July 2016

Every seven years all educator preparation programs (EPPs) in Ohio must undergo an external peer review to determine their ongoing accreditation by the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). CAEP's mission is to advance excellent educator preparation through evidence-based accreditation that assures quality and supports continuous improvement to strengthen P-12 student learning. Miami University's EPPs underwent an accreditation visit on March 6-8, 2016 that began with an extensive self-study from 2014-2016.

As part of the self-study process each program must submit a performance report to the respective Specialized Professional Association (SPA). Each SPA has a unique set of standards which have been developed by experts to specify the competencies required by educators in their discipline. The programs implement and collect data from 6-8 key assessments to verify the competence of their candidates and the effectiveness of the program to meet the SPA standards. The 6-8 key assessments include both standardized tests and faculty-developed measures including the Ohio Assessments for Educators (OAE), several faculty-designed instruments knowledge and the Education Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). Data from the key assessments are submitted to the SPAs and include documentation of the candidates' knowledge, skills, and dispositions.

On occasion, the SPAs select outstanding key assessments developed by university faculty members to be highlighted on their website as exemplars. Our own Martha Castaneda, Program Director of our teacher preparation program in World Languages, developed the Chronicle of Professional Involvement which was selected as exemplary by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). The Chronicle of Professional Involvement (CPI) requires teacher candidates to document and reflect on their involvement in professional development, advocacy, and ethics. This assessment is now cited on ACTFL's website.

Following the submission of SPA reports and national recognition by the SPAs of all of our program, last July the EPP completed a comprehensive self-study (including analysis of candidate performance, program effectiveness, and our quality assurance system) and submitted it to CAEP. An off-site team reviewed the evidence and responded with formative feedback to which we rejoined with additional data. The visiting CAEP team arrived on March 6th to verify the evidence submitted in the self-study reports. For two days they interviewed our candidates, faculty, university supervisors, graduates, partners, program directors, chairs and others. The exit interview with the chair of the onsite review team included comments such as these:

• Miami's EPPs
  • demonstrated an impressive use of technology;
  • have well developed partnerships with evidence that they are mutually beneficial;
  • are characterized by a personal touch with their candidates and P-12 partners;
  • are engaged in initiatives to increase the diversity of their faculty and candidate pools and their cultural responsiveness;
  • demonstrated that their completers perform well in the field and possess strong content knowledge, pedagogical skills and dispositions;
  • and have a strong data assurance system and use their data to strengthen their candidate performance and program effectiveness.
• The strength of Miami's Transformation Initiative (TI) is evidenced by
  • improved clinical practices and stronger partnerships;
  • research-informed practices; and external evaluation.

Although we received excellent feedback at the exit interview, we will not have a final accreditation decision until next year. The on-site review team will report their findings to the CAEP Accreditation Council who will complete a thorough review and make accreditation recommendation to the CAEP Accreditation Commission. The Commission will make the final accreditation decision.