From Thought Police to Thoughtful Practice: The Evolution of Dispositions Assessment in a Teacher Education Program (Report‪)‬

We began from a position of helplessness. Like many schools of education, our faculty felt a great responsibility to safeguard schools and students by ensuring that only teacher candidates who were knowledgeable in their content and skilled in and disposed toward creating safe learning environments for all students could obtain teaching credentials. While the vast majority of teacher candidates in our credential programs seemed well suited to the profession, occasionally an individual would surface whose remarks and behaviors would raise strong concerns about their appropriateness for the profession. However, once in the program, dismissing such unsuitable candidates was nearly impossible, in part because the faculty's judgment of the candidates' suitability was typically based on the answer to one question: "Would I want this person teaching my child?" While this was certainly a critical question, it lacked the criteria and process needed to gather evidence for candidate evaluation or possible dismissal. Our first attempt to elaborate on this question led us to focus on the word person and the personality characteristics that make a person a good teacher. Drawing on the work of Haberman (1987) and others, the department's fledgling attempt to define and measure teacher qualities resulted in a teacher candidate disposition form that listed 36 positive and negative personality characteristics to be measured on a scale from never evident to very evident. The form was to be used to evaluate applicants to this fifth-year credential program in prerequisite course and fieldwork.