Engel misses the point: you can't ignore that people teach the way they were taught!

[Laura Gibbs]

I read with tremendous UN-enthusiasm this op-ed piece about teacher training in the New York Times this morning: Teach Your Teachers Well

Susan Engel lists a series of innovations she wants to see in Colleges of Education (higher admissions standards, free fuition, more/better courses, more/better mentoring, etc. - nothing really new)… but she doesn't address to me what seems a fundamental problem: now that we are stuck in a multi-generational cycle of really bad teaching and learning, how do we break out of that???

Think about it: the students I see in college, the ones who have succeeded in the system, are pretty much without any imaginative sense of teaching at all. They have been exposed for 16 years of their lives to some seriously UNimaginative teaching: they have spent 12 years in school systems which are generally dominated by the tyranny of standardized testing and centrally-controlled curricula, and then they spend 4 years in college where, if it is a big public research university like where I teach, they are taught a series of courses by professors who never really got into the business because they wanted to do creative teaching - so they have had class after class after class in college which consists of lecturing, midterms, final paper, and final exam. They know it's a lousy model - but what can they do? They want the diploma so they suck it up, and go through the motions in order to get the grades (Shaii's great discussion on that topic).

The main way people are going to teach is HOW THEY WERE TAUGHT. If we have a generation of students who were taught in unimaginative, tedious ways by people who were not trained to do otherwise (as Engel herself admits in the premise of her article!), well then: how do you think a few courses someone takes in college will break that cycle????

Against 16 years of tedious teaching, can a well-intentioned series of courses and a semester or two of mentoring change that? I really don't think so.

Engel mentions therapy as a profession that teaching could emulate in its training methods. I agree: but if students had been to BAD THERAPY for 16 years of their life, Monday through Friday, for 9 months per year, with one bad therapy session after another, day after day, year after year… do you really think we would be able to turn the victims of bad therapy into good therapists with just a few college courses?

If Engel is right, and there really is a need for radical reform in teacher education, she has to take on the extra burden that the very people we are training to be teachers are themselves the products of the broken system! They are not coming at this with fresh eyes: they are coming at this with 16 years of bad experiences to get over.

This seems to me a HUGE PROBLEM, and Engel's notions of curriculum reform do not begin to address how serious the problem is.

I don't have a solution, except to say that I am trying to do my part at the university by making my teaching TRANSPARENT TO STUDENTS, sharing with them as part of my course the reasons why I teach the way I do, and the reasons why I think other kinds of teaching are not as good (in my opinion - and students need to formulate their own opinions about these vital issues, through dialogue with others about their opinions, and through self-reflection). So, if someone who is going to be a teacher happens to take one of my courses they will have at least heard SOMETHING from one of their college professors about teaching methodology, and been prodded to be self-reflective about that in at least one of their college courses.

It's not much: but at least it is something. It's sure more than what happens in most college courses which have zero self-awareness of teaching methodology, and where instead of being transparent, the teaching is completely opaque… That was my experience as a student in college, and that is what I see when I look at the syllabuses of my colleagues (insofar as they make their syllabuses available publicly, which is pretty rare to begin with).

So, I found Engel's article completely uninspiring. I hold the universities and colleges to be seriously culpable in the failure of our public schools, and I don't really expect they will be major players in its revitalization. I liked much more the reform proposal that Connie described in this other forum: "Teachers at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design"...

[Laura Gibbs]

The problem of specialization is completely triumphant in the world of academic research - and of course, it makes sense in terms of academic research. The problem is that educating students and training teachers are not matters of research... yet research specialization is what university faculty members have been trained in, and it is what they must embrace in order to get their PhD (and the only way to get a post at a university, a tenure-track post anyway, is to have a PhD, which means to have spent years being trained as a RESEARCHER, not as a teacher - there is almost zero teacher training in a typical PhD program; often not even a full semester of pedagogical training is provided).

Ironically, this also applies to colleges of education: just like the faculty members in other areas of the university, professors in colleges of education are academic research specialists and they are best suited in training other people to be like themselves: academic research specialists. For them to take on new responsibilities in addition to that is something that will be purely voluntary on their parts... and you shouldn't be surprised if there are not many volunteers! As the article implied, job satisfaction is surprisingly not very high among academics: even though they have almost unparalleled job security (tenure is a job for life), they also have almost zero job mobility - if they have tenure at a university where they are not especially happy, that means they are going to be unhappy for the rest of their working lives (opportunities to change jobs after you have tenure are almost non-existent), and spouses often pay a terrible price, too, as a result of their academic partner's almost complete lack of job mobility.

I grew up as the child of an academic so I've known this all my life - but it amazes me what a rosy-colored view of the university world seems to prevail among the general public. I guess it is for this reason: people assume that university professors are like high school teachers but somehow smarter or more highly educated. The opposite is true: university professors are generally NOT like high school teachers. University professors are trained to be highly specialized academic researchers, and teaching is often something they find awkward and difficult because it is does not really suit their personalities at all; they are dedicated to their SUBJECT MATTER, not to their students - quite the opposite of many (most?) K-12 teachers.

[Connie Weber]

Ok, I'm starting to see the whole picture more clearly. I know nothing about this world and thank you for bringing it to my (and the community's) attention.
Let's keep this going, keep it threading through Fireside in various forms, blogs, forums, links.
In my naive way I'd just like to say that the specialization of knowledge is a curious issue. What about those of us who absolutely have to be generalists, who live their lives as generalists? I wonder how different the specialists and the generalists are.
And if you're a specialist and now need to teach your topic of specialization, don't you have to be a generalist, in order to understand how human learning goes? I guess that's what the article is saying. I'm printing it off for study.
Thanks, Laura!

[Laura Gibbs]

GREAT article from Harvard Magazine by Louis Menand: The Ph.D. Problem - On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal.

What Menand documents here fits in very much with my own limited personal experiences. Here are his comments at the end of the article, which are a good statement of why I expect no real change at all in education to come from the colleges of education and the PhDs who work there:

Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected. The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it. […] People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.

[Laura Gibbs]

I would love to hear some optimism from the colleges of education, too, Connie! I think, however, that expecting things to change - really change - at the university level is unrealistic. Because of tenure, the professors who are at universities right now are going to be there for decades to come. Their incentive and motivation to change what they do is about zero. You cannot make professors do anything; for example, there are still some professors at my school who refuse to use email, ha! Admittedly, I'm very cynical about this (having lost my own job as a professor due to the forces committed to resisting change); I am able to do what I do with my classes only because I left the ranks of professors and took up a position as an instructor at half the pay and with no job security. That's what it took for me to get myself in a position where I felt like I could really make a difference, and that is not a choice most people have the luxury to make (with no children, I can afford to take risks with my job life that others cannot). So, I really don't expect to see much change of any kind in my lifetime at the universities... but, of course, I would LOVE TO BE WRONG. Let's hope so!!!

[Connie Weber]

Hi Laura,

Thanks for sharing the article--and your views about the article. I actually love BOTH, the article and your criticism of it.

From the article: "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..."

I agree with that whole-heartedly. I want to have selective, intensive teacher programs. I want that kind of school of education to gradually become the norm: teaching should be a hard profession to get into, and one that requires a lot of top-quality involvement to get through. I agree that teachers should continue studying the subjects they will teach (and not get watered-down versions of them via the often intellectually cheap ed school courses that are currently the mode). Students of education should learn their crafts the way surgeons and therapists do: intensive supervision in real settings, plenty of opportunity to review and reflect with mentors). Students of education need to learn a whole lot about developmental psychology and neuroscience. AGREED!!!

And your criticism of the plan is valid. You are asking how we break out of the mold when we've got people who were educated by that very mold... It has been what we've all seen of education, how we experienced it. And today's upcoming teachers have been through the more recent era of standardization along with the huge emphasis on testing (what Gardner calls our "national obsession")... How can we help people bust out of that?

But I think it's possible for us to break out and do things differently. I think it's a necessity, and we can do it. Hey, you and I and people on Fireside in general are geared towards in-depth involvement and change of the profession (wouldn't you say?); we're going beyond the models we knew and developing better education for our students.

A key point in your criticism is that a few courses can't do this--it has to be an intensive program. And beyond that, there has to be a constant built-in reflective component in what we're doing. We didn't learn how to be teachers and then we were done, we have to each and every day strive to keep learning more.

I love what you're doing with your students: making your pedagogy transparent, sharing your reasoning, modeling and expecting reflection--and excellence.

The Silva article goes deeper, you are right. She's presenting a model that builds in collegiality.

I hope we carry on both that discussion and this one. No matter what, I'm expecting colleges to be major players in the revitalization of education. Maybe we should start a list of outstanding models of teacher education, ones that are selective, deep, tough, built around the ideas briefly covered here.

Do people have suggestions of programs they think are vibrant, high-powered models of what should be going on in teacher education? Have people been in programs they'd highly recommend? Do people have suggestions for what should be going on?

Education professors, what do you see? What would you like to see?