant, research-based instructional strategies or interventions can then be practiced by PTs with individual pupils as well as in whole-class instruction formats during pre-practicum experiences and monitored by clinical supervisors. Those interventions work well for PTs completing pre-practicum assignments in low-income, culturally and linguistically diverse (LCLD) schools, since they enable PTs to “practice” and experience success (M. E. Brisk, Personal communication, September 19, 2004). Examples of research-based interventions are read-alouds (Ulanoff & Pucci, 1999) and the use of bicultural autobiographies to elicit pupils’ prior knowledge (Brisk & Harrington, 2000).  

The most intensive scrutiny of actual PTs’ practices is conducted during the student-teaching experience. For instance, PTs should be able to prepare detailed “maps” of the classrooms in which they learn to teach. They should be encouraged to gather as much information as possible from their pupils’ backgrounds, learning needs, and other data that support teachers in their planning of culturally relevant and sensitive lessons and activities. Appendix II provides a graphic example of the pupil data PTs might collect, with the help of their cooperating teachers, to inform curriculum, instruction, and assessment planning in classrooms with pupils’ various backgrounds and life experiences. 

Cooperating teachers, from whose crafts PTs gain a substantial portion of their ideas about practice, are significant role models for PTs (Whitney et al., 2002). The contextualization of issues related to diversity in the classroom has a significant impact on those preparing to become teachers, while their learning is buffered by the teachers with whom they spend most of their student-teaching time and the supervisors who assess such learning. The various roles that university supervisors and cooperating teachers are called on to perform include mediating PTs’ initial apprehension about working in unfamiliar diverse settings with support that enables them to overcome distrust and achieve a working degree of cultural assimilation (Rushton, 2001). 

The interdisciplinary approach to assessing how multiculturalism is learned and implemented in the K-12 classroom can bring a number of additional partners to the table. For instance, it is no longer the case that a clinical supervisor assessing the developing skills of a PT seeking physics licensure will spend all of her time observing, assessing, and providing feedback primarily on science instructional strategies. As clinical supervisors are prepared to monitor PTs’ development of relationships with diverse students, they can also propose changes to the available observation protocol to reflect in more detail what they observe in current clinical sites. This, in turn, may require that clinical supervisors be granted the same “status” within the teacher education program and afforded, for instance, the benefits of faculty development opportunities described earlier.

Similar monitoring and feedback procedures should take place through the first year of teaching (and beyond if possible) for those who elect to work in diverse schools. An assessment of the percentage of graduates who elect to work in such settings and stay should also be kept by the teacher education program’s administration, updated, and periodically shared with faculty to provide additional feedback on the ultimate result of their instructional and assessment efforts. Graduates’ retention rates in diverse schools could also be shared with the public as a form of advertising regarding the aims of the teacher education program.  

A system to monitor PTs’ practices, tabulating the frequency and quality of instances in which culturally-relevant instruction and engagement practices are witnessed, can be implemented in several different ways by programs, depending on the human resources available (doctoral students, part-time faculty, or faculty interested in the project as research). The themed interventions selected for and practiced during previous field experiences—and fully implemented during student-teaching—are some of the practices to which both PTs and monitoring team observers pay special attention. After the classroom observations, and at a time mutually agreed-upon, PTs and observers gather in an informal setting to discuss the events taking place during the observation. Faculty and research assistants contribute to PTs’ growth with feedback and act as “critical friends” (Stenhouse, 1975) to help PTs with further analysis and reflection.  

In his work on critical inquiry in the classroom, Fecho (2000) calls for a stronger presence of schools of education in helping bridge the support gaps between teacher preparation programs and their graduates’ first years of teaching. Fecho’s emphasis on the importance of critical inquiry for novice teachers committed to a social justice stance is echoed by others who also advocate for a smooth transition into the first years of teaching to occur with the ongoing use of action research (Levy, Shafer, & Dunlap, 2002). The work of teacher educators does not end on graduation day.  Critical inquiry is even more imperative in regards to the multicultural education of teachers.

The monitoring of student-teachers and first-year teachers in diverse schools for the sustained implementation of culturally relevant instruction is meant to inform both teacher education and staff development initiatives. A significant number of PTs might be offered full-time, paid positions in partner schools upon graduation. The existing long-term relationship with those schools facilitates fluid conversations with their administrations, as university and school faculty might collaboratively devise additional interventions from which all pupils benefit.           

Concerns about the frequent lack of connection between university learning and school practice have been addressed by the work of scholars and practitioners involved in school-university partnerships (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2000; Bullough Jr. et al., 1999; Teitel, 2001; Wiseman & Knight, 2003). Innovative partnership approaches to teacher induction and support in the first years of teaching appear a plausible solution to diminish beginning teachers’ flight from urban schools. As stated earlier, poor working conditions and lack of institutional support are often cited as strong factors affecting teacher retention (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003). Research has shown that teachers whose preparation took place in professional development schools (PDS) have similar rates of retention than those who completed student-teaching in non-PDS settings, but the PDS-prepared teachers appear more competent and committed to the job (Reynolds, Ross, & Rakaw, 2002). The PDS approach improves the preparation of teachers when its coherent, learning opportunities for PTs are streamlined and certain ideological consistency between the teacher preparation program and the partner school is attained. Attempts to extend strong diversity training components in teacher education to the relationships fostered with partner schools have yielded promising results, as documented in longitudinal studies of school-university partnerships (Florez, 2002; Murrell, 2001). Teachers’ consistent exposure to linguistically diverse students, coupled with school districts’ efforts to provide professional development opportunities, do tend to promote teachers’ use of sensitive instructional approaches with diverse students (Karabenick & Clemens Noda, 2004).