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Inside Our Schools: Teaching the teachers
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In an Op Ed. in today’s New York Times (11/02/09), “Teach Your Teachers Well,” Susan Engel, director of the teaching program at Williams College, makes some very important points about what is necessary for colleges to do in order to produce good teachers.
Among the points she makes are:
Student-teachers should get a degree in an academic subject they care about (such as chemistry, history or English) rather than an education degree.
Such potential teachers should get intensive hands-on training in classroom experiences including video taping of their presentations in order to develop their teaching techniques.
They should have outstanding teachers as mentors to give them the kind of advice and training they need to be successful in the classroom.
They should also learn more about how children learn, using the latest information rather than what Engel characterizes as: “static and superficial overviews” of the stages of children’s intellectual development.
Unfortunately, what is missing from Professor Engel’s suggestions is any mention of the negative influence of the so-called “assessment movement,” intensified by the No Child Left Behind emphasis on “improving” test scores, often ignoring many more productive ways of instructing students.
In my thirty-seven years of teaching literature and writing at what is predominantly a teachers’ education college, I experimented with many techniques to improve student learning. These applied not only to college students but to the grade school students they were being trained to teach. I found, as has been substantiated by many educators since John Dewey, that students best learn if you establish an atmosphere in the classroom in which much of their learning comes from each other.
Just as you wouldn’t try to teach a toddler how to speak by giving him or her lessons in spelling and grammar, so the best educators find ways to motivate students to learn by teaching one another problem-solving and critical thinking skills derived from carefully planned, thoroughly tested learning strategies. The kind of teaching being forced on many teachers today with emphasis on testing does not produce effective learning.
This sad state of affairs is reflected in the 50% plus drop-out rate of college students and the need of many of those who do graduate to be “retrained” by their employers so they can actually do the job they were “educated” to do. It would have been helpful to our understanding of what is wrong with education today if Professor Engel had mentioned the obstacle of “assessment” for its own sake.
