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November 08, 2009, 10:55 AM ET
Can Colleges Teach Teachers?
I can’t stop thinking about teacher training. I recently posted on Arne Duncan’s blistering critique of schools of education, admitting that university-based teacher training suffers from long-standing deficiencies -- one of which is our inability to recruit the best undergraduates into schools of education. Last Monday on the New York Times op-ed page, Susan Engel, the director of the teaching program at Williams College argued that since the universities are uninterested (or incompetent) to attract their best student into education careers, it is time “to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray.” Ms. Engel wants college-based teacher training programs to be highly selective, “free of charge,” and promising a “stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school.” She wants to abandon traditional pedagogy-based teacher-training curricula in favor of subject-matter mastery, along with intensive mentoring by master teachers. “Show me a school where teachers are smart, well-educated, skilled, and happy to be there, and I’ll show you a group of children who are getting a good education.” If the teaching program at Williams is doing all these things, I am sure that it is producing a wonderful crop of young teachers.
Apart from the financial incentives, which are not realistic on a national basis, most of what Ms. Engel proposes is not new. We have tried many of her suggested approaches, though perhaps not in combination. I am quite keen on colleges doing more to attract and train teachers -- here at Princeton I am proud to play a small part in a superb Teacher Prep program that sends 20 or so of our graduates into public school teaching each year. But even if all of the liberal-arts colleges followed the Williams/Princeton lead, I doubt that we could produce enough new teachers to meet the nation’s needs.
And the problems are not all with the teachers. One of my favorites among last year’s Princeton’s graduates (not a Teacher Prep student), is currently volunteering as an assistant 8th-grade teacher on the West Coast. He recently sent me this message:
“My experience working a school has led me to think in a different way about education policy. For example, I have always believed that students in poor public schools suffer from a lack of resources, and that equalizing funding between poor and rich schools would make a huge difference. However, after being in a school for a month, I am not sure how much difference that would make. The students I work with have books, but don't bring them; the teachers have fancy, digital video projectors, but the students don't look at the board; and the school provides plenty of pencils, but students often don't realize that they need to take notes. On the other hand, despite mixed scientific research on the effects of class size, it is painfully obvious to me that large classes (25+ students) impede student learning. And I am realizing how incredibly difficult it is -- if even possible -- to measure teacher quality ... but I am pretty confident that test scores alone can't tell the whole story.”
He concludes, by the way, that his difficult teaching assignment ”is definitely providing me an unbeatable introduction to the state of inner-city public education, and giving me plenty of inspiration to tackle these problems, both this year and for the rest of my career.”
It is encouraging to think that this young man is still committed to as career in teaching -- he is the sort of student Ms. Engel has in mind, sans the training she advocates. He needs that training, and he knows it, but where/when will he get it? Equally important, can we create the conditions under which his students will want to learn. That is what “the Race to the Top” (arghh!) ought to be about.
Comments
1. barbzirk - November 09, 2009 at 09:23 am
Many years ago, Hunter College practiced what is once again becoming vogue....major in a subject, minor in another one, and, if you want to become a teacher, take the necessary education courses as electives - and get reduced tuition for doing so! What a concept!
2. dqualters - November 09, 2009 at 10:33 am
Another idea kicking around for some time is to make Teaching a Profession. By that, have it use the model of medicine and law. Students finish an undergraduate degree and then the best/brightest apply for intensive graduate work in education theory, practice, and policy followed by a year of "internship" and a year of "residency". Of course, education doesn't have the resources or make the money that law and medicine does. But as long as we are trying to fit liberal and intense professional education into 4 years we're going to come up short.
3. velvis - November 09, 2009 at 11:30 am
If we do in fact change our current system why would we want to teach our teachers the same things that are mostly ineffective now? Right now all that is available is theory and never a lesson in how to apply it. Learning about Vygotsky is not the same as learning how to set up scaffolding for 30 different kids at different educational levels.
Why not real lessons on how to improvise when lessons and attention spans start going down hill?
Or a course that gives you a greater sense of differnt types of kids in various environments instead of vague ed psych/development- teaching in Vegas, is not teaching in Philly, is not teaching in suburban VA, is not teaching in rural LA.
How about courses in classroom management or how to conduct an IEP meeting or parent conference or deal with principals who are of a different school of thought or helicopter parents?
Most teachers know their content, and most get the theory but it's not the content that makes them cry and eventaully quit when kids won't listen or when the helicopters swoop in, or when they're grading until the wee hours, or when principals won't back them up, or when they're called failures for doing everything they can to reach those who have no interest in being there.
4. rlpeterson - November 09, 2009 at 11:31 am
I would agree with dqualters.
I completed an undergraduate degree in my academic field and pursued teacher licensure at the graduate level. My master's program involved exactly the curriculum dqaulters mentions: a mix of theory, practice, and policy followed by a semester of field observation and a semester of student teaching. Personally, I felt much better prepared when I entered the classroom than I would have been as an undergraduate. I was a little more mature, much more confident, and, because of the graduate degree, better paid.
5. blarkin - November 09, 2009 at 06:34 pm
The continued focus on traditionally university-trained versus alternatively-certified teachers and what they are or are not teaching in any program will not attract the best students into teaching. The standing of the classroom teachers within the hierarchical community of education says teachers are at the bottom of the pecking order and will remain so for their entire career unless they go into school/district administration or university research. For the brightest students this is not an encouraging prospect.
Until classroom teachers are regarded as full professional partners with school administration and university researchers rather than "trained" underlings, the brightest students will go elsewhere. Having recently made a shift from the classroom after 20 years of teaching into administration, I have been appalled at the disregard school/district administration offcials extend to teachers in general. The adminstrative conferences I have attended have focused on how to control and evaluate teachers. They speak of the classroom teachers as mindless laborers who need constant oversight to avoid straying from the researched, tested, and mandated curriculum which the administration bought and is sure will work for every child.
Very little discussion ever takes place on how to bring teachers into administrative decision-making or hiring; some lipservice has been paid to the importance of teacher-educators and mentorship. I have never heard a discussion on making teachers' salaries higher than administrators' because what teachers do in the classroom might, (this is a really crazy thought) just might be more important than what an administrator does. How about letting teachers hire the principal or the superintendent?
Our favorite teachers have always been those who challenged us to think for ourselves, pushed us to delve into subjects for a greater understanding, and made us work harder than we ever thought possible. They were the ones even the principal didn't cross. These are the teachers our brightest students would love to become. U.S. education has a much larger problem than what is being taught for certification.
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