12.31.69
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This article sketches out a comprehensive approach for preparing history teachers. It argues that grounding in historical content knowledge is necessary for success in the classroom, but such grounding is not enough to ensure that success. For beginning teachers, the problem is not merely acquiring content knowledge but acquiring it in ways that facilitate teaching subjects to young people of varied backgrounds and abilities. In short, teachers need to understand content in the context of teaching, meaning prospective history teachers must have a robust understanding of history’s details, ways in which historians acquire and structure those details, and how teachers can make the subject accessible and worth knowing for students. This approach demands that teachers also know how their students understand history and the assumptions they make about historical events and developments. Finally, prospective teachers need to know how to offer content-rich, engaging instruction within a standards-based, high-stakes testing context.
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This article argues that with changes in attitudes and actions in classrooms, teachers can alter what happens in urban schools and transform the lives of students. Ten precepts are offered to assist them in that role: teach more, not less, content to poor, urban children; ensure all children gain access to conventions/strategies essential to success in American society; whatever methodology/instructional program used, demand critical thinking; provide the emotional ego strength to challenge racist societal views of the competence and worthiness of children and their families; recognize and build on children’s strengths; use familiar metaphors, analogies, and experiences from the children’s world to connect what children already know to school knowledge; create a sense of family and caring in the service of academic achievement; monitor/assess children’s needs and address them with a wealth of diverse strategies; honor and respect children’s home culture; and foster a sense of children’s connection to community.
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As a teacher educator, the author believes that he must prepare teachers to go forth into schools with a deep understanding of the subjects they will teach, an appreciation for how students learn, and a repertoire of instructional strategies that will help them make learning come alive for their students. As they develop these skills, they must simultaneously work on resolving four inescapable challenges: First, they have to figure out what it means to be a novice. Second, although teaching is intellectually challenging, it is also chock full of emotional drama. How students negotiate the emotional terrain of teaching is a critical element of their experience. Third, the author thinks about how a primary challenge for teachers is to secure the genuine attention of students. Fourth, the author considers what it means for young teachers to take care of their health and spirit amid the stress that marks the 1st year of teaching.
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Schools of education typically prepare their prospective teachers to work with amorphous "average students"—who are by implication middle class, native, English speaking, and White. They are then given some limited opportunities to adapt these understandings to students with diverging profiles—children of poverty, second language learners, and students of color. The authors argue that given the changing demographics of public schools, initial teacher education should be based on the understandings that teachers typically do not receive until the end of their programs or in add-on endorsements. They should be prepared from the outset to work with the wide diversity of language, culture, and class that they are likely to meet in public schools. Ten recommendations are presented for "What Every Teacher Should Do" to work effectively in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings they are likely to encounter.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
This article proposes a model of formative assessment grounded in Vygotsky’s theory of concept formation and argues that this model can provide a useful framework for facilitating a beginning teacher’s continued learning. The model is used to argue that beginning teachers need to know how to recognize, describe, and use students’ prior knowledge not only in terms of whether students get the academic concept but also in terms of the valuable, experience-based aspects of what students do know. The author demonstrates the model’s utility by describing the results of a 3-year classroom research study on preservice teachers’ conceptions of students’ prior knowledge and formative assessment. A "get it or don’t" conception was commonly used by preservice teachers and was found to have serious impacts on their instructional practices. The article concludes by exploring the potential of a theory-enhanced model of formative assessment for teacher educators’ own instructional practices.
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Who should be accountable for what beginning teachers need to know? This article first explains and illustrates three sets of knowledge and skills beginning teachers should have acquired in their preparation programs: academic knowledge needed for teaching the field of their license, generic professional knowledge and skills needed for teaching any subject, and license-specific professional knowledge and skills needed for teaching the field of their license. The article then argues that the wrong faculty is held accountable for the most important things beginning teachers of core subjects from Grade 5 to 12 need to acquire—deep knowledge of the subject they teach and a beginning understanding of how to teach it—and that their preparation programs are approved by agencies with no valid basis for making judgments of these crucial details. It concludes with suggestions for restructuring teacher preparation and assigning accountability where it belongs.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
The author offers a brief critique of the clichés that rain down on beginning teachers as they struggle to find their ways in this most complex, slippery, and rewarding work and encourages a steady focus on the intellectual and ethical heart of teaching from the start. A sample of practical advice—little parachutes and safety nets—are put forward as possible aids in the adventure.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
Recent advances in biology and digital technology represent unique opportunities for teacher educators to rethink the programmatic experiences of prospective secondary science and mathematics teachers. This article discusses the importance of teacher education programs that connect mathematics and science where appropriate, recognize the hybridization of science, and integrate biological and digital features into program learning experiences. In addition, recommendations for incorporating these design features into teacher education are offered.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
Do we prepare teachers for the schools we wish all children could attend or do we prepare teachers for the schools where they are most likely to find a position? The authors address the often-asked question What do beginning teachers need to know? by making the case that we must prepare teachers for the disparate conditions found on the educational landscape. Public policy decisions, economic conditions, and the teaching profession itself have created two systems of schooling in America. One system values the professionalism of teachers and believes education is broad in its definition. The other system offers a myopic focus on test scores and defines teaching as nothing more than content delivery. Schools of education must become agents of change by preparing teachers steeped in the realities of modern schools but aware of the power of an individual teacher to impart change.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
This article focuses on characteristics necessary to be an effective teacher for all children, regardless of their academic ability, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, family structure, sexual orientation, and ability to speak English. The article gives attention to the issues of equity and social justice as it addresses the knowledge and skill base of effective teachers.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
Much of what teachers need to know to be successful is invisible to lay observers, leading to the view that teaching requires little formal study and to frequent disdain for teacher education programs. The weakness of traditional program models that are collections of largely unrelated courses reinforce this low regard. This article argues that we have learned a great deal about how to create stronger, more effective teacher education programs. Three critical components of such programs include tight coherence and integration among courses and between course work and clinical work in schools, extensive and intensely supervised clinical work integrated with course work using pedagogies that link theory and practice, and closer, proactive relationships with schools that serve diverse learners effectively and develop and model good teaching. The article also urges that schools of education should resist pressures to water down preparation, which ultimately undermine the preparation of entering teachers, the reputation of schools of education, and the strength of the profession.
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In this article, the author explores seven "unanswered questions" concerning the preparation of future teacher educator-researchers. She considers five questions concerning the substance of doctoral preparation: what the new generation of teacher-researchers would need to know about teacher education, relevant disciplines, research methodologies, teaching in universities, and K-12 schooling. She then briefly discusses the need to theorize about how doctoral students learn to teach and conduct research. In essence, the author proposes a curriculum for her own learning as a mentor and advisor in a doctoral program for future teacher educator-researchers.
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Drawing on his nearly 30 years as a university teacher educator, the author reflects about the future of college- and university-based teacher education in the United States in light of recent attacks on education schools. The author argues that university and college teacher educators should do four things: (a) work to redefine the debate about the relative merits of alternative and traditional certification programs, (b) work to broaden the goals of teacher education beyond raising scores on standardized achievement tests, (c) change the center of gravity in teacher education to provide a stronger role for schools and communities in the education of teachers, and (d) take teacher education seriously as an institutional responsibility or do not do it.
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(No abstract is available for this citation)
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
(No abstract is available for this citation)
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
A recent report of the American Educational Research Association Panel on Research and Teacher Education confirms beyond question earlier findings exposing the limited utility of our research base in answering questions pertaining to policy or practice concerning preparation and licensing of teachers. Conditions accounting for this perplexing circumstance are described in detail by the panel, as are recommendations provided for overcoming them. A recent research project anticipating many of the recommendations led this article’s authors to the view that several of the recommendations need added detail to be immediately helpful to the research community and that further recommendations are needed for "scaled-up" research called for by the panel. Accordingly, suggested additions and refinements, with accompanying rationale and examples, are proposed. A central theme of this article is the need to add explanatory power to teacher education research, with the accompanying caution that doing so brings added complexity to theory, measurement, and design.
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Productive strategies for evaluating outcomes are becoming increasingly important for the improvement, and even the survival, of teacher education. This article describes a set of research and assessment strategies used to evaluate program outcomes in the Stanford Teacher Education Program during a period of program redesign over the past 5 years. These include perceptual data on what candidates feel they have learned in the program (through surveys and interviews) as well as independent measures of what they have learned (data from pretests and posttests, performance assessments, work samples, employers’ surveys, and observations of practice). The article discusses the possibilities and limits of different tools for evaluating teachers and teacher education and describes future plans for assessing beginning teachers’ performance in teacher education, their practices in the initial years of teaching, and their pupils’ learning.
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Advocacy for academically based teacher education informs this article, which stresses the need for persuasive evidence of its value. A summary of the current state of the evidence is presented, concluding that positive evidence is now very limited. What is needed to make the case for academically based teacher education is quantitative empirical evidence. The data presented by Coleman are described as a case study to demonstrate the difficulties in interpreting empirical data developed through quantitative methods. The recent assembling of comprehensive longitudinal databases of student achievement in multiple knowledge domains linking individual students with specific teachers is shown to be a promising improvement available to contemporary researchers. Good data and the means for working with them are currently at hand. Those who support the aims of academically based teacher education are called to develop quantitative empirical arguments that will build a dossier of persuasive evidence on its behalf.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
New York City represents a microcosm of the changes that are shaking the very foundations of teacher education in this country. In their efforts to find teachers for hard-to-staff schools by creating multiple pathways into teaching, districts from New York City to Los Angeles are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers. This article provides an overview of a research project that examines features of these different pathways into teaching in New York City schools and the impact of these features on where teachers teach, how long they remain in the classroom, and student achievement in reading and math as measured by value-added analyses. The article provides both a conceptual framework for the study and a discussion of some of the methodological challenges involved in such research, including problems of selection bias, difficulties in documenting programmatic features, and challenges of estimating teacher effects on student achievement.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
The locus of control in teacher education has been outside the hands of those who educate our nation’s teachers for more than a century. Essentialists have long controlled the agenda for public schooling in America, and it is evident as well that their influence has prevailed in both the form and function of teacher education. The authors suggest that the contest between progressives and essentialists regarding teacher education has been repeatedly decided in favor of the essentialists. The current attempt to recast teacher education to focus singularly on effectiveness of classroom teachers in raising the test scores of their students is a not-unanticipated result of this enduring contest.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
(No abstract is available for this citation)
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
(No abstract is available for this citation)
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
(No abstract is available for this citation)
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
(No abstract is available for this citation)
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Administrator
All those responsible for the preparation of teachers agree that having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom is essential to student academic achievement. The research of the past decade by William Sanders and others clearly demonstrates the significance of the teacher in fostering student growth and academic achievement. What researchers and practitioners are having difficulty agreeing on is the essential characteristics of the teachers who create value-added learning and the ways in which professional development experiences need to be structured in order to foster and develop those critical teacher characteristics. The Ohio Teacher Quality Partnership represents one state's approach to better understand the relationship between teacher behaviors and student achievement and how a wide variety of stakeholders are collaborating to create a more vital educational system for P-12 students.
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