Education

Clay,

I'd like to respond to your questions by describing my daughter's credentialing experience, since she completed her program recently (three years ago).  In California, Education is not an undergraduate major, which, I agree with you, is a good thing. Teacher candidates are required to have a content area.  In my daughter's case, it's science.  She has a bachelor,s degree in geology, a master's degree in paleontology, and field experience with an environmental group.

She very much valued the strategies, resources, and guidance provided by her university science and ELL instructors. But the technology component for her credential program was definitely lacking. She tested out of the first part, Microsoft Office. The second part involved creating content in TaskStream, a fee-based website that most likely not a single pre-service teacher continues subscribing to once they complete their program. Too bad she did not have the opportunity to start developing her PLN as part of her program. Also, as a geologist, she had plenty to offer in terms of real-world use of technology, such as Google Earth for marking water wells that were no longer safe for drinking water.

Her student teaching experience was a short one because, due to a shortage of qualified science teachers, she was asked in the second term to take over a full load as an intern. Fortuanately, she's at a site with an outstanding and very supportive science department; so learning under fire worked out fine in her situation.

She's now completing her second year (3rd if you count the internship) at her site. So while her teacher prep was for the most part useful, she's had to commit to way too many hours of professional development for non-tenured teachers via the BITSA program, a requirement in California. Not only has she found the content to be of little relevance to her teaching assignment, but the program prevents her from attending a series of university-sponsored science in-services and has also made it difficult for her to fully participate in meetings and events at her school site. And to top it off, she's never been asked to evaluate the program.

But, of course, in California right now the biggest challenge for new teachers is being able to survive the budget cuts.

The sad fact is that most teacher education programs fail to prepare teachers adequately.  I believe this has a lot to do with training that involves too much theory and not enough practice.  I don't deny that theory is important, but most teachers develop their own theories about teaching and learning through practice.  You have to do it to get it.

When I was a senior in high school, I wanted to become a journalist (I told my parents that I'd become a lawyer, but I was lying ;P).  A reporter came and spoke to my journalism class and when I asked him for some advice on pursuing the career, he said: "Don't major in journalism."

My path to being a teacher was through a career-switcher program that was run through a school district and not through a university, so I haven't had the experience of taking education classes.  Although one of the "selling points" of the program I was in was that the people teaching us were not like education professors "who hadn't seen the inside of a classroom in 20 years," it was taught by administrators (yeah, I know, right?).

I will say that one thing that I've heard across the board from people who have done both types of programs is that there always seems to be a disconnect between theory and practice, as if those who profess to know everything about education don't take one factor into all of their theories: the actual students.

But I digress.  I learned a lot more from experience than I may have in a traditional program.

I'm a second year teacher. I taught with the non-profit Citizen Schools in Boston and currently teach at a suburban high school outside of Boston.

For this topic I'm on the side of content knowledge in teacher preparation programs. I received my undergraduate in social studies teacher education and my masters in curriculum and instruction. When it came time for me to take the Praxis (New Hampshire teaching test) and MTEL I was very unprepared for the history content section. I passed but not by much.The last time I had had to take a U.S History class was high school because my AP exam counted as credit in college.  Even now being two years in I'm lacking in content knowledge. I have hours of reading to do every night in order to prepare for class and then I spend more time coming up with a creative way to present it. 

My teacher preparation program was overloaded with methodology and pedagogy classes. By the time I finished my masters ( I did six years straight of school) if I heard the name Jean Piaget one more time I was going to throw my textbook at my professor. The only beneficial classes I took were ones that produced tangible results, like creating a unit I could use.

My student teaching experience was the most beneficial aspect of my program and occured during my senior year in college. Teacher preparation programs need to find ways to get students looking to teach into the actual classroom sooner. I also think the longer the student teaching experience the more prepared a person will be when it comes time to teach. I know people who had to complete a year of student teaching. Although it was a long stressful year for them, its worth it. And stress aside were teachers, we need to love what we do in order to do it.

My undergraduate also required countless observation hours in which we had to observe another teacher at a local school and make comments. Although this was also beneficial to my preparation I think these observation classes could be better. They present opportunities for co-teaching which is more enjoyable and useful than sitting in the back of a classroom watching.

I could write more but I need to go brush up and learn everything I can about the Vietnam War before class tomorrow.

I'll toss this excerpt in for the good of the group:

"Darling-Hammond's work offers the clearest view on how the confluence of research on teacher preparation can be moved into policy that aligns with current federal priorities to more effectively train, support, demand, and reward good teaching in the schools.  It reminds us of the checklist that should go into evaluating teacher prep programs.  Among her toplines:
* Prospective teachers must learn specific practices and apply them in clinical experiences;
* Prospects need sufficient coursework in content areas (such as math and reading) and the methods of teaching them (so both the content and the pedagogy); and
* Teachers-in-training need to be well-aware of the local district curriculum and how their pre-service education prepares them to meet expectations and achieve expected outcomes;

"We also know that those prospects most like to succeed in the classroom are certified in the specific areas they teach, have higher-than-average scores on the teacher licensing test, and graduate from a competitive college."

It's from eduflack.

@ ClayAn intriguing post.  There's an old saying that elementary school teachers teach because they love children.  Secondary teachers teach because they love their subject matter and college professors teach because they love themselves.  
Perhaps teacher prep programs should be radically different depending on which level one wants to go into.   Secondary teachers are often subject matter experts so it would appear more preparation in the subject matter area is more important than loads of pedagogy courses.  I'm all for valuable alternative certification programs.  Some of my best teachers have arrived at my school via alternative routes.  

Just a couple of thoughts on this topic:

1.  My undergraduate education courses felt a lot more like hoops I had to jump through to get my teacher certification than a learning experience with significant power to inform practice. 
2.  My content area courses were far more important to me at that time.
3.  I share your thoughts/experience regarding the masters program I completed two years ago.  I felt this to be a far stronger program for shaping my own teaching than my undergraduate teacher preparation program.

Why was that?

1.  The master's program focused on metacognitive reflection regarding experiences we have had in education or have observed in the classroom.
2.  The master's program saw itself as a preparation program for social sciences lending more academic credibility to it than the undergraduate teacher preparation program.  We were instilled with the strong and true belief that the work we were doing would help to shape the profession.  The undergraduate program had no such expectations of its participants.
3.  The graduate program was grounded in evaluating primary sources of research and academic writing while the undergraduate program mostly exposed us to synopsis of these studies. 
4.  The graduate program modeled instructional methods for us while the undergraduate program mostly just presented these methods in a traditional fashion.  We did not get to experience them ourselves as students.

So, what do I think a powerful teacher preparation program needs to do:

1.  Establish an academic expectation that students wishing to become teachers are becoming social scientists.
2.  Focus strongly on primary sources of research and academic writing for the content of the course.
3.  Utilize a hefty level of metacognitive reflection as the source inquiry (ultimately this will improve quality of instruction in other departments within the institution and become a powerful source for professor performance review).
4.  Require students to take at least one course online within the teacher preparation program and one course within their content area. 
5.  Expect more from clinical observations than just time in the classroom.  Time spent observing other teachers in the classroom ought to be fodder for reflection that can be tied to literature on teaching methods, psychology, or curriculum design.

I can speak to this from two perspectives--my own road to teaching was in an undergraduate education degree.  My major was education, minor was math, second minor in biology. As was true of nearly all teacher ed programs back in that time (ancient history--the 60's)  Currently I teach in a 5th year teacher ed program in California.  CA requires all teacher candidates to have a bachelor's degree before doing their credential program; credential programs must be offered in two academic semesters.

  So I started teaching without the "deep" understanding of my subject area that a full math major would have provided.  However, I've noticed since then that my understanding of math is in some ways deeper than that of many math majors.  I also know now, very clearly, what I only saw as a glimmer back when I started teaching, that teachers have to know math differently from how scientists or mathematicians need to know it.  Would I have benefited from doing more college-level math courses?  Maybe--but not all that much.  What's helpful for a teacher is to understand how different aspects of math are connected and to be able to distinguish mathematically important topics and concepts and procedures from interesting but less significant ones and to know why the important ones are important.  Very few college-level courses are taught with this in mind (and traditional textbooks are no help in this regard, let me add parenthetically), so more college math courses don't necessarily help all that much.  There's also a hard-to-define area somewhere between math and pedagogy that teachers need to know and pretty much no one else does, and that typical college math courses don't help with.   I'll give an example: mathematicians and people who use math in general do not need to be aware of the fact that there are three meanings to the "–" sign (negative, opposite, minus), because it turns out in the end that they are equivalent.  They do know it, but at the level of use--they know it automatically, virtually below the level of consciousness unless someone like me brings it up. Teachers, however, do need to know this consciously because it impacts students' math learning and therefore how we need to teach.   I don't know why I processed my math knowledge differently from others.  But for me the bottom line is, content knowledge is extremely important, but the kinds of content courses designed for other professions, especially for math majors intending to do graduate work in math,  may not be adequate for teachers, at least in math.  I don't know if similar issues exist for other content areas/disciplines, but I suspect they do, though perhaps not to the same extent.   As for the ed courses I took as an undergraduate; I don't know if it's a fair comparison because I went to an unusual college that had a strong emphasis on personal learning.   But I joined the Peace Corps shortly after graduating, and ended up teaching math in Ghana.  There were a number of other volunteers at my school, also recent graduates, but with no ed background, only their content majors.  Even though I definitely would not say my undergraduate education was "adequate" (whatever that might mean--perhaps more on that later) for teaching—I still had a LOT to learn, I know that I had a head-start on these other volunteers.  I watched them go through a learning process unassisted I had already gone through as an undergrad with guidance and support.  So however weak my undergrad teacher ed was--it was definitely better than nothing.   The most valuable part of my undergrad education (as far as teaching is concerned) was of course the student teaching experience.  It was integrated with an excellent seminar--I literally went from the classroom to the seminar, where we integrated, in both a heady and practical way, practical experience with the theory we had learned or were learning.  This gave me a life-long rock-solid belief that this is the best approach to teacher ed--integrating theory and practice.  This is a conclusion now supported by research (Linda Darling-Hammond has pulled together the results for us; here’s a link to one of her articles: http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/28/2e/7a.pdf)    The integration can be done in a variety of ways, but if you want the best results, it needs to happen.  Teachers may know and understand the theory of teaching and learning very well, but be complete disasters when confronted with 20-40 actual students (just as understanding the physics of riding a bicycle doesn’t help a whole lot with riding it.  Some, perhaps, but not a lot.)  However, a teacher with a lot of practical experience and little or no theory is essentially self-taught as far as teaching goes, and often will not ever get beyond surface features with regard to her/his teaching:  Are the students quiet?  Did they like the lesson?  Did they fill in the blanks with the correct answers?   When something obviously doesn’t go well, often they’ll react to that by making negative judgement about their students or the parents of their students—or judging themselves and leaving teaching.  If teaching is a loaf of bread, practice is the flour, eggs, sugar, etc., and theory is the yeast.  You can get a loaf without yeast, but it’s not usually very good; and yeast alone doesn’t even make a loaf.  (Which, by the way, is why teachers often find the pontifications of “experts” who have never taught, or who haven’t taught for 20 years, unconvincing.)   But merely exposing people to both theory and practice isn’t sufficient; they need to think about them both, chew them over, reflect on them, in order to get the benefits.  Some people do this virtually automatically; others will do better if prompted, and everyone benefits from sharing their thoughts with others and hearing others’ thoughts and ideas.  And I’m convinced “thinking together” is most effective when it’s “on the ground”—that is, when it’s about some specific experience with a lesson, topic, student, parent, administrator.  Thinking and talking about teaching and learning in general is interesting and worthwhile, and can move one’s teaching forward in some ways, but the really valuable stuff happens in a specific context.  Any teacher has experienced this, informally if not in a formal teacher ed program—teachers talk to each other all the time, sharing ideas, materials, etc.   So a teacher education program, or professional development experience, will be valuable to the extent that it provides new input in the form of new ideas (theory), opportunities to try things out (practice), and opportunities to reflect, alone and with others, some of whom are more experienced or know more, on all of it.  The more closely related the theory and practice can be, the better.    However, IMO neither an undergraduate teacher ed program nor a one year post-BA program, no matter how well-done, can be “adequate” in the sense of fully preparing someone to teach.  For one thing, what does this mean, anyway?  If a teacher’s any good, s/he goes on learning about teaching and learning as long as s/he teaches.  If someone teaches for 30-40 years, and is still learning—at what point does that learning process become “adequate”?  But less philosophically—there’s a lot of evidence that the average teacher takes 5 +/–2 years of experience to hit their stride, to feel they have the basics down.  to me, this implies that if we did teacher ed as other professions such as law and medicine do, with a full 3-4 years of post-BA program, we’d be in the right time-frame to really help people off to a good start with teaching.  Instead of the current rate at which teachers leave the profession (something like ___% leave in the first 5 years), most of that attrition would happen during the teacher ed program, and the people who made it all the way would be solid as independent teachers (assuming the programs were done right.  Pure theory—what most grad schools are accustomed to and are good at—wouldn’t do it.)  But this isn’t likely to happen any time soon.    Induction programs are a step in the right direction.  In California, all new teachers now go through a 2-year induction phase.  I don’t know how effective they are in general—my impression is that we/they still have a lot to learn about this phase of entry into the profession and that many aren’t all that effective or useful yet, but that people are making progress toward becoming more so.  Collaboration between school districts and universities seems to help, but collaboration takes time and money, and the system isn’t set up for this to happen automatically—it takes additional effort on everyone’s part, and everyone’s plate is pretty full already—so it only happens here and there.   So there you have it—my 2 cents worth.  I (sort of) apologize for the length, but teacher ed is what I do for a living, so it’s hard to stuff my thoughts about it into a nutshell.

Argh!  I left the statistic out because I wanted to check it--then forgot it.  Here it is:
 About 20% of new teachers leave the profession after their first year; about 40% leave within the first five years.
Also--what the heck happened to my paragraphing?  what I want is a space between paragraphs--what I got is no paragraphs at all, after the first one.  I can't figure the system out on my own--can someone help me?

I'm glad you've mentioned LDH's research here, as it's particularly relevant.

I did not realize it until I moved overseas and began teaching with colleagues from all over the world, but my teacher ed program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver was pretty forward-thinking at the time.  I have no idea if it still is, however!

I think ultimately, as has been said before, virtually no program makes teachers 100% prepared to go it solo. However, if I had to list the first 5 things that come to mind in response to your post's question, I would say:

- Ample time in classrooms practicing the skills learned outside of classrooms, including "uninterrupted" time as a teacher -- i.e., not one-day-in-one-day-out, but 3 months "in" it completely -- internship style.
- Ample opportunities to observe many different teachers teaching in many different subject areas and grade levels
- courses requiring students to think about the link between the theory and the practice (what Jean is talking about above) -- and in order to do this, of course, you have to have *had* the practice
- Ample time for reflection both WITH peers and supervisors, and independently
- substantial training in how to be a language teacher, regardless of content area specialty, because all teachers are teachers of language

While I think content knowledge is somewhat important, I don't think it needs to be a huge focus. (Of course I think this also depends on what your content area is.) It's more important for a good teacher to learn how to get that content knowledge than it is to memorize it. While Kristen (above) might feel like she doesn't have enough content knowledge, the truth is she might change schools or districts down the line and not be teaching the same content, anyway, because the curriculum is different.

I do think, however, that numeracy and literacy pedagogy is crucial for elementary school teachers.

I'm personally rather saddened to hear that the testing mania we lament about in K-12 has seeped into teacher qualification programs, too! I think it's ridiculous that there are tests which "indicate" whether or not one is qualified to teach.