Tom VanderArk has a very interesting / provocative post about the teacher effectiveness debate and there are plenty of controversial and challenging in a very short post, but there’s one in particular that I take issue with (tonight.)

Now… I complained about my grad school classes when I was in them, but I’m not sure "worthless university certification that has little to do with the job" is accurate or fair.

I’ve studied under some truly brilliant folks in grad school, from Tom Sobol to Ruth Vinz to David Schaafsma. They were career educators who made me think about teaching differently. Sometimes, they forced me to confront the assumptions that I came into teaching with because of my experiences as a students, sometimes, they gave me language for things I thought but could not express. (And in the case of Tom Sobol, I just sat there trying to soak up as much of his wisdom as I could.)

It’s interesting because, two years out of my English Ed masters, I went back and re-read a lot of my notes and books and papers from grad school and I found that I was in a much better place in my own teaching to try to do the stuff we were talking about then. Sometimes, I think we waste pre-service teacher programs on pre-service teachers who aren’t yet at a point to fully get what they are learning. So much of what the first two or three years of teaching is about is about figuring out who you are and how that "you" relates to the stuff you learned in grad school (or undergrad) and how any of that relates to the kids in front of you in the classroom.

And while, yes, I think Mr. Vander Ark is correct that we need do to a much better job of coaching / mentoring our new teachers, I disagree that it follows that just because we don’t do that, that means that our current pre-service program is invalid. In fact, I’d argue that, in the best of all worlds, better mentoring of new teachers would allow them to more quickly and more effectively access the skills they learned in graduate school.

I’d hate to think that we’d do away with the notion of teaching teachers how to teach because we don’t do a good enough job of supporting young teachers. Our profession needs more thoughtful practice, not less. A summer of quick and dirty "here’s how to teach" lessons will not create thoughtful pedagoges, but rather, mostly, it will create a generation of teachers who teach the way they’ve been taught — at best.

(By the way… One of my biggest frustrations about our profession is how little we know about the history of our profession. One thing I think our teacher education programs could do better is to teach the history of our profession. We need to be a less a-historical profession, and we can use our teacher education programs to do that. But I digress.)

So yes, let’s look at how we support our young teachers. Let’s build in apprenticeships into teaching. Let’s mentor and coach much better than we do. But let’s also help young teachers become scholars of their fields. Let’s give them the time to learn about teaching, not just in the middle of it all, but in study because we stand on the shoulders of giants… and our teachers should have the time to learn who they were, what we’ve learned, and how that can transform what we think our classrooms can be.

And one last thought — if our teacher-ed programs don’t always get there… that’s reason to push to make them better, not get rid of them.

Tags: teachereducation