Teacher education programs should be selective, rigorous….and free, argues Susan Engel. In a New York Times op-ed the psychologist and director of the teaching program at Williams College writes that admission to teacher ed programs should include “a stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school.”
Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. Too often, teaching students spend their time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans. These skills, while useful, are not what will transform a promising student into a good teacher. First, future teachers should continue studying the subject they hope to teach, with outstanding professors. It makes no sense at all to stop studying the thing you want to teach at the very moment you begin to learn how.
Hear, hear. I’m all for organizing teacher training around subject matter, rather than what Leon Botstein once termed “the pseudoscience of pedagogy.” But Engel’s not done yet.
Meanwhile, students should learn their craft the way a surgeon learns to operate: by intense supervision in a real setting with expert mentors. Student-teachers are usually observed only twice during a semester and then given a written evaluation. But young teachers, like young doctors, should work side by side with skilled mentors, getting plenty of feedback, having plenty of opportunities to observe and taking on greater and greater responsibility as they improve.
The key word is that paragraph is “craft.” It’s common to hear teaching described as an art, a science, or a profession, but seldom as a craft, which has always struck me as exactly the right word. Like becoming a writer, you become successful when you find your voice. That’s craftwork. Toward that end, Engel also suggests that teacher ed steal a page from family therapy programs, whose students, she observes, “spend a great deal of time watching videotapes of themselves in action, reflecting on their sessions and discussing the most difficult moments with senior therapists to explore other ways they might have responded.”
Craft, indeed–with teachers as ‘forgers’.
Does anyone out there think we might set ourselves at least closer to the right track if educators simply abandoned the idea of being respected as professionals-qua-professionals (and hitching their profession to all the boondoggly, pseudo-scientific things they do to legitimize themselves as such)?
Embracing the idea of “forging the next generations of Americans” (to borrow from EDH) doesn’t exactly sound shameful, after all. Proudly establishing this as a starting point–as a “this is the single overarching mission of all American educators”–might actually put the right frame in place for a profession that is, at this point, not quite sure what it’s supposed to be professional at.
Comment by Eric Kalenze — November 2, 2009 @ 12:57 pm
It seems to me she sell current student teaching a little short. Most of the student-teacher/mentor-teacher pairings I’ve watched have been pretty much full-time partnerships. Maybe officially the student teacher is only observed twice, but I’d be pretty sure that in good pairings the mentoring was constant.
Comment by Rachel — November 2, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
But I should add, I agree that “craft” is exactly the right term, in that it captures the amount you have to learn, and the capacity for continual improvement, and the blend of skill and instinct.
Comment by Anonymous — November 2, 2009 @ 2:31 pm
I agree with using the word “craft” but also agree with what Eric states above, that “forging the next generations of Americans” is a starting point.
One thought that I’ve been kicking around, and it ties into the “craft” concept, is creating a legitimate “apprenticeship” model for new teachers. Just as an apprentice in the building trades (or other trades) learns over a period of time, both in the classroom and on the job, teachers should be given the opportunity to do the same, with steadily increasing responsibilities AND salary. When they complete their training, they are at the “journeyman” level, with 2-4 years of experience. This would be compared to my training, consisting of classwork and then being thrown into “student teaching” for a semester, with no pay or benefits during that time. Hardly the best method of preparing “professionals”.
While there are some versions of this model in practice, i.e. “internships”, etc., I think some thought should be given to adopting what the Apprenticeship community calls a “time honored method of training”.
Other professions use this model, they just call it by a different name, such as “intern” for medical doctors. Why not education?
Comment by CaliTeacher — November 2, 2009 @ 2:49 pm
Why is it that teachers can’t acquire the knowledge and skills they need for practice in 4 years of college? Nurses take a heavy courseload of sciences, social sciences etc., plus the clinical courses, along with supervised clinical practice and they graduate ready to take the content-based licensure exam and start working. Of course, nursing students typically spent far more time in class and more time studying outside class than did ed majors, and that wasn’t counting the clinical practice rotations. It’s not likely to have been an accident that most of my colleagues who dropped/flunked out of nursing ended up in the ed school. Their social life usually expanded, as well.
The usual “orientation” (or whatever term) for new nursing graduates is measured in weeks or (few) months and there are significant consequences (loss of job and/or licence) for malpractice. Also, they are not paid for a master’s degree unless they are in a job which requires it, such as advanced practice (intensive care, pediatric etc), which typically has a content-based exam in addition to the MS. I can’t accept the idea that we can’t prepare k-12 teachers in 4 years and I don’t think (most) regular teachers should be paid for a master’s. Reading/math/spec ed etc. could be different, and I don’t have a problem with content-area masters’ (arts/sciences, not ed school) at the high school level and perhaps at MS, also.
Comment by momof4 — November 2, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
No one has yet described how, exactly, public school districts (in particular) are going to transform their bureaucracies and practices to enable college and university teacher-training candidates to spend all this quality internship time with master teachers in P-K12 classrooms. How will teachers be rewarded for doing so? What about the potential impacts on P-K12 students (for good or for bad)? What are some possible unintended consequences? Will schools — particularly those “on the bubble” that are not making AYP be willing to turn over more classroom time to teachers in training?
You really can’t lay all of the problems and limitations of teacher preparation on higher education alone.
Comment by M C Smith — November 2, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
After 13 years of teaching, I have learned a lot about the craft. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to practice it properly. What I’ve learned is that top-notch lesson planning takes LOTS of time –far more than the 40 minutes a day I’m allotted. So I’m faced with a choice: a. skip doing my laundry and conducting a social life so that I can practice my craft properly; or b. live a balanced life and resign myself to lessons that fall significantly short of what I know I can do. My point is, yes, it’s a good idea to show beginning teachers the craft, but unless we create the conditions in which that craft can thrive, we’re not going to make much progress. Reforming ed schools is a good first step; but increasing prep time to a level on par with other advanced nations is a necessary second step.
Comment by Ben F — November 3, 2009 @ 12:43 am
I e-mentor novice teachers, in five different states and in very different school contexts. In analyzing their questions, concerns and responses over several years, the three most frequent difficulties are: #1) time management, especially in the first two years (reflecting Ben’s comment above); #2) effective classroom management strategies; and #3) school climates that don’t support them as new teachers (including their assigned mentors, stalker principals, suspicious parents, burned-out colleagues and–mostly–the expectation that they can work miracles when they can barely find the copy machine).
I like the word “craft” but think it could fairly be applied to any number of occupations–say, nursing, which is partly technical but also involves practice knowledge that can only be gained by first-hand experience. And just because pedagogy is both poorly understood and often poorly taught doesn’t mean it’s not a real thing–and the same goes for pedagogical content knowledge (knowing how to teach a subject being different from understanding it yourself). The proof of this is evident to anyone who’s ever sat in Algebra II and watched the teacher balance equations on the board without having a clue what any of that rapid calculation means.
The effective classroom management strategies my newbie teachers crave are also “pedagogy”–whether they realize it or not. They have to have the kids’ attention and order before they can dump content in their heads, and all the time-outs and behavior contracts and “high expectations” in the world mean absolutely zero until the students are paying attention and willing to (I hate this word) engage in listening/discussing/thinking/writing and so on.
Getting kids to that point is also…pedagogy. Personal relationships are pedagogy. And beyond that, there are truckloads of instructional techniques, assessment strategies (and the skill of analyzing what the assessment tells you), facile use of technologies, multiple representations of concepts (to meet learner needs), synthesis of intra- and inter-disciplinary knowledge, and on and on. All pedagogy.
I think the biggest problem with Engel’s plan is the lack of expert mentors willing to take intern after intern–because having a student teacher is much more work for the veteran, if done right. And in urban settings, the veteran teacher often has 4 or 5 years’ experience herself.
Comment by Nancy Flanagan — November 3, 2009 @ 9:08 am
Nancy,
I disagree that engagement comes before classroom order. Students can and should be orderly regardless of whether the lesson is boring or not. A boring lesson is not justification for kids to rebel and be rude, though many education leaders and students insinuate to us that it is. And student teachers should know this. I know because I attain order in my classroom everyday, while many of my earnest colleague, infused with more conventional anti-discipline views, get run over by the kids day after day. Sadly, threats of punishment are needed and useful tools for repressing some of our kids’ anti-social and sadistic impulses. The thought that “engaging lessons” can obviate discipline issues is happy talk that pleases every adult who does not have to face a classroom of kids everyday, but it’s a false doctrine. We do our young teachers and our schools a disservice by denying this timeless truth that was clearly understood by Hobbes and Machiavelli and many before them.
And I agree with Engel and Botstein that content-mastery is the true soul of teaching. Fancy methodologies are peripheral.
Comment by Ben F — November 3, 2009 @ 10:05 am
NF: “They have to have the kids’ attention and order before they can dump content in their heads”
Ben: “I disagree that engagement comes before order…”
Nancy: Umm, I said exactly the opposite, Ben.
I was making a case for the fact that kids have to be paying attention in order to learn. Not merely sitting quietly–but paying attention. There are hundreds of thousands of dead classrooms where things look placid but there isn’t much learning going on.
Ben: “threats of punishment are needed and useful tools for repressing some of our kids’ anti-social and sadistic impulses…this timeless truth was understood by Machiavelli…”
Nancy: Did you put that on your resume?
Nobody’s arguing that a well-ordered classroom (which means respectful and–sometimes–quiet behavior) is not essential for learning. But the possibility of enjoyable, enthusiastic learning, kids being really, you know, interested in their lessons is not “happy talk.”
While I agree that kids “should” be orderly in that perfect world where children appreciate the great gift of education, let’s get real. There are multiple ways for teachers to establish order: fear, coercion, bribery (aka “incentives”), caring relationships, trust, consistent adult behaviors, mutually understood values, cool lessons, and so on. Take your pick.
Some of the best teachers I know run very traditional, tight-ship classrooms. Some of them even use fancy methodologies successfully. Go figure.
Comment by Nancy Flanagan — November 3, 2009 @ 12:49 pm
I am tired of non-teachers glibly suggesting that traditional discipline is but one of a panoply of equally-effective strategies for maintaining classroom order, and a barbaric and distasteful one at that. Our new clueless principal abolished all detention at our middle school (“I oppose detention with every fiber of my being” He has a doctorate in ed from Berkeley) and breezily suggested that “positive incentives” would suffice to curb wayward behavior. Our superintendent shares his high-minded utopian vision. As I predicted, bit by bit, the campus has unravelled. Word got round that you cannot get detention even if you try. One after another teachers have gone to him for help with uncontrollable classrooms. His medicine? The marble jar. Place a marbles in the jar for good behaviors; take them out for bad ones. When it fills, give some reward. Consensus is that the marble jar, and similar schemes, works for two days. That’s it. The few stern teachers with a hard-boiled and unrosy view of human nature have orderly classrooms; the majority, the ones who recoil at tough measures, who wish to be unstintingly nurturing, positive and engaging, are getting steamrolled. Counselors, committees, a cracker-jack phys ed teacher work long hours to promote a positive climate on campus, organize lavish and ornate “renaissance rallies” to reward kids who get decent grades, organize parties and dances, etc. etc. Nevertheless vile behaviors proliferate. Today at lunch I heard a very popular art teacher, a recent county teacher of the year, state about one class, “They’re not just difficult; they’re MEAN. And as the bumper sticker goes, “Mean people suck.”
Most of our conversation about children and discipline is dishonest. Kids can be FANTASTIC and lovable, and we strive to elicit more of that from them. But let’s not fool ourselves. They’re human beings like the rest of us, but even less bridled. Hence what Machiavelli and Hobbes say about humans applies to them too; if anything, even more so. Running a classroom of middle schoolers is just as tough as running a Renaissance city-state. Just as the happy talk Christian political theory Machiavelli set out to debunk did a disservice to the princes of his day, so the conventional anti-discipline doctrines of ed schools do a disservice to young teachers.
Comment by Ben F — November 3, 2009 @ 10:19 pm
Ben: Well said. As a former middle and high school teacher, I’m constantly amazed by the lack of attention paid by ed-reformers and others to discipline. One of the most difficult schools I taught in had a “no school detention” policy, much like the one you describe above. While individual teachers were allowed to assign detention, each individual teacher had to proctor his or her own detention (and no detention was allowed without contacting the parents, who were often not reachable — it was a poor, mostly Hispanic neighborhood school where many families moved often and did not always have phones – or good command of English).
As a practical matter, this meant that if a teacher wanted to assign one student to detention, the teacher would have to ask the bilingual guidance counselor to call home until they made contact with a parent, and then the teacher would have to stay after school for the entire detention period, and also fill out the necessary paperwork. This meant that the teacher was losing about twice as much time as the student… for student misbehavior! Needless to say, this school was not well-run, and most teachers applied for transfers as soon as they were eligible (the most senior teacher, I believe, had been there only 8 years).
Comment by Attorney DC — November 4, 2009 @ 2:18 pm
Bertrand Russell shares my unromantic view of human nature:
“There is in untrained human nature a very considerable element of cruelty which shows itself in many ways, great and small. Boys at school tend to be unkind to a new boy, or to one whose clothes are not quite conventional. Many women (and not a few men) inflict as much pain as they can by means of malicious gossip. The Spaniards enjoy bull-fights; the British enjoy hunting and shooting. The same cruel impulses take more serious form in the hunting of Jews in Germany and kulaks in Russia. All imperialism affords scope for them, and in war they become sanctified as the highest form of public duty.”
from his essay, “‘Useless’ Knowledge”
Sadly, twelve year olds are not innocents, and so ethical grown-ups must check and reprove their darker impulses.
Comment by Ben F — November 4, 2009 @ 10:20 pm
If we’re going to talk about discipline (and I think we should talk a lot about discipline), there is an interesting post over at http://www.edpolicythoughts.com/ about whether every classroom should have a bouncer. I added my two cents worth.
Comment by Brian Rude — November 8, 2009 @ 8:44 am