Archive for the 'Teacher Training' Category

What Teacher Ed Should Look Like

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 2, 2009 in Higher Education, Teacher Training and Teaching. 13 Comments

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.”

One For the Price of Two

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 29, 2009 in Teacher Training and Teaching. 2 Comments

At Teacher Beat, Stephen Sawchuck highlights an intriguing study that shows Los Angeles students taught by Teach For America teachers “outperformed peers who were taught by other teachers—including veterans with many more years of experience.”  The study is another feather in TFA’s cap, but there is one aspect of the study that may unwittingly reinforce anti-TFA criticism.   Note how the methodology is described:

The study included 119 second-year or alumni Teach For America teachers who taught either reading or math in grades 2-12 during both 2005 and 2006 in 27 different LAUSD schools. As a control, the study also evaluated the impact of 1,190 non-Teach For America teachers who taught the same grade levels and subjects in the same schools as the Teach For America teachers.

I’m not surprised that high-achieving, driven and energetic TFA corps members are pretty decent teachers in Year Two, and alumni even moreso.  When you recruit top-shelf candidates, you expect them to move down the learning curve in short order.  But what about Year One?  Having worked with a significant number of first-year corp members, it’s fair to say most struggle.  That’s not a knock on TFA.  First year is a struggle for every new teacher. 

The study is dated December 2008, and Sawchuck notes there’s a reason it’s only coming out now:

Initially, the study was performed for internal purposes. Having provided quite a bundle of financial backing for TFA, Broad wanted to get a sense of how its investment was paying off in terms of stronger student learning. But officials for the group said they ultimately decided to make the study public given the growing national conversation about teacher effectiveness.

The proposition of TFA is that they’re better — or certainly no worse — on Day One than existing teachers.  If they’re solid in year two, but ineffective in year one, you’re essentially getting one good year for the price of two if they don’t stay past their two-year commitment.  I’m not sure that’s a message TFA wants to send. 

The Danger of “High Expectations”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 2, 2009 in Teacher Training and Teaching. 0 Comments

High expectations?  Not so fast, says teacher Gary Rubenstein, who points out that the standard advice to have high expectations for their students is “one of the most dangerously misinterpreted pieces of advice given to new teachers.”

The reason the advice ‘have high expectations’ is dangerous is that new teachers, in trying to follow this advice, commit one of the worst mistakes a teacher can, teaching over their heads.  The advice should be ‘Have realistically high expectations.’ This would force the new teacher to consider that there is such a thing as too high of expectations, and to try to learn what sorts of things are realistic.

Set the bar too high and students won’t rise to your high expectations.  “They lose confidence in themselves and, more importantly, they lose confidence in the ability of their teacher,” notes Rubenstein, whose blog is filled with great advice for new teachers. “Once they decide that their teacher is not competent enough to make ‘appropriate level’ lessons, they stop listening, start talking, and make it impossible to teach.”

Freire Is Foul and Foul is Freire

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 27, 2009 in Education Theory and Teacher Training. 41 Comments

Mention the name Paolo Freire at a gathering of educated people and you’re likely to get blank stares.  Unless members of that group went to ed school, where the Brazilian theorist is nothing less than a rock star, and his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Opressed is part of the canon.  In the new City Journal, Sol Stern examines the curious case of Freire and asks  how his “derivative, unscholarly book about oppression, class struggle, the depredations of capitalism, and the need for revolution ever gets confused with a treatise on education that might help solve the problems of twenty-first-century American inner-city schools?”  For starters, Stern says Freire’s seeds were cast upon fertile soil.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed resonated with progressive educators, already committed to a “child-centered” rather than a “teacher-directed” approach to classroom instruction. Freire’s rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools’ most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage.”

Freire opposed what he described as the “banking” concept of education, in which the student is a seen as a tabula rasa to be filled by the teacher.  Banking, naturally, is a tool of the oppressor in which the teacher talks and the students listen, the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply, and the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.  “Freire’s strictures reinforced another cherished myth of American progressive ed,” Stern notes, “that traditional teacher-directed lessons left students passive and disengaged, leading to higher drop-out rates for minorities and the poor.”

Stern finds no evidence that Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed has gained much traction or met with much success anywhere in the Third World.   “Nor have Freire’s favorite revolutionary regimes, like China and Cuba, reformed their own ‘banking’ approaches to education, in which the brightest students are controlled, disciplined, and stuffed with content knowledge for the sake of national goals—and the production of more industrial managers, engineers, and scientists,” he notes.  Why, Stern finally wonders, does American education’s love affair with Freire persist?

A broad consensus is emerging among education reformers that the best chance of lifting the academic achievement of children in the nation’s inner-city schools is to raise dramatically the effectiveness of the teachers assigned to those schools. Improving teacher quality as a means of narrowing racial achievement gaps is a major focus of President Obama’s education agenda. But if the quality of teachers is now the name of the game, it defies rationality that Pedagogy of the Oppressed still occupies an exalted place in training courses for those teachers, who will surely learn nothing about becoming better instructors from its discredited Marxist platitudes.

Stern challenged me a few months ago to find a published piece critical of Friere’s work and its impact on American education.  I failed.

Unaccountable Cash Cows?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 13, 2009 in Higher Education and Teacher Training. 11 Comments

“The dirty little secret about schools of education is that they have been the cash cows of universities for many, many years, and it’s time to say, ‘Show us what you can do, or get out of the business.’”  Nothing terribly controversial about those words, unless you consider the source:  Katherine Merseth, director of the teacher education program at Harvard University.

Merseth was not bad-mouthing her own program, according to U.S. News’ Eddy Ramirez, who quoted her in a recent blog post.  However, Merseth said that of the 1,300 graduate teacher training programs in the country, about 100 or so are adequately preparing teachers and “the others could be shut down tomorrow.”

“It’s high time that we broke up the cartel,” said Merseth. “We need to hold graduate schools of education more accountable.”

Help Wanted: Professional Development Watchdog

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 7, 2009 in Teacher Training. 16 Comments

One of the reasons education gets led by the nose from one fad to the next may be that there is no organized effort to evaluate the claims made by groups and individuals offering professional development workshops for teachers.  In his second post on how teachers can get more respect at Britannica Blog, Dan Willingham suggests that the American Association of School Administrators take on the role of evaluating claims made by those hawking PD.

Suppose that every professional development workshop came with a research disclosure statement that put it into one of three categories: (1) there is some research evidence backing the idea; (2) there is no evidence bearing on the idea, positive or negative; (3) the idea has been tested and data do not support it. It’s hard to believe that districts would be eager to sign on for workshops in the latter two categories.

“If school districts were more selective in the professional development activities that they pursued, some of the faddishness would be drained out of education,” Willingham believes.  Doctors rely on a data-driven approach before adopting new treatments. “The public does not view the education establishment as similarly measured, and that is to the detriment of teachers and administrators,” he concludes.

A Tsunami of Teacher Retirements

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 7, 2009 in Research and Reports, Teacher Training and Teaching. 0 Comments

More than half the nation’s teachers are eligible for retirement over the next decade, according to a new report by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, which calls for school administrators “to take immediate action to lower attrition rates and establish programs that pass along valuable information from teaching veterans to new teachers.”

“We face a tsunami in the shift of the future of the teachers’ workforce,” Tom Carroll, president of the commission, tells USA Today. ”Over the next five or six years, we could lose over a third of our teachers.”

“The traditional teaching career is collapsing at both ends,” the report says.  “Beginners are being driven away by antiquated preparation practices, outdated school staffing policies, and inadequate career rewards. At the end of their careers, accomplished veterans who still have much to contribute are being separated from their schools by obsolete retirement systems. In five years, two-thirds of the teachers we entrust our children to in America’s classrooms could be gone.”

Record Recruiting Year for TFA

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 10, 2009 in Employment and Teacher Training. 1 Comment

Bad economy?  President Obama’s call to national service?  The disappearance of the investment banking industry? Whatever the reason, applications to Teach for America have hit 35,000 this year–up 42%.  That includes 6 percent of the graduating classes of Stanford University and UC-Berkeley, and 11 percent of Ivy League school seniors, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

A Flexner Report for Education?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 9, 2009 in Higher Education and Teacher Training. 7 Comments

Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards suggests teacher training needs its own version of the Flexner Report — a 1910 report on the wildly uneven quality of medical education in the U.S. that changed the face of the medical profession and led to the closing of half of all the medical schools in the U.S.  “Those that remained bolstered their quality,” Riccards writes, ”turning out a better doctor to meet the growing medical needs of our industrialized nation.”

Isn’t it time for such an approach in teacher education?  Don’t we need a comprehensive study of our teacher training programs, one that focuses on how we crosswalk the latest in teacher educator research with current curricula, ensure that teacher training programs are empowering our teachers with research-based instructional strategies, require clinical hours, build mentoring and support networks, use data in both instruction and intervention, and ensure graduates align with both the content and skill needs of the communities and states they are serving?  Of course we do.  

Riccards suggestion comes in the wake of news that the University of the District of Columbia plans to shut down its undergraduate education department, which has managed to graduate less that ten percent of its students.

21st Century Skills: A Guide for Clear Thinkers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 2, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Theory and Teacher Training. 17 Comments

In politics, “issue framing” means presenting an issue in a way that is most likely to get others to agree.  A classic example of this is in the debate over abortion.  No one is for or against it; they support the “right to life” or the “right to choose.”  Reject a cleverly framed issue and you risk finding yourself on political, moral or ethical thin ice.  This is why those who are opposed to military actions must turn cartwheels to “support the troops.”  It’s essential that you praise the men and women in uniform if you wish to criticize what they are being ordered to do. 

21st Century skills is a masterpiece of issue framing.  Who can possibly argue against students being able to innovate, think critically and solve problems?  The beauty of a well-framed argument is that it keeps its opponent forever on defense.  A classic piece of political wisdom is ”if you’re explaining, you’re losing” and critics of 21st Century Skills have to spend a lot of time explaining why something that sounds so attractive and desirable doesn’t make a lot of sense, or simply won’t work. 

That brings us to the peerless Dan Willingham, who patiently and clearly unpacks several of the problems with the 21st Century skills movement.  Dan stole the show at last week’s Common Core panel discussion in Washington, and his piece today on Britannica Blog lays out in a single reading three flawed assumptions made by The Partnership for 21st Century Skills:

1. Knowledge and Skills are separate.
2. Teachers don’t have cognitive limits.
3. Experience is equivalent to practice.

Pay careful attention to point #2, for it’s enormously important, and with the exception of Willingham, it has gone completely undiscussed. As currently conceived, 21st century skills enthusiasts expect teachers to do a job that is literally beyond the cognitive abilities of almost all of us.  Not just beyond the limits of most teachers but beyond the limits of most human beings.

Everyone’s cognitive system has limits. We can’t remember everything that happens to us. We can’t pay attention to five things at the same time. This is important in the classroom because the methods that P21 encourages teachers to use (as the ones most likely to develop 21st-century skills) are incredibly demanding—so demanding that almost no one can use them effectively without a great deal of preparation and training. The demanding methods include project-based learning, small-group learning, and others in which students have some voice in the direction of the lesson plan. These methods are difficult because it’s so hard to plan for them; you can’t know what’s going to happen in the classroom until you get there.

Willingham points out that teachers already believe the teaching methods promoted by P21 are the best ones.  “Yet classroom observation studies show that very few teachers use them, almost certainly because they are so difficult to use.”  He went into even more detail on this point at his Common Core presentation. 

If you’re uncomfortable with the giddy promotion of 21st century skills, here’s the start of your “support the troops” position.  the 21st Century Skills movement is conscripting you in an unwinnable war.  They want you to do a job that is beyond your –  or anyone’s — cognitive capability.  It will be easy (and facile) to say as Ken Kay did at the Common Core event last week that just because something is hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.  Diane Ravitch recently pointed out that we’re already gullible about the myth of the miracle teacher.  Now P21 wants to up the ante. 

If we’re serious about closing the achievement gap and raising the level of performance of American education, we can’t be serious about asking teachers to walk on water and labeling them failures when they drown.  Any credible reform has to be reasonable and achievable.  21st Century Skills, as currently conceived, fails dismally on both fronts.   If we’re serious about equipping children with these important skills, we need to be equally serious and clear-eyed about what it will take, about what works and what doesn’t. 

Right now P21’s take on education is a clear case of Garbage In, Garbage Out.  And when it fails, as it inevitably must, guess who will be blamed?