Nate wrote,
> What caught my attention and pissed me off was the assertion of
> the "stupid
> teachers". I would like feedback because those that get into our SOE even
> with its emphasis on getting those into education who haven't received the
> highest grade has the highest per student GPA out of any school or
> department in the whole University. Newsgroups and articles point to the
> low standards of teacher education, but from my experience their the ones
> with the highest GPA.
I have a few observational comments and mainstream discourse demonstrated in
the article:
1. The discourse suggests "good" student is "smart" student. Or even
reverse, "smart" student is "good" student.
2. Evidence of "smartness" is in student having high GPA.
3. Students who want to be teachers are failure themselves. This supports
common "wisdom" -- if you can't do anything else become a teacher.
I can offer my personal observations about preservice teachers that I teach
to refute each of the points. Let me start in the reverse order. In my
view, I, as a SOE instructor, struggle exactly with my students being very
school-successful. They are often ones of the best. And this is the
problem (for me). They have very high grades (and GPA). They study and
work for grades. This is not just my observation but their own testimony
articulated in our class and web discussions. They often have never
experienced academic learning for pleasure and they think, at least
initially, that it is impossible. They are great survivors of institutional
control and pressure. They are street smart of knowing school shortcuts.
They have great dreams of becoming teachers who make differences in their
kids' lives. And still they are aiming at becoming a part of the great
circle called mainstream institutionalized Western education crashing
participants' interests, dreams, pleasures, potentials, and abilities. The
essence of school machine: control, discipline, transmission of knowledge,
meeting benchmarks, blaming kids and parents, fatigue, and indifference will
claim many of them. JOB -- concerns with promotion, survival, dealing with
burnout -- will soon replace their dreams. Of course, schools are not alone
(and probably not even a main player) of this reproducing circle, but
definitely important phase as research on schooling shows but it is another
story.
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nate [mailto:schmolze@students.wisc.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 4:13 PM
> To: XMCA
> Subject: Re: teacher ed critique
>
>
> Eugene and others,
>
> In reading both I sensed on one level your students had many of the same
> frustrations prior to your class that the article discusses. I know until
> recently in our SOE constructivism was seen in an holier than though way
> which was above critique. The way of thinking it embraced was not
> challenged in any way. One student I know said, that we were never
> allowed to be critical of DAP or constructivism. Any way of thinking,
> which is now Vygotsky, should never be above critique.
>
> In general I think SOE in particular are very conservative organizations.
> More Vygotskian, comparative type research did not start being
> brought into
> the SOE until a few years ago. Critical thought is not necessarily valued
> because what you are often learning, reading etc. is the professors
> ideological preference and very often their books. When a paradigm shift
> like constructivism initially occurs a university invests capital in that
> particular ideology and that makes critique and other ideas coming in less
> likely. So, rather than SOE being seen as liberal, I would argue they are
> pretty conservative and resistant to change, for better or worse.
>
> What caught my attention and pissed me off was the assertion of
> the "stupid
> teachers". I would like feedback because those that get into our SOE even
> with its emphasis on getting those into education who haven't received the
> highest grade has the highest per student GPA out of any school or
> department in the whole University. Newsgroups and articles point to the
> low standards of teacher education, but from my experience their the ones
> with the highest GPA.
>
> Nate
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Eugene Matusov <ematusov who-is-at UDel.Edu>
> To: XMCA <xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
> Cc: Tony Whitson <twhitson who-is-at UDel.Edu>; John St. Julien <stjulien@UDel.Edu>
> Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 1:36 PM
> Subject: FW: teacher ed critique
>
>
> Hello everybody--
>
> Below is another interesting article and food for thought. There is a
> critique of/attack on liberal School of Education programs of preparing
> elementary school teachers.
>
> At the end of my classes I ask my students (both undergraduate and
> graduate)
> to write what, from their point of view, they have learned in my class (if
> anything). Like all other my class assignments, except the final project,
> it is not graded assignment (called "mini-project" in the syllabus).
> Several of my undergraduate students of their teaching method course with
> teaching practicum experience -- preservice teachers -- wrote something
> like
> that (which, in my view, can be relevant to the article below),
>
> "I think that it is very interesting that we saw the difference between
> public schools and Montessori schooling. I feel that Montessori schools
> allows the children to be more in control of what they learn. These makes
> the children more interested and therefore more motivated. I like the idea
> of asking the children what they want to learn. Public schools never give
> children the opportunity to provide input on what they are going to study.
> I
> know that this way of constructing a classroom is unrealistic in a public
> school, because of accountability and standards. We should still give the
> students a voice in their own education."
>
> "Before this semester we had only talked about constructivism and
> traditional teachers, this semester we got to see it and decide what we
> wanted to be. I think that before this semester I thought that I wanted to
> be a constructivist teacher. After this semester I have decided that is
> almost impossible in todays schools. I now know that I want to be
> somewhere
> in the middle of the two."
>
> "Learning instructional strategies is important for have a civil
> classroom.
> I realize now how a constructivist classroom can work. I was brought up in
> the traditional setting, but after learning more about problem-based
> learning and constructivism, I tend to believe that the traditional should
> be changed. I believe that there can be a successful medium."
>
> "One thing that has always bothered me about school has been the
> competitiveness that is embedded within education. There is enough
> competition in or hierarchical society that there is no reason why we
> should
> be labeling kids and placing them into their positions this early on.
> Grades
> should not be the basis of the way we educate children and assess their
> learning on tests. I'm glad we got to learn about more authentic
> assessments
> and ways of making our classrooms a community where students work with and
> help one another."
>
> "I have learned the great importance of considering student's interests in
> planning activities. Many teachers take for granted that what
> they say goes
> and that their students have to participate in whatever they plan
> for them.
> What many don't realize is that if students are not interested in what the
> teacher is saying or doing, if the teacher does not make directions clear,
> and if the teacher does not consider his students' needs and outside
> factors, the students will not learn a thing regardless of what
> is going on
> in the classroom. Students will only pay attention and really learn and
> retain anything if their teacher works to create relevance for them in the
> classroom and keeps their interests peaked."
>
> "There are two more pieces of knowledge that will be invaluable
> to me in my
> future. I learned that there are an infinite number of activities that
> teach
> the same concepts and skills. Before this year, I had the notion
> that there
> are a few best ways to teach one concept or skill. Now, I know
> many lessons
> are valid and good depending on my students, and I know how to
> evaluate and
> compose a lesson that will teach the concepts and skills that I want my
> students to learn. Finally, one more fact that I had never really thought
> of
> before was that making my lessons interesting for my students will be a
> large part of my classroom management. If my students are interested in a
> lesson, they are much less likely to act inappropriately. This fact will
> encourage me to develop intriguing lessons for my students."
>
> I'd like to know what you think about the article below in the context of
> the students' voices (selected by me),
>
> Eugene
> ----------------------
> Eugene Matusov
> School of Education
> University of Delaware
> Newark, DE 19716
> Office (302) 831-1266
> Fax (302) 831-4445
> email ematusov who-is-at udel.edu
> Website http://ematusov.eds.udel.edu/
> -------------------------
>
>
> ------------------------
> Features Archive - Respond to this Article
> May 1999 - Volume 31 Issue 5
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -
> -----
> Method Madness
> Why are public school teachers so poorly trained?
> by Carol Innerst
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
> -
> ----
>
> With a new semester just getting underway, Paula Kelberman's first order
> to her class of prospective elementary school teachers at East Stroudsberg
> University in Pennsylvania was to rearrange the tables in the classroom.
> They were lined up in rows. She wanted them in a "U" shape because rows
> are "boring" and too "traditional." Rows also apparently promote
> individualism, which would-be teachers learn is bad, rather than
> cooperation, which encourages students to talk and work together. "This is
> not a course that will tax you in terms of reading," the professor
> continued. "I'm not as interested in your grade as I am interested in your
> ability to explain your own process. The final product will not be as
> important as the effort, the process you put into it."
>
> These techniques - stressing how rather than what to teach - are common in
> the 1,300 colleges and universities responsible for training our future
> teachers. Educators have complained for decades about the failure of
> teacher ed programs to offer teachers any substantial training in subject
> matter. But despite a spate of reports and recommendations and flurries of
> activity in the name of teacher education reform, little has changed in
> the way most teacher training institutions go about their business. Most
> still attract students of average or below average intellectual ability.
> Most still make it easy for students to get into teacher education
> programs, often after they have failed coursework in another discipline.
> And most still view their role, and the primary role of the teachers they
> train, as change agents whose mission is to work toward social justice and
> equity in the classroom rather than academic achievement. The 1993 mission
> statement of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education
> explains: "First and foremost, quality teacher education [programs] must
> be places of active conscience. The professional commitment to social
> justice, and the ethics of equity and diversity in the American culture
> must be palpable."
>
> Social justice and equity are commendable goals for society, and no one
> could quarrel with the need for conscientious teachers who know how to
> create a harmonious classroom atmosphere. Moreover, some pedagogical
> training is clearly necessary, especially for teaching younger children
> (if you doubt it, try spending a day as a substitute third-grade teacher).
> But the foundation for learning is built in the elementary years and too
> often, the basics of teaching kids to read, write, and compute lose out to
> educational fads that focus on building self-esteem and discouraging
> competition.
>
> For instance, in an effort to avoid competition and hierarchy, ed schools
> promote something called "cooperative learning" - putting students of
> varying abilities to work together on a project. Cooperative learning can
> be an excellent educational technique in some circumstances. But when used
> exclusively - as it often is - it enforces a lowest common denominator on
> the group and holds individuals back. Prospective teachers are subjected
> to large doses of cooperative learning as well, as professors model the
> desired teaching techniques. Other current teaching fads include
> "developmentally appropriate" learning, which posits that education is a
> natural unfolding that occurs at different times for different children
> and discourages teaching them to read and write before they are "ready."
> E.D. Hirsch, the education critic and author of The Schools We Need and
> Why We Don't Have Them, testified before Congress that "this doctrine is
> drummed into almost all teachers who take early-education courses. The
> intention is to ensure caring treatment of young children, yet the
> ultimate effect of the doctrine is to cause social harm. To withold
> demanding content from young children between preschool and third grade
> has an effect which is quite different from the one intended. It leaves
> advantaged children [who get knowledge at home] with boring pabulum, and
> it condemns disadvantaged children to a permanent educational handicap
> that grows worse over time."
>
> To make matters worse, today's prospective teachers are often themselves
> the products of poor schooling and arrive on campus requiring remediation
> in math, writing, and sometimes reading. Consequently textbooks used in
> teachers colleges have been dumbed down to the point where a book used for
> a sophomore-level child psychology course, for example, "is written at
> what used to be a 10th or 11th grade high school reading level," according
> to John E. Stone, an education professor at East Tennessee State
> University.
>
> Small wonder then that 59 percent of newly-matriculated Massachusetts
> teachers, steeped in methodology designed to make students feel good about
> themselves but bereft of factual knowledge about any subject, failed a
> literacy exam given by the state last year. This was no isolated incident.
> The previous spring, Connetquot school district on Long Island in New York
> state got 758 applications in response to an advertisement to fill 35
> teaching vacancies. District officials decided to narrow the pool by
> asking applicants to take a short version of a multiple choice reading
> comprehension test taken from the state's old 11th grade Regents English
> exams. Just 202 applicants correctly answered at least 40 of the 50
> questions.
>
> Not too long ago it was expected that a child would learn to read by the
> end of first grade. In recent years, that expectation has been pushed back
> to the end of third grade - and many children still fail to learn because
> their teachers were never properly taught how to teach them. The
> prevailing "whole language" philosophy of reading instruction sees
> learning to read as a natural process that will come in time when the
> child is developmentally ready to learn to read. A good example of the
> chasm between education professors and parents (and even many teachers) is
> the language war over the best way to teach reading - phonics or whole
> language. Most schools of education continue to train prospective teachers
> in whole language even though research shows that early, systematic
> phonics instruction is necessary for 30 to 40 percent of beginning
> readers. It takes a brave teacher to buck the belief system and whip out
> flash cards when she sees children struggling to read because they have
> not been taught to sound out the letters of the alphabet. California,
> which saw its reading scores plummet after years of whole language
> instruction, has ordered schools to teach phonics, but there is massive
> resistance to this change.
>
> Parents complain, too, that their children reach middle school and can't
> multiply because teachers have been trained to emphasize "higher level
> thinking skills" rather the mundane memorization of the multiplication
> tables. Rote memorization is bad, teacher trainees are told. Learning any
> facts is useless, they hear, because information is constantly changing
> and increasing. It would be impossible to teach or absorb it all.
>
> A 1997 Public Agenda survey documented a huge disparity between what
> parents want their children to be taught in school, and what professors of
> education want them to learn. Parents want orderly schools that emphasize
> the academic fundamentals. Education professors want less structured
> schooling that facilitates inquiry and stresses "learning how to learn."
> Despite evidence that disadvantaged children especially benefit from
> traditional "direct instruction" (the teacher has information and
> transmits it to the pupil), Public Agenda found that even for this group
> education professors continued to preach process and learner-centered
> teaching in which children "construct their own knowledge."
>
> Raising the Bar
> To become a public school teacher, college graduates have to be certified
> by the state. Prospective teachers must take required general education
> and education courses, do a stint at student teaching, and pass a series
> of general knowledge tests. The passing scores on these tests vary from
> state to state but tend to be low. As a result, a lot of unqualified
> teachers get into the classroom. In the early '80s a few states weeded out
> the illiterates by testing veteran teachers, but howls from the teachers
> unions soon nipped that practice in the bud. For their part, unions
> complained that too many teachers were assigned to classes in subjects
> they had not trained in. A math teacher, for example, might be asked to
> take over a physics class because of a shortage of physics teachers.
>
> Prodded by public officials, states like Pennsylvania are attempting to
> address the problem of teacher quality in a variety of ways, including
> forcing changes in the way the teacher training schools do business.
> Governor Tom Ridge and Secretary of Education Eugene W. Hickok have
> launched reform initiatives to upgrade teacher training. The first thing
> they've done is make it harder to get into state schools of education by
> increasing the required minimum grade point average to a 2.5 or higher,
> depending on the specialty. They're also making it harder to get licensed
> as a teacher and are forcing schools to eliminate the watered-down content
> courses for teachers, replacing them with rigorous curricula that put the
> emphasis on subject mastery. There is considerable resentment among the
> deans and other high-level administrators, but privately some faculty
> members at the schools of education are cheering the efforts.
>
> Pennsylvania's East Stroudsburg University, for example, raised the grade
> point average needed to get into elementary education from 2.5 to 2.75.
> Students still need to take 60 hours in general education, but no longer
> have a smorgasbord of courses to choose from. A would-be secondary math
> teacher now must take the same math course a math major takes, not an
> easier course designed especially for teachers.
>
> Hickok, who gave up his tenure at Dickinson College to continue working on
> education reform during the final four years of the Ridge administration,
> remains disappointed that teaching is "still attracting too many students
> who really aren't of the intellectual calibre I'd like to see. On any
> college campus, the best and the brightest aren't going into education,"
> he said. "That will take time." Some deans of schools of education agree.
> Dean Edwin J. Delattre of Boston University School of Education - one of
> the harshest critics of teacher training - says there are no more than 50
> good teacher training institutions among the 1,300 in the country. Of the
> others, he says: "They admit and graduate students who have low levels of
> intellectual accomplishment. They are well-intentioned, decent, nice
> people who by and large don't know what they're doing."
>
> Three years ago BU began to target only teacher applicants with high SAT
> scores. The inquiry pool immediately dropped 17 percent, but SAT scores of
> the freshman class topped 1200 that year - more than 300 points higher
> than the average self-declared education majors who took the 1996 SAT. BU
> also doubled the amount of time prospective teachers must spend in math
> class and made an ethics course mandatory.
>
> Some schools, among them George Mason University's Graduate School of
> Education, are tying teacher training to professional development schools
> - public schools that bridge the chasm between the theorists at
> universities and the practitioners dealing with real children in real
> classrooms. These schools work closely with teacher training institutions
> and allow prospective teachers to use their classrooms for extensive field
> experience. The program uses the school's veteran teachers as mentors to
> the student teachers and also brings university professors out of their
> ivory tower and into a real classroom. New teachers say the extended
> practical experience is extremely beneficial. Dean Gary R. Galluzzo of
> George Mason is a strong advocate of professional development schools. He
> remembers going through teacher training and not seeing any students until
> his first day of student teaching. "I didn't see a teenager until my first
> day in that school in 1973," he said. "That's wrong."
>
> Another way to improve the quality of teaching is through alternative
> certification programs. If properly designed and executed, such programs
> can open public classroom doors to people like Hickok, who has taught at
> the college level but is deemed unqualified to teach in a public K-12
> school because he has not jumped through the hoops of ed-school
> methodology training. The nation's first true alternative certification
> program was pioneered by New Jersey in the '80s. The program, which
> attracted more minorities to teaching than the regular teacher college
> route, put college graduates with a bachelor's degree into K-12 classrooms
> where they worked with a mentor teacher while taking an abbreviated
> teacher training program evenings and weekends. Pennsylvania is about to
> launch a similar initiative that will let bachelor's degree holders teach
> under a mentor while taking one year of subject-based coursework to obtain
> a teaching certificate. The key is that the coursework will steep the
> teacher candidate in the subject he or she has been hired to teach, not
> just pedagogy.
>
> This kind of alternative certification, which can bypass or at least
> lessen the impact of the faddish curricula of the teacher training
> institutions, could be a potent tool for forcing schools of education to
> become responsive to and provide the kind of no nonsense teachers that
> parents and the larger public want to see in K-12 classrooms.
>
> School choice, which allows families to choose the public or private
> school they want their children to attend with state funding following the
> child, could also prod schools losing students to rethink their
> methodologies, putting pressure on the training institutions. In many
> districts, parents for years have signaled their desire for traditional or
> basic schools that put an emphasis on subject matter and are dedicated to
> achievement. The few public schools that feature structure and the basics
> find parents standing in line for days to try to get their child enrolled.
> Public charter schools can have the same kind of impact, particularly if
> their charters successfully free them from the regulatory red tape of
> hostile local school boards and teachers unions.
>
> Another lever for change could come through the states, which accredit
> teacher training institutions and license teachers. If a school regularly
> graduates teachers who can't pass the state's certification test, states
> can shut that school down. States can also adopt value-added assessments
> to determine how well teachers are doing in the classroom. Pioneered in
> Tennessee, value-added assessment requires new teachers to demonstrate
> their ability to produce achievement in their students, not just pass
> performance-based exams that test their grasp of the current pedagogocal
> orthodoxy learned in teacher training schools. At a minimum, value-added
> assessment requires annual testing of students in all grades with a
> reliable and valid achievement test.
>
> Unfortunately, teacher training reform appears to be headed in the wrong
> direction. The 1996 report of the National Commission on Teaching and
> America's Future calls for all teacher training to be aligned with the
> teacher certification standards developed by the National Board for
> Professional Teaching Standards. The National Board's standards are
> consistent with the "latest research" that supports learner-center
> teaching and other fads already solidly in place in those institutions.
> The current push by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher
> Education to bring all teacher training under its auspices would similarly
> assure that social and attitudinal goals, not academic achievement, remain
> the priority of teachers. And that would add another nail to the coffin of
> teacher training reform.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
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> This site and all contents within are Copyright 1999
> The Washington Monthly, Washington, D.C.
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>
>
>
> --------------------
> David Blacker
> University of Delaware
> blacker who-is-at udel.edu
>