Chapter 1: The Development of the Uteach Model

UTeach originated at The University of Texas at Austin in 1997. It arose from a combination of specific circumstances, ideas, and people.

Texas Senate Bill 994 of 1987 (Texas, 1987) created some of the context. Authors of this bill were motivated by warnings about the mediocrity of education presented by A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), by a report highly critical of teacher education from the Southern Regional Education Board (Simms & Miller, 1988) and also took guidance, at least in part, from a report of the Holmes Group, which had concluded that “the undergraduate education major must be abolished in our universities” (Lanier, 1986, p. 23).