Actions the state took
Make student teaching financially feasible
In 2024, Utah passed HB 221, offering $6,000 stipends for student teachers. A rare example of legislation with unanimous support, the bill offers a one-time fund of $8.4 million dollars as a three-year pilot test, but supporters hope to make the funding permanent.
The stipend does come with some qualifications. Teacher candidates must be enrolled in a Utah institution that leads to licensure, so candidates attending teacher prep in neighboring states and student teach in Utah are not eligible. Candidates cannot already be receiving other state aid, such as a department of workforce or grow your own scholarships. And candidates cannot be employees of the district where they are completing student teaching (e.g., they cannot already be working as a paraprofessional in the district). The next step will be for the state’s school board to decide how to allocate funding and make decisions about, for example, whether to set aside more money for student teachers going to hard-to-staff regions.
Setting clear guidelines for clinical practice
The state recently adopted new Teacher Preparation Program rules, which require that candidates have the opportunity to demonstrate a range of knowledge and skills in their clinical experiences, including but not limited to:
- implementing the planning and design, delivery, facilitation, assessment, evaluation, and reflection of a unit of instruction
- revising instructional plans for future implementation or reteaching concepts
- implementing accommodations, modifications, services, and supports as outlined in a student’s IEP or 504 plan
- establishing and maintaining classroom procedures and routines that include positive behavior interventions and supports
These rules also state that clinical experiences must be significant in number, depth, breadth, and duration; increasingly more complex, and include working with all types of students.
The rules also specify that cooperating teachers must be professionally licensed, have at least three years of experience, and, most importantly, have an annual evaluation rating of proficient or higher.
Outcomes
While the legislation is too new to measure outcomes, the state is pursuing additional research on the effectiveness of its clinical experiences. Researchers from the CEEDAR center of the University of Florida are looking into cooperating teachers and clinical practice supervision. The state is also working on building out its data system, the Utah Schools Information Management System, which will eventually be able to track data on student teaching experiences. Furthermore, the bill providing paid student teaching stipends comes with a reporting requirement, so the state will have to track some data for those recipients to determine whether to continue the program in the future.
Advice
Involve all your stakeholders: Including stakeholders from the beginning leads to stronger policies and better implementation.
Dr. Hite, executive coordinator of educator licensing, shared that, after being invited to engage in the process of enacting legislation, stakeholders “are willing to do what we needed them to do, but [this process] also built a massive bridge [between prep and districts], infusing the relationship with more trust.”