Ed schools don’t train teachers, writes Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, in Education Next. “Training” is taboo. Instead, teacher educators believe it’s their job to “prepare” or “form” professionals who will decide how to teach.
The function of teacher education is to launch the candidate on a lifelong path of learning, distinct from knowing, as actual knowledge is perceived as too fluid to be achievable. In the course of a teacher’s preparation, prejudices and errant assumptions must be confronted and expunged, with particular emphasis on those related to race, class, language, and culture. . . . candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes through abundant in-class dialogue and by keeping a journal. From these activities is born each teacher’s unique philosophy of teaching and learning.
Many teacher educators think it’s more important for teachers to be “activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society” than to be effective instructors, writes Walsh.
Methods courses no longer teach the best methods of instruction, write Renee T. Clift and Patricia Brady in Studying Teacher Education. Instead, “instructors work simultaneously with prospective teachers on beliefs, teaching practices and creation of identities—their students’ and their own.”
This puts a huge burden on new teachers, notes Walsh. At the age of 21 or 22, they’re sent into classrooms to figure it all out for themselves.
In a 2012 Fordham survey, only 37 percent of teacher educators said it’s “absolutely essential” to develop “teachers who maintain discipline and order in the classroom.”
Worse, future elementary teachers aren’t trained to teach reading effectively, Walsh writes. In most ed schools, a prospective teacher is told to “develop her own approach to teaching reading, based on exposure to various philosophies and approaches, none more valid than any other.”
Walsh has ideas for improving teacher education.
The Obama administration’s $5 billion teacher initiative is here.