This oped article is from today's New York Times. This lady really nails it. Ironically the same is true for coaches, coaching is teaching. The only part that I object to is the 3.5 GPA idea. Selection should be based on a portfolio and extensive interviews. GPA and test scores do not measure passion.
November 2, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Teach Your Teachers Well
By SUSAN ENGEL
New Marlborough, Mass.
ARNE DUNCAN, the secretary of education, recently called
for sweeping changes to the way we select and train teachers. He’s
right. If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical
mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to
become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent
programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of
teaching.
Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down
their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The
result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have
no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t
working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively
weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones
preparing to become teachers.
So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves
into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John
Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century
college professors.
These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5
undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process.
But they should also be free of charge, and admission 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.
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.
Teacher training can also learn from family therapy programs.
Therapists 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. In much the same way, young teachers need to
record their daily encounters with their classrooms and then, with
mentors and peers, have serious, open-minded conversations about what’s
working and what isn’t.
Teachers must also learn far more about children: typically,
teaching students are provided with fairly static and superficial
overviews of developmental stages, but learn little about how to watch
children, using research and theory to understand what they are seeing.
As James Comer, a professor of child psychiatry at Yale, has argued for
years, if we disregard the developmental needs of our students it’s
unlikely we’ll succeed in teaching them.
One more thing is required — give as many public schools as possible
the financial incentives to hire these newly prepared teachers in
groups of seven or more. This way, talented eager young teachers won’t
languish or leave teaching because they felt bored, inept, isolated or
marginalized. Instead, they will feel part of a robust community of
promising professionals. They will struggle and learn together. Good
teachers need good colleagues.
To fix our schools, we need teaching programs that are as rich in
resources, interesting, high-reaching and thoughtful as the young
people we want to attract to the profession. Show me a school where
teachers are smart, well-educated, skilled and happy to be there, and
I’ll show you a group of children who are getting a good education.
Susan Engel is a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College.
