What Makes a Good Teacher Preparation Program?
I'm enjoying the pooling of insights and discussions in the threads to the posts on unions and teacher evaluations.
Since another target in the cross-hairs of the reformers radical edupreneurs is education schools, I'm curious to hear everybody's thoughts on whether and to what extent they deserve criticism.
Again, I'll offer the following from my own experience as a conversation-starter, but by no means finisher:
I came into teaching late. My undergraduate degree was not in education, but in the Humanities - heavy loads of literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, and social sciences.
I was amazed to discover that many teachers major in education instead of their content area (math, science, literature, history, etc) during their undergrad years. I don't think that's a good thing, at least on the secondary level. While an ed bachelor's might impart knowledge valuable for teaching - instruction and assessment, syllabus and curriculum design, classroom management, child development, teaching non-native English speakers or students with special needs, multi-cultural sensitivity and so forth - none of these things should replace, in my view, deep and broad content knowledge.
I got my secondary certification taking graduate courses in the above subjects over two summers. The courses were valuable overall, and did inform my practice somewhat, but I can't say they struck me as enough. And I had a standard by which to make that judgment, too - because three years before taking these courses, I went through an ESL teacher certification course in Portugal.
(click "Read more" below for the rest....)
It was a summer-long course that consisted of standard academic coursework in the mornings - second language acquisition, best instructional practices, etc - but in the afternoons, did what my later Secondary Ed certification course did not do: gave us real classroom teaching time to apply what we were studying with real students in real classes. (The students either got free or cut-rate classes due to our inexperience.)
We were observed and evaluated by our teachers during these afternoon classes. Long story short: way better than the "listen to professor lectures, read some stuff, write papers, and get your certification" approach of my later studies.
I actually entered high school teaching with only that ESL certification, and it was a godsend for this added bonus: the school that hired me used a team-teaching approach in which ESL support staff joined content teachers in a "mainstreamed" classroom. What this meant for my own development was that I got to work with, and closely observe, a wide variety of English and history teachers daily for the first two years of my career. Especially valuable in that international school setting was the opportunity to work with not only American teachers, but also Australian, British, and New Zealand ones. I especially benefited from watching the Aussies and Kiwis from the Antipodes. Their traditions, I learned, are much more constructivist and student-centered than the American style.
I'll close by adding a couple more observations: many of my fellow students in the Secondary Certification course questioned the value of being taught to teach by teacher trainers who hadn't been teachers themselves for years or decades. I've also known teachers whose graduate courses for Masters in Education didn't satisfy them. I'm thinking especially of a friend whose Masters in Educational Technology course three years ago was thoroughly 1990s in its emphasis on Powerpoint, Word, and Excel. Blogs? Wikis? Podcasts? Moodle? The professors teaching these courses were apparently oblivious to these developments.
So what about you? Do education schools cut the mustard for teacher preparation? If yes, why and how? If no, why not? What's the ideal?
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