John,
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to jump on a panel at Bank Street College with a few education colleagues (including representatives from Hechinger Report and Gotham Schools) about education and the media. Save for a few questions about my blog (see: teacher voice), the general topics at the panel centered around perceptions of teachers in the media. Teachers on the panel were asked how they felt about the constant teacher-bashing by the Rush Limbaughs and Fox News pundits while education reporters and researchers discussed how difficult topics like value-added measures and teacher working conditions were to fully write for the American public.
One part of the discussion that struck me was teacher preparation. While I have a hard time recalling every bit of the conversation, I remember I mentioned three things (which you’ll probably recognize)
- We ought to have differentiated pathways into the profession, so long as …
- We find ways to ensure that teachers are adequately prepared for the system they’re encountering
- There’s a certain privilege in attending places like Bank Street in the kind of education those students receive that I didn’t necessarily get
I might have gotten under some people’s skin with the last statement, but there’s an element of truth to it. In no way am I suggesting that we only need to come from so-called elite colleges. Actually, I’m suggesting we need to discuss what we consider “elite.” There’s a functional difference between a college with an awesome name but whose students don’t see a correlation between what they learned in the ivory tower and their experience in the classroom. While most teachers surveyed here believe that their teacher preparation program was satisfactory, they tended to trust in-school dimensions of their preparation much more than anything the college can provide. That probably has to do with the fact that many colleges concentrate too much on theory instead of practice.
Thus, the place doesn’t have to be elite in name, but functionality.
I know plenty of folks who graduated from a smaller school, but whose professors gave them the rigorous, thorough foundations to at least get the technical sides of the profession right before they came in the classroom. Things like lesson plans, unit plans, rubrics, assessments, creating independent thinkers, differentiation, and questioning don’t come naturally to people and have to be taught. Some of this stuff requires tons of professional development from inside and outside sources. Walking into the classroom and surviving (!) the first year is hard enough without knowing how to create a critical question from the top of the lesson, but if we’re given the tools and techniques to withstand the culture shock of standing in front of a live audience for 10 months out of the year, then that goes a long way in creating a stronger teaching core.
In a way, educators who believe in this Teaching 2030 vision are, in fact, seeking a secret technocracy, where the merits of our most expert individuals hold more merit than the whims of an appointed few. In this case, the experts happen to be educators, educational researchers, and those who seek to enhance this valuable profession for our students. We can’t rely on the unreliable (i.e. standardized tests) to tell us whether teachers actually matter. We have lots of evidence for things that do matter, though, and one of those is whether people can push out of their comfort zones and into the mode of a professional teacher.
New teachers entering in the profession deserve the best foundation possible, and secretly, we’re going to need a few more technocrats like us.
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Wow, great summary of the issues! The theory vs. practice resonates with me. We still do a bit of that theory focused stuff in staff development and do not allow enough time for getting knee deep in a new idea or technique to see how it works in our classes. I just gave a local school 8 boxes (yes…large bankers boxes) of 3 ring binders. These binders used to be filled with the flavor of the month staff development (you can measure a tree’s age by the rings and a teacher’s by the number of new iniative materials sitting on their shelves or on their hard drive). I recycled the paper and gave the binders away…it felt right. It is not that I did not learn anything in college or in staff development but that it was all so scattershot. I never got the sense that someone had a good road map of what skills I should have when I entered the profession..or when I completed the iniative training. What a joy it would be to have a group of master educators (who still teach) guiding this process. Yes some theory and yes some practice would show up but it would all be focused on making us professionals. What was needed by each teacher for the past century was a self installed built in-shock proof crap detector. Now, we need to do this different and the needs of the master educators of tomorrow is a culture of professionalism where we do not settle for the easy fix and we will not tolerate any of our colleagues getting less support than they need to succeed. I say bring on the technocrats.
Shannon