Training of Teachers Is Flawed, Study Says

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

The National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group, is to issue a study on Thursday reporting that most student-teaching programs are seriously flawed. The group has already angered the nation’s schools for teachers with its plans to give them letter grades that would appear in U.S. News and World Report.

The council’s report, “Student Teaching in the United States,” rated 134 student-teaching programs nationwide — about 10 percent of those preparing elementary school teachers — and found that three-quarters of them did not meet five basic standards for a high-quality student-teaching program.

When the U.S. News rankings are published, the student-teaching programs will count for one-fifth to one-third of an education school’s grade, according to Kate Walsh, president of the council.

“Many people would say student teaching is the most important piece of teacher preparation,” Ms. Walsh said. “But the field is really barren in the area of standards. The basic accrediting body doesn’t even have a standard for how long a student teacher needs to be in the classroom. And most of the institutions we reviewed do not do enough to screen the quality of the cooperating teacher the student will work with.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/education/21teaching.html

[ananda]

1. Well...

... from my own experience, the best way to learn how to teach is to
get in there and just do it. You pick things up from other teachers and
from those who have been there. And of course from trial and error.

[wordpix]

13. +1 New teachers should be assistants for a year first ---have seen so many BIG MISTAKES

made by new, young teachers including those who come from Teach for America. Great young people, but please don't put them in with a tough crowd without real experience in the classroom first.

[backtomn]

18. How would that work for Doctors......

....or architects......or nuclear scientists......or race car drivers......or, you get the point. Having knowledge and being able to impart knowledge are two different things. From my scientific research experience, the best researchers often do not make the best managers. They are two different skills.

[Angry Dragon]

2. It also helps that all students come from the same mold

I always thought that each student learns in their own way and the teacher
had to find different ways to reach different students.

[KansDem]

3. The National Council on Teacher Quality is funded by...

The National Council on Teacher Quality receives all of its funding from private foundations. Here is a list of our funders:

Aaron Straus and Lillie Straus Foundation
Abell Foundation
B & L Foundation
Barksdale Reading Institute
Barr Foundation
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Boston Foundation
Bower Foundation
Brookhill Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Chamberlin Family Foundation
Daniels Fund
Doris and Donald Fisher Fund
Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Finnegan Family Foundation
Foundation for the MidSouth
Garner Foundation
George Gund Foundation
Gleason Family Foundation
Goldsmith Family Foundation
Harold Whitworth Pierce Charitable Trust
Houston Endowment
Joyce Foundation
Longfield Family Foundation
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education
Morton K. and Jane Blaustein Foundation
Osa Foundation
Phil Hardin Foundation
Polk Bros Foundation
Rockwell Collins, Inc.
Searle Freedom Trust
Steans Family Foundation
The Teaching Commission
Walker Foundation

http://www.nctq.org/p/about/funders.jsp

Found this on the NEA's site:
Study Finds Student-Teaching Suffers From Poor Supervision

A controversial report by the National Council on Teacher Quality examined student-teaching practices in 134 education schools, and found that all but a quarter of the programs reviewed earned a “weak” or “poor” rating. Some education organizations are criticizing the review for its methodology. Source: Education Week

http://neatoday.org/2011/07/21/study-finds-student-teaching-suffers-from-poor-supervision/

I'd like to know what the criticism is of its methodology...

[izquierdista]

4. What a pile

What is amusing is that to teach math to high school seniors, one needs to have a teaching credential, lots of education courses, and an apprenticeship known as "student teaching". To teach the same math to college freshmen, one needs to be a first year math grad student on a teaching stipend.

[canaar]

7. Complex issues rarely have simple or dismissive solutions.

Public education - captive audience, percentage of client direct funding much less than percentage of client funding to colleges.

Children are public education clients (dependents) v. adults as clients.

Mandatory attendance v. voluntary attendance.

Higher percentage of students in college who have learned how to learn v. public school students.

Scope of public education peripheral responsibilites v. scope of cullege peripheral responsibilities.

I have taken college math classes from 1st year math grad students. A pretty mixed and uneven bag but no more so than the mixed bag of instructors, assist. profs, assoc. profs, and tenured math profs that I had most of whom had no evident teacher training. College frosh failing math and dropping out raises not one peep of a hue and cry about teacher quality. Kids dropping out of high school because of socio-economic reasons, health/safety reasons or other factors over which public school educators have no influence (let alone control) and it's clearly a teacher quality issue.
puhleeze.......

I wish I was still actively teaching so I could invite you to teach just one of my classes for a month. I'd let you have your choice.

[izquierdista]

11. What level?

I'm not qualified to teach high school, I can only teach at a university.

[canaar]

15. K-12

Math 1st grade through pre-calculus. Elementary general music. Elementary - secondary instrumental music. 8-12 physical science, earth science, life science, ecology, biology, chemistry. 8-12 computer applications. HS Basic programming. MS and HS woodworking. HS Physical Education.

The issue being addressed in the OP addresses the issues around the quality of the practicum aspect of new teacher training. The POV that you expressed is consistent with the popular notion that anyone with a four-year degree(or perhaps less), can teach. In my post-teaching career, I represented the employment interests of public school employees in Florida, among other states. At the time, Florida experienced significant teacher shortages. In the county that I was working, there were about 150 unfilled teaching positions in April that had been unfilled with any qualified, probationary, alternative route to certification teachers or substitute teachers with a 4 year college degree. To quote the District's personnel director at the time, "we can't fill those vacancies because we have already hired every otherwise unemployed and degreed warm body within commuting distance."

Florida offered provisional certification to anyone possessing a 4 year college degree in any subject to teach any subject (either related to or unrelated to) their fields or study and/or expertise so long as the individual would be willing to undergo a several year teacher training program provided by the district on the employee's work time, at the employer's expense while being employed as a full time teacher. A substantial portion of my workload involved representing these provisional teachers in termination proceedings. I never represented a single provisional teacher who wasn't re-employed by the district within 2 weeks or less. Several of these teachers were 'fired' from the district as many as three or four times per year and re-hired. Before you go to beating up on me, I had no influence whatsoever on their re-employment. Strictly a matter of supply and demand.

I do not go so far as to say that no college/university teacher has the ability to be a successful k-12 teacher. I will say that being a successful college/university teacher does not guarantee any degree of success in K-12 public education. It has admittedly been about 13 years since I took my last college classes (Advanced Calculus and Projective Geometry) and I am sure that college pedagogy has not remained static during that time. However, "My way or the highway," was the ultimate theme of all the colleges, law school, grad school that I attended and I don't argue the appropriateness of that attitude. In public education, My way or the highway hit the road beginning in the late sixties, had left the city limits by the mid 70s and became a hoary memory after the publication of A Nation at Risk in '81.

[izquierdista]

So........where do we disagree?

I would say that a good college/university level teacher would probably make a good K-12 teacher. And the converse is true; a college professor may be a great researcher, but a crappy teacher no matter what level he is teaching.

I do remember back in the '80s, when a college degree was a pretty good guarantee against unemployment, because you could show it to any school district and they would put you on their list of available substitutes. If you had any persistence, there were also myriad ways to get provisionally certified if you wanted to continue teaching.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that "anyone with a four-year degree(or perhaps less), can teach". I've met many people with four-year degrees that were not competent to practice their field of study, so I wonder how well they could teach it.

You list an impressive breadth of subjects to be teaching. I suppose I too, could teach more subjects than the one that I got my degrees in. (In fact, I do so now - in one area.) It's not necessary to be a complete expert to teach a subject; just to know a little more, and how to explain it, to the student.

My POV is that pedagogy and teaching technique is different from being a lecturer. Lecturers are allowed to give a one-sided presentation of information and it is up to the listener to process the information. Teaching requires two-way communication to make sure that the concept was grasped in the way that the teacher intended it, without any misunderstandings creeping in. Any subject matter expert can give a lecture, but it takes a teacher to evaluate how well the student has learned the subject matter.

Which, I suppose, is the distinction between K-12 teachers and college professors. College professors can lecture and go off on a tangent and lose their lose their audience on some piece of esoterica; teachers, not so much.

[canaar]

27. If a person has some native

teaching talent and has grown up in an environment in which good pedagogy was modeled and the person had developed a knowledge base sufficient for the subject matter, that person would likely be an effective teacher regardless of teacher preparation. It is somewhat analogous to having a class of bright students. The students, by virtue of their curiosity and intellectual gifts will learn in the absence of, despite or in response to a teacher. Perhaps unfortunately, there is either an insufficient supply of natively gifted teachers or insufficient incentives to engage all of our supply of natively gifted teachers or maybe a combination of both. Consequently, we do what we believe a system of education can do and that is to educate and train individuals to develop their knowledge, skills and personalities to perform necessary societal roles.

In short, the ability to teach can be taught or it may be innate (independently learned?). Where my level of hypersensitivity kicks in is with any notion that since nearly everyone in the U.S. has attended school and the vast majority of us attended public schools, we all share a similar level of expertise with respect to the knowledge and practice of the profession.

[backtomn]

19. You missed on key point.....

....the high school teacher doesn't need to be educated in MATH......only with credentials and "education courses". I agree that many TA's in college are weak, but the high school teachers (without work on student teaching) could easily be worse.

[plumbob]

23. Where did you get that idea? In Texas, your degree CANNOT be in

education and must be in your subject area with a mandatory minor in a second subject area. After you earn that degree, you take 24 more hours of education courses (which do not count towards a master's degree), and then teach 18 weeks in a public school, 9 weeks in each subject area while paying tuition to the supervising university and getting paid ZERO. THEN you can pay $1100 for the three tests you need to complete your certification.

Degree holders in the subject area, a year of additional training in education, a semester of free teaching, passing a nationally recognized test in three areas: your two subject areas plus pedagogy.

Then the Texas minimum starting salary is $27,320 for a 10 month contract with no assurance of renewal.

[plumbob]

21. Thank you! I hold 11 subject area credentials, 2 degrees, and it really does gripe

me to be criticized by some 23 year old lecturer at the local junior college with only a BA.

[jberryhill]

33. I want to take this opportunity to agree with you on something

As a fresh graduate with a doctorate in electrical engineering and several years of experience as a teaching assistant at a university, I took a position as a substitute teacher in the local school districts while I was looking for work for a spell.

Math and science teachers would specifically request that I fill in for them if they were out for conferences, illnesses, etc. because they knew I could teach the material from different angles, provide real-world relevance, engage the kids in the subject matter and discuss their aptitudes and academic plans.

Nonetheless, the guy with the phys ed bachelors degree who did substitute teaching during off season from minor league baseball would get five bucks more a day than me for covering the same classes, because he had the magic education credits.

Education degrees are important in the lower grades, but bluffing your way through subject matter with a roomful of 15 through 19 year-olds is a waste of everyone's time and potential.

And, quite frankly, if teaching had paid just a little bit more at the time, I would have taken the advice of the other faculty, bit the bullet, got the accreditation, and gone into teaching high school. I've done a lot of stuff since then, but there are few things that bring me more satisfaction than hearing once in a while from a student whom I barely knew, who lets me know that I had made a difference to them. There is nothing more awesome than that, and it is one of the things I envy about people who did make teaching their career.

[soleiri]

5. oh please

Funders include:
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation

Five out of fifteen staff members are identified as former TFA-ers.

The advisory board:
Michael Feinberg, Kipp Founder
Eric A. Hanushek, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution
Frederick M. Hess, "Scholar" American Enterprise Institute
E.D. Hirsch, Author and Founder Core Knowledge Foundation
Joel Klein, CEO & Executive VP News Corporation
Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder Teach For America
Your favorite and mine....Michelle Rhee, Founder and CEO StudentsFirst
Stefanie Sanford Director, US Program Policy & Advocacy Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Plus a bunch of other people I don't know enough about to comment on.

Yeah, same shit they always peddle.

[Igel]

22. Listen up.

They're right.

[soleiri]

26. please elaborate

[RobinA]

34. I Am Not a Teacher

but I do have a Master's in a subject that requires an internship done under "supervision" of a person licensed to practice in the field - much like student teaching. From my perspective, my internship and that of most of my classmates was as inadequate as this study is claiming the student teaching experiences are. Anecdotal, of course, but makes me inclined to believe the results quoted here. I'm not saying no one ever had a good experience interning or student teaching, just that this problem is not hard to imagine based on my experience.

[Mrs. Ted Nancy]

6. Teach for America

thinks that a teacher needs only five weeks of training during the summer before the school year begins. And then some coaching during the school year.

[wordpix]

14. That's what I've seen, too, in some of the worst schools in the nation

Don't know how Teach for America can turn schools around with inexperienced young teachers. Most of them leave teaching after the first year or two, or at least, that's my experience working with them in the schools.

[sense]

8. I agree that the "Training

of teachers is flawed". I don't remotely agree that the supporters of this group are interested in improving teachers. They simply want to control them and to ensure that students don't learn how to think.

[msongs]

9. student teachers = slave labor. what kind of grade will these scammers give THAT? nt

[BigDemVoter]

10. From someone who has seen teacher-training

from the inside (as a former teacher). . . . It was ALL horseshit. EVERY single education class I ever took was a total and complete waste of time, money, and yes, energy. I no more learned to teach from any education class than my pet Chihuahua learned from her doggy classes!

[JDPriestly]

16. I learned a lot.

One of the best courses I took was educational psychology. Learning how people learn opens a lot of doors in life.

I did student teaching and realized that I was not extroverted enough to teach kids in grade and high school.

I later taught a bit as a grad student and even there, my shyness made it difficult for me although the students did not seem to mind.

The only other teaching I did was as a private music teacher. And that I really enjoyed. I found my education courses to be extremely important and to give me a big edge with children -- an edge over other musicians who may be concert pianists but don't understand what a lesson plan is or how people learn.

It has been a long time since I studied education. Things may have changed.

But the educational psychology course was really very useful in my life -- especially in raising my own children.

[BigDemVoter]

17. I wish I had had your experience. . .

As I truly wanted to learn some solid teaching skills! You're lucky!

[JDPriestly]

24. Are you a teacher?

The biggest lesson I learned during my student teaching was that I really am not a teacher.

[BigDemVoter]

30. Yes. . .

I was a teacher for 15 or so years. . . And then the real burn out hit hard. Am working in healthcare now! :)

[JDPriestly]

31. I hope you are enjoying your work.

[Igel]

28. Yes and no.

I learned a lot of mechanics from the coursework. Groundwork, strategies, planning, ethics, expectations. In some ways I learned how to be a teacher, how things are to work in principle.

But I learned how to teach from my student teaching, actually being in the classroom with a mentor teacher at my back, asking me to reflect on how I did and how to improve, how to drag teaching methods, lesson planning, classroom management from the textbook to the classroom. If I flubbed, he wouldn't just tell me what I did wrong but suggest at least a couple of ways to get it right the next period or take a lesson or part of a lesson to show me a possible way of teaching the material. If I didn't see that the kids weren't getting it, he'd interrupt me and tell me--and then, during class break or conference period, tell me who wasn't getting it and what the signs were. My mentor teacher had me do everything I could--and if I didn't manage my time right, he'd backstop me until I had things like recording attendance or dealing with late arrivals without missing a beat.

Which, I think, makes the point of the OP really important because it's not talking about teacher training per se, sitting in class while taking notes on a lecture, but specifically about clinical teaching, monitoring and controlling the quality of the mentor teacher to make sure that a good, competent teacher is actively training the apprentice in the classroom. A good school district will then make sure that the new teacher out of his/her student teaching will have a mentor to drop in from time to time or answer questions.

This extends to internship programs, an option that replaces clinical teaching. A lot of interns wash out--bad for them, bad for their students, bad for the school--because they have a sucky mentor.

[sulphurdunn]

12. NCTQ

is one of the seemingly infinite tentacles of the tax exempt billionaire vampire squid foundations out to devour public education. What was most disturbing about the Times article was its convenient failure to connect any of those dots.

This a good link from Seattle Education that sheds light on the NCTQ omitted by the Times.

http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/kate-walsh-nctq-and-us-news-world-report/

[plumbob]

20. Michelle Rhee is on their advisory board - all I need to know.

Be a waste to worry about anything they had to say.

[Igel]

25. For crying out loud, can nobody actually read?

The study is ssying that the programs that actually involve clinical teaching, student teachers (*not* "teaching students" or "teacher candidates") are flawed.

The programs often have no say over who the student teacher gets assigned to. They have no control over what the mentor teacher does. They have no control over the quality of the mentor teacher. They have precious little control over what the mentor teacher allows the student teacher to do.

In other words, the student-teacher program itself has very little control over its own quality.

I've talked to student teachers who have had problems.

One boasted that it was the easiest thing on earth: She sat at the side of the room for 6 weeks. She never taught or even tutored. I've also seen teacher ed programs that went for 13 or 24 weeks.

I've known a student teacher who showed up in a classroom on Thursday and was told to have lesson plans for the next two weeks on the mentor teacher's desk at 7:25 a.m. the next day, and that as of Monday morning he'd be doing everything, from attendance to grading to detention forms, all the teaching and running tutorials after school.

I knew another who had passed all the tests to teach one subject but 1/2 of his student-teaching day was teaching something entirely different. Strictly speaking, either he was rooked out of 1/2 of his student teaching or state law was violated when he got up and taught a subject he hadn't qualified for.

Another would show up in the morning, knowing he'd be teaching something, but not knowing what, exactly, the mentor teacher had planned for him for the day. Show up at 7:00, get your lesson plans that kick in at 7:30.

One student teacher was by himself in the classroom when a fight broke out. He had to figure out how to call security. The teacher had taken to doing errands and other things and wasn't available. He was shaken and wasn't quite what to do with the 5th graders. Intervene? Let them go at it?

Another student teacher had a fight brewing and separated the teenagers. He sent one into the hall, unsupervised, to cool down. The teacher came back and found the kid in the hall. The principal was with her, ran into her in the hallway. The student teacher wasn't to be left unsupervised but had been.

In most districts, student teachers can't be substitutes but are in charge of the class if a sub is present. I've seen student teachers be treated as a substitute in co-taught classes. The special ed teacher was out, the student teacher may not have been working on special ed certification but there he is, being the sub for the special ed teacher.

Student teachers are to be in on everything possible. This includes parent/student/teacher conferences. It can include meetings with a principal. It can include ARD committees. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn't.

The point is, the ACPs and schools in charge of these student teachers had *no* say over who the mentors were. Some were great; some were lazy; some were sucky teachers but the school wanted the student teacher to provide free labor to a failing teacher. Some student teachers were in the classroom for 6 weeks, others for a whole semester. Some were fully in charge of the class--rearrange the seating chart, figure out how to cover the unit, whatever. Others were only in charge of content presentation or grading homework as the mentor teacher prescribed, sometimes with little warning. Some provide great feedback. Some provide scant feedback. Some don't behave very professionally.

In other words, there was no quality control wielded by the certification program over the student-teacher portion of the teaching-candidate's training. Which is exactly what the study says.

Is this state of affairs good? No. Can it be fixed? I don't know, but a good college program or ACP should try.

[sulphurdunn]

32. I get at least one student teacher

every year. It's a burden to take responsibility for a student teacher. My best student teachers can hardly be restrained and wear me out tweaking their lesson plans. Others need a lot of mentoring, oversight and direction. You see, they are as different as the students in the classes where they learn to teach. So long as I accept student teachers I will be the one who designs their individual programs, and I will be the one to assess them, not their professors and certainly not some teaching expert who is long on theory and short on practice.

Some of my best student teachers turned out not to be very good teachers in their own classrooms. Some of the others, the ones I had reservations about, have done quite well. Teaching is as much an art as a profession. No two people teach or manage their pedagogy exactly the same way. Standardized teaching is just training. Kids are not widgets. I was both a military and a corporate professional before I took up teaching in my middle years. Teaching is not a business and it is not a boot camp. Imposition of either model is doomed to failure.

[plumbob]

38. Here's the problem with student teaching in Texas: the mentor teacher

receives not one dime in additional compensation for taking on an additional 10-20 hours per week of work for 16 weeks. The student teachers receives not one dime of any sort, but must pay for 12 hours of tuition at the supervising university. In addition, the mentor teacher will spend around $200-$300 out of pocket for necessary expenses for their student teacher, none of which will be reimbursed.

This is why student teachers end up with those mentors willing to do that as a sense of repaying their own student teaching - that's why I do it. I teach on the same faculty as my own supervising teacher from 2 decades ago, and I have 4 of my own former students (2 of whom student taught with me) in the building as well. That's satisfying.

But because I came to teaching later in life, and because we have other income to keep us comfortable, I can afford to mentor student teachers. Many cannot, and the idea that someone would just be assigned an extra 300 or so hours of non-compensated work per semester is really absurd.

As always, a free ride is expected from public education, while we shell out to private schools, charter schools, miscellaneous experts and think tanks. Truth is, just a bit more money would symbolize a bit of appreciation, and you'd be surprised at how far that would go.

[bemildred]

29. These dipshits ought to do a study on the adequacy of funding for education.

Maybe the quality problems stem from reluctance to pay for it, eh?

[ohtransplant]

37. Ding, Ding, Ding!!!

We have a winner!!!

This is an old discussion and we're having it again. This time they're much more successful in tearing down public schools and its' support systems.

As charters/private schools drain money from public education, states slash education funding and property tax receipts dwindle, where do they expect the additional funds to come from? Or is there another agenda like further dismantling public education? Hmmm...

To say we all want great teachers is easy. Pointing fingers at teachers is also easy. Commitment to quality education is hard and I don't see the commitment.

[joshcryer]

35. Schooling was a disaster from its inception, one has to wonder how many humans...

...had their total potential destroyed from those http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm">propaganda machines.

[sulphurdunn]

36. And the alternative?

[plumbob]

39. So vaccines, advanced surgical techniques, chip technology were all invented

by people who never went to school?

Really?


Been in a classroom lately? I'll match up my senior students' critical thinking skills any day with most adults. Dual language learners develop superior processing skills, and it shows. One of our class projects each year is a microentrepreneurial business of their own design. Over the years, several dozen actually implemented those plans and make a living with them, all without working for the corporate folk your link is so full of.

Certainly, there are poor schools and poor teachers. There are also plenty of great ones.

[livetohike]

40. I have no complaints with the student teaching program that

I was in, but that was 1973-1974. I practiced the mechanics of being a classroom teacher - lesson and unit planning, preparing tests, visual aids, etc. The classroom discipline was not a problem. It's the relationship to the real world of teaching that was a problem for me. I was not prepared to teach in inner city schools, or the poverty stricken rural South and yet those were my full time jobs.

I was naive, grew up in the suburbs of Pgh. Maybe I can't blame my student teaching experience, more of a lack of life experience by the time I was 21 :shrug: