Preparing Future Teachers

From the Grand Rapids, Michigan Press, comes a story about Arne Duncan and what he thinks should happen for teachers and teacher training:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says teachers should be paid between $60,000 to $150,000 – but should be held more accountable.

Duncan also told the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards last week that it should be more difficult for prospective students to enter college teacher preparation programs.

The latter sentence is part of a bigger discussion over whether colleges of education in this country do a good job of attracting good students and if they are training them properly.   Indeed, a big worry expressed among some UW COE faculty about bringing in TFA is that if the COE doesn't step up and do better they could be shut down.   Some of the UW COE faculty seem to think the TFA training may be the training of the future for teachers.  

 Here's a lengthy article on the issue of colleges of education from the NY Times.  The article follows a new teacher prep school called Relay Graduate School of Education which doesn't have courses but modules which follow a different teaching technique. 

“The rhetoric is enormously heated,” Dr. Levine said, speaking from his office at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where as president he helps universities restructure their teaching programs. “We have a group of education schools that are perplexed at why they are being so criticized,” he said. “We have states saying they are going to create alternate routes to becoming a teacher, and they are going to increase standards for the existing education schools.

“We are simultaneously trying to reform and replace the enterprise.”

Another program, Teacher U, was created by leaders of three big charter school chains.  Here's what one manager had to say:

Teacher U was founded by leaders from three prominent charter school chains — Achievement First, Uncommon Schools and KIPP — in part to provide a setting where their own teachers could receive master’s-level training that was tightly focused “on stuff that will help you be a better teacher on Monday,” said Brent Maddin, the program’s senior manager of teaching and learning, and Relay’s future provost.

That's a big echo of how TFA preps its recruits.  And shades of our own state's Professional Educators Standards Board in their review of UW COE's TFA plan:

Even the state-appointed team of university educators that reviewed Relay’s charter expressed concerns, though it ultimately recommended approval. “The institution must recognize the importance of scholarly activity in a graduate school,” it warned. “It must specify how it plans to support ongoing (rather than episodic) scholarly work by full-time faculty.”

What's the debate?

The debate mirrors a larger concern nationally, which is that by treating teaching as a trade instead of an art, and permitting new teachers to run their own classrooms from the first day, alternative education programs will, in the long term, reduce the quality of America’s teaching force. A great teacher, critics of the new approach argue, should also be trained in advanced work in his or her field, as well as be versed in child psychology, cognitive theory and educational philosophy, so he or she can work in any setting.

Relay seems to be teaching a "protocol" to teachers as does TFA.  If A happens, then you do B.  And everything is in service to goals, most of which are directly related to testing. 

Again, like the math debate locally, how about a hybrid?  I don't think this crash course in teaching is enough to become a good teacher.  There's a lot more to reaching students than knowing how to deliver a lesson.