A new report released yesterday from a panel convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) says teachers need to be trained in a model more akin to doctors going through residency—a sort of collaborative apprenticeship with more experienced instructors that offers clinical experience to better prepare them for the rigors of their actual classroom.
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I think this is a very interesting thought, and perhaps would have better results than handing a first year teacher the classroom keys and wishing them luck.
I completely agree with this, but how would such a program be paid for?
And would you pay those in training? A semester-long student teaching experience is essentially paying for your own slave labor. You pay for 12 hours of college credit, and work for 40 hours + a week, doing all a regular teacher would do. Some schools even require additional, night-class time. (Fortunately, Indiana State didn’t require such of me, and I had a great student teaching experience, except for the fact I was POOR AS HELL AND HAD TO ASK MY PARENTS TO BANKROLL ME. [thanks mom and dad])
This is a valid point. I look at it like this:
Doctors are seen as having an extremely important job, one which comes with towering responsibility, and so they undergo appropriately arduous training for their profession. Their skills are generally high in demand, as there will always be a dire need for a doctor somewhere, so they are compensated comfortably. It’s common knowledge that a doctor’s salary tend to place him or her in the higher income brackets, which no doubt is part of the appeal, so although med school is still expensive, that doesn’t prevent admission from being rather competitive. Which is exactly how it should be: if I’m going to let someone perform open-heart surgery on me, I’d rather that person have been a fixture as his or her college library and not the campus bars.
What if teaching was regarded in the same way? Like doctors, we are also tasked with incredible responsibility, and there will always be a need for teachers. But there is also a general disrespect, a certain dismissiveness, of teachers as well—at least in Americans, I think. Teachers are lazy. Teachers are overpaid. Those of us who work in the “real world” don’t get summers off. A parent questioning me about my techniques when her perfectly capable son has routinely neglected his (instructional-level) homework week after week. Those who can’t do, teach. Our culture may make a big show about how much we love our teachers and how they shape children’s lives, but underneath it all, our culture doesn’t really value a teacher’s particular set of skills.
I have to say—on one hand, it’s hard to fault them. Everyone knows that in med school, students spend hours upon hours internalizing large amounts of content and practicing on real bodies. I’m willing to bet that if you asked any person on the street what a teacher learns in ed school to prepare them for their profession, I think they’d be a little lost. Most people think that to be a teacher, one must merely possess nebulous qualities such as being “good with kids”, “patient” (in what scenarios? with whom?), “entertaining”, “strict”, and “able to explain stuff.” All these qualities are great in a teacher, but then again, these are more personality traits than skills picked up in school.
A teacher’s skills are not so soft as this list might lead one to believe. A teacher must be able to quickly gather data and make snap decisions. A teacher must be able to take difficult material and break it down into digestible chunks, based on the way the brain processes new information. A teacher must have a keen understanding of child and human development, and be able to use this understanding to greenlight, modify, or rule out an activity for a particular academic level or age group based on X, Y, and Z. A teacher must organized. A teacher must be able to keep a juvenile audience in mind when crafting directions or explanations. A teacher must be able to devise systems and procedures which will ensure maximum efficiency with minimum maintenance. All of these skills could be taught and sharply honed in a residency program, but mastery of these skills depends on the aptitude of the student teacher.
In conclusion, to reform education, I think we need a simultaneous four-pronged approach. Each of these four factors needs the other three in order to be workable or feasible.
- Develop a clear set of data-informed guidelines which prove exactly which teaching techniques an effective teacher must master and how she or he will know when the technique has been mastered. (This would help the non-teaching public demystify the craft of teaching, which might possibly inspire more parents to take interest in the quality of their child’s teacher, and in general come to respect the profession a bit more.) So once these guidelines are established, one could then go on to create…
- Rigorous training to ensure that only the best and most-prepared individuals are in charge of our children’s education. However, this kind of training would be costly, so in order to make sure that people are still going to flock to teaching we need to…
- Pay teachers handsomely. I think a lot of teachers under a huge amount of pressure would be much more likely to persevere if they were getting paid six figures a year to do it. I’m not talking about merit pay, here—I’m talking about paying teachers the amount of money they deserve. A higher salary would raise the prestige of the profession, which would then attract more people to teaching. However, if we are going to put forth this amount of taxpayer money, we need to ensure the public that it’s being used wisely, so we should launch…
- Comprehensive, truly purposeful and ongoing professional development and evaluation. All this goes toward accountability to the public. Much easier to accomplish once a general guideline for teacher effectiveness has been establish. See? It all comes full circle.
