March 9, 2010--Teacher Training

The title says it all, and in a totally non politically correct way: "Build A Better Teacher" is the title of a commonsense article from the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Among other things, it traces the history of the mid 20th century shift in the way public school teachers were prepared. In earlier years teachers were readied for the day-to-day realities of the classroom in normal schools, or as in my mother's case, teacher training schools. Training schools.

There the almost exclusive emphasis was on effective teaching methods. Trainees were instructed in ways to teach reading, math, history, the social sciences, and classroom management. There was very little theory. Just some child psychology. And not much stress on academic subjects. No one was expected much less required to major in history or math to teach either subject and no one was even expected to earn a bachelors degree much less an advanced one. What counted was a demonstrated ability to teach young children. And how well did this work out? Pretty much everyone who was educated by my mother's generation of teachers has nothing but praise for them and the education we received.

But then there were tectonic changes. The preparation of teachers was taken over totally by schools and colleges of education set within research universities. Licensing requirements were "raised," if one can call them that, and soon anyone who wanted to teach even elementary schoolers was expected to earn bachelors and maters degrees and as undergraduates major in an academic subject. The methods and techniques of teaching were substantially shunted aside. This new teacher education industry, and an industry it surely was and now even more so is, gained total hegemony over the education, no longer the training, of teachers.

Teaching, as a result, is no longer considered a craft, a set of skills to be learned. It has become a profession. Thus, under the umbrella of the university and encouraged by state boards of education and national certification agencies--all self-interested and self-perpetuating entities--teaching was transformed. And from the results, not for the better.

Yes, we have more credentialed and certified teachers than ever before but we also have about one-third of our public school children unable to read or do math at grade level. And the achievement gap between low income and middle income kids, especially minorities, is about as wide as it has ever been.

One would think that this would be declared a national emergency, even more serious than our health care crisis--since an educated citizenry at least as much as a healthy senior citizenry is essential to our democracy and economic competitiveness. We would expect that as a result our educators, politicians, and media would be paying as much attention to what to do about this crisis as to how to cover the medically uninsured, important as that may be. And yet, in spite of the many months and literally thousands of articles and talk show hours that have been devoted to the ups and downs and politics of the health care bill now before Congress, one is hard pressed to find even an occasional piece about our tottering education system and what to do to fix it. And there is even less being discussed that challenges the conventional and failed wisdom that still directs almost all of what goes on in schools and how we prepare teachers for Monday morning.

We still blame the children as not coming to school prepared to learn; or their parents, who it is claimed do not place enough emphasis on learning or discipline; or standardized tests, which it is asserted emphasize correct answers and rote learning as opposed to creative and critical thinking; or governments for not coming up with enough enough money or get in the way of teachers doing their creative thing; or teacher unions, which appear to care only about teacher prerogatives and not the education of children and which resist being held accountable for student learning; or just about everything else that doesn't put the focus on what is really at issue--the fact that our teachers are not being adeqately prepared to be effective in the classroom.

This is a national shame since we know what good teaching is and we know how to prepare people to be successful in the classroom. If in the past they could do it in teacher training schools we can do it today. But that training, that preparation has to be wrested back from schools of education and returned to those practical experts who know how to inculcate the skills that we know are effective in classroom teaching. Even in the most challenging schools.

Which takes us back to the article in the Times. Read all of it, but in very brief it focuses on the work of some of those who have been developing taxonomies of effective teaching practices. They go about it in a way that makes perfect common sense--they identify teachers who are widely acknowledged to be effective (their kids learn year after year in measurable ways) videotape them, then analyze the evidence from the tapes and from that extract practical lessons and tips for new classroom teachers to follow. Using these they work with those teachers-in-training in a coaching manner to instruct them what to do when getting a lesson started, engaging all the children, managing a classroom, and teaching specific aspects of content.

New teachers love this approach and there is gathering evidence that the training approach is working. Students learn more from teachers prepared this way, morale is higher, discipline problems are reduced, and fewer teachers than at present drop out in frustration.

One personal story. Some years ago I and others were working with the superintendent of schools of a large city that had seen better days. It was on a Ford Foundation funded project to bring proven teaching methods to a cluster of the lowest performing schools in the city. The high school in the cluster was so dysfunctional that a decision had been made to shut it down. Instead of that we brought Project GRAD to the district. GRAD's focus was on the retraining of existing teachers in these tested methods. The teachers had to vote to participate. Nothing was imposed upon them, It's a long story, but the high school and its feeder elementary schools in three, four years were so improved that not only wasn't the high school closed but it attracted support from the Gates Foundation and more and more of its students were graduating and going on to college.

Most of the teachers who came to work in this cluster were graduates from the nearby state university. We thought the dean of the School of Education there would like to work with us. Minimally, since the teachers in the GRAD schools were doing so well, we hoped that the dean and his colleagues would like to use these schools as sites for student teaching. We also thought that if this were to happen we would have to do a lot less retraining.

We came to a meeting with the dean to discuss the general dysfunction of the district's schools--where his graduates were teaching--and how well by comparison the teachers were performing in the GRAD schools. He was a good and serious man and promised to take a close look at everything we brought with us--a huge stack of reports and data.

When we returned for a second meeting, we thought to discuss ways in which we would work together, the dean slid the pile of papers back across the table to us and said, and I am quoting, "Thank you very much. This is interesting. But we are very satisfied with what we are currently doing."

I was literally speechless. This from the dean who was sending his graduates out into the state's most dysfunctional public school system. But there was nothing we could say or do to get him to change his mind or entice him to at least try something different.

He had his educational theories and ideologies and all I had was evidence that there was a better way.