The recent announcement of a new survey of teacher-education programs by the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report has sparked a firestorm of debate. Critics of current approaches to preparing teachers argue that exposing weak programs is essential for improving the quality of teaching, while schools of education criticize the methods and criteria used to judge programs’ offerings.
The good news is that there is very important common ground underlying the debate: Teaching matters. Skillful teaching makes the difference between students’ learning what they need to succeed or not, and it matters for all students, rich or poor, regardless of color. The disappointing news is that we are not using this common ground to get lots of skillful teaching in classrooms. Instead we are battling over who should train teachers and where and for how long. We are arguing about how to evaluate programs.
Spending energy arguing about who should prepare teachers, or about how to evaluate programs, is a distraction from what we need to be doing. What do we gain from a debate about the methods for assessing a system that is, overwhelmingly, not preparing millions of people to whom we entrust our children? What do we gain from another education war? The real problems we have right now are that we do not have a reliable system to prepare beginning teachers or to determine their readiness for responsible independent practice, and that we lack the professional infrastructure to develop teachers’ skills once they start teaching.
The attention on teacher quality and the questioning of teacher education makes this a moment of opportunity. Let’s radically improve the professional training of teachers, using what we know about the practice of teaching and its substantial demands. How can we do this?
First, let’s agree that teaching is about more than just being smart and knowing a subject, that it requires a set of skills that prospective teachers must be taught and should demonstrate before they take over a classroom. We don’t allow other professionals—pilots, doctors, or lawyers, for example—to work independently before they are trained and are able to demonstrate that they can do their jobs safely.
Second, let’s identify the set of skills that are fundamental to safe and responsible teaching. These should not be pedagogical generalities, such as “knowing learners” or “classroom management,” but specific, crucial skills, like being able to explain fractions in several different ways, or to gain and maintain the attention of a class, or to accurately and fluently diagnose specific student confusions. These should be the compact list of teaching practices that put children at risk when teachers cannot do them well enough. The work on this is well under way; the University of Michigan will have a draft of a score of such high-leverage practices available within a few months.
Third, let’s build a new set of tests of prospective teachers based on these skills. Let’s agree that they are not allowed to have responsibility for a classroom until they demonstrate that they can perform at a standard of skillful initial practice. Here at Michigan we have also begun work on such assessments.
Then we must devote immediate collective attention to work toward supplying that training. We—like other professions and occupations—need systems for training people to do their jobs skillfully, credible methods of determining whether someone ought to be allowed to practice independently, and built-in supports for continuous improvement and practice assessment. It is those systems and approaches we should evaluate, rather than spend time evaluating—and arguing about how to evaluate—a system that we already know does not work.
Let’s stop asking the wrong questions. This is a time for action, not words; specific steps, not arrows and slings. In the next five years, we will need more than 1.5 million new teachers. Let’s use what we know to prepare them for responsible practice with real students, and let’s evaluate—and improve as we go—a much better, practice-focused system of professional training.