Apparently it is open season on teacher preparation programs
and professional development for teachers. Last week New York Times columnist
Joe Nocera had an op-ed piece called Teaching
Teachers. His column follows a Sunday
New York Times book excerpt on Elizabeth Green’s forthcoming, Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching
Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone). Nocera quotes heavily from Green’s
work. In Education Week, Walt Gardner Weighs in with Can
Teaching Be Taught?
This all comes in the wake of the National Council on
Teacher Quality (NCTQ) latest report on the quality of teacher education
programs. The NCTQ is a Bill Gates funded reform arm of the corporate education
reform movement. The apparent purpose of the NCTQ is to discredit traditional
teacher preparation programs through the most cursory and flawed of research
methods, so that profitable alternative graduate programs can make money. To gather information for their report, NCTQ
mostly views documents on education school’s websites and uses their own
metrics to decide on their quality. NCTQ has been universally discredited in
the media. See Linda Darling Hammond’s piece
from the Washington Post here.
Here is a good general rule: If anything you are reading
cites the NCTQ as a reference, don’t believe a word of what is said.
The gist of Nocera’s op-ed in the Times is that university
departments of education inadequately prepare teachers to teach and that once
on the job teachers are left to their own devices to figure it out or not. He
cites Elizabeth Green as saying, “The common belief, held even by many
people in the profession, that the best teachers are ‘natural-born’ is wrong.”
Really? This is the common belief? I suppose that my thirty
year career in professional development has been a mirage. I get a little tired
of people outside of education telling me what the common beliefs are.
Sure I think that many people believe that there are those with
a particular talent for teaching, but in all my years as a teacher and administrator,
I have for the most part encountered professionals of varying talents, who were
trying to improve their craft. Talent is never enough. The baseball player Tony
Gwynn was the finest hitter of is generation. He had considerable athletic
talent, but more importantly he worked hard every day to get better at hitting.
So, how do we best improve the preparedness of new teachers
coming into the field and how do we make sure that improvement in teaching
continues throughout a teaching career? I believe that the context of the
learning is key. Undergraduate education can only do so much. Learning to be a
teacher is an on-going effort that must be pursued over time in the context of
the actual classroom.
I have taught undergraduate education majors and also
working teachers enrolled in Masters Degree programs. The graduate students
were far superior students mostly because they saw the direct application of
what they were learning to their classroom. In a word, they had “context” for
what they were learning. Not only that, they also had a laboratory (their own
classroom) in which to try out ideas. They came to class with questions in
their head about how to improve their instruction. These graduate classes were
like seminars in teaching improvement.
Through no fault of their own, undergraduates do not have
this context. That is why it is important to get pre-service teachers into the
classroom as participant observers as soon as possible. Many schools of education
are already doing this, of course. Education majors need to be in the classroom
observing and assisting the certified classroom teacher starting in the
sophomore year. College professors need to reinforce this in-context learning
by attending these visitations themselves and discussing what happens there in
a seminar structure.
Of course, these regular visitations should end in the
senior year with a minimum 18 week student teaching experience under the
guidance of an informed college supervisor and a master classroom teacher. This
experience is critical.
No matter how good the undergraduate program is, however, it
can never substitute for the moment the neophyte teacher steps in front of
her/his own class. In this context, the new teacher is most open to learning
and the opportunity for learning is fully contextualized. At this point it is
critical that the neophyte have a skilled mentor who is readily available for
assistance. Most current mentoring programs in schools fall short because
resources of time and money are not available to provide a real mentoring experience.
Ongoing professional development also has a large role to
play. As I mentioned above, new teachers can greatly benefit from continuing
their education on a graduate level because that learning is now
contextualized. School districts can help their teachers stay current and
refine their professional abilities through in house professional development.
Many of my colleagues moan when they hear of another professional development
program coming their way, but done right, these programs are critical.
So how do we do professional development right? Once again a
part of the answer is context. Professional development should happen in the
teacher’s classroom to be effective. A good model would look like this.
1. Formal
presentation given by an experienced and knowledgeable teacher/consultant to a
group of teachers on some important aspect of teaching and learning
2. Planning
time for the teachers to meet as a group and develop a plan for integrating
this new strategy into the classroom
3. Observation
by the teacher/consultant of the application of the strategy in the classroom
4. Face
to face feedback conference from the teacher/consultant to the teacher on how
the lesson went with suggestions for refinement of the strategy.
5. A
follow-up observation and conference by the teacher/consultant to see the
refined lesson
6. Further
meeting time for the group of teachers to discuss implementation of the strategy
and continue refinement of practice.
Obviously the models for mentoring and professional
development laid out here require resources of time and money. If there is one
major mistake we have made in public education it is that we have tried to do
it on the cheap. If we want to have the finest possible teachers with the
finest possible training, then simple answers and shortcuts won’t suffice. I
would call programs of tying teacher evaluation to test scores, grading colleges
of education, and hiring Teach for America recruits simple answers and
shortcuts.
Back in my teacher’s union president days, I had a board
negotiating team member tell me that the taxpayers he represented didn’t want
to pay teachers for “free time.” He thought that two preparation periods per
week was plenty. In his words, “We are paying you for your time in front of students;
you can plan on your own dime.” Viewing American public education over the past
45 years, I would have to say that his is the prevailing sentiment still.
When will the so-called reformers realize that to get the
best teaching, we must invest the necessary time and money?
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