Thoughts on Teacher Education

In the most recent edition of Action in Teacher Education, teacher educators at Henderson State University (Harrison, Smithey, McAffee, Weiner 2006) discuss their attempts to operationally define appropriate dispositions for new teachers and incorporate them into their admissions standards for the teacher education program.

First, they defined teacher disposition as encompassing “a mood, an attitude, or a tendency or inclination to behave in a certain way” (72). For them, teacher dispositions include the intangibles, the ‘heart of a teacher,” and are most commonly associated with caring for students, efficacy, and enthusiasm, etc. They identify six dispositions that they seek to assess and promote throughout the course of their program:

1. caring for students and their families
2. sensitivity to diversity
3. sense of fairness
4. sense of efficacy
5. personal reflection, and
6. sense of professionalism

They operationally define these dispositions by analyzing the observable behaviors of what the candidate writes, says, and does.

If the article had ended at this point, I would have felt very intrigued by the process and the aims of the authors. Instead, the Henderson group then detailed how they use an interview method to assess candidate dispositions. (These interview questions are nothing new in teacher education and have been used extensively—thanks to the work of Martin Haberman—in alternative route programs searching for STAR teachers.)

A student not meeting the required dispositions in the interview had the option to try again. Here, I quote the authors:

“[After the interview] Candidates received a summary of their performance during the interview and a statement that they had ‘passed’ or ‘not yet passed’ the interview requirements for admission into the teacher education program. Candidates who received ‘no yet passed’ had the opportunity to interview again at a later date or meet with university faculty who gave the candidate another opportunity to demonstrate the dispositions in question….If the candidate still did not ‘pass’ the interview, he or she was advised to develop the disposition and interview again at a later date or to consider another profession more suited to his or her dispositions” (76).

I find the Henderson approach troublesome for several reasons. First, it assumes that certain individuals can readily adopt new dispositions. Because the assessment is based on a verbal interview, a second assumption is that what people say about their beliefs will correspond with how they will teach. (More on this in a moment.) Finally, the fact that these dispositions are distributed to candidates openly (students are even given a self-assessment test that highlights each category which is administered in an introductory course before the interview) suggests that students may be inclined to tailor their statements about teaching so as to emphasize these previously stated dispositions. (This habit of giving/telling the professor what he/she wants to hear characterizes the strategy of many successful college students...Of course, I am an exception, most, most certainly.)

Mary Kennedy (1999) summarized a key finding from her work on evaluating preservice teacher education programs through the Teacher Education and Learning to Teach (TELT) study. She described “the problem of enactment.” Basically, she discovered that although preservice teachers espoused certain beliefs, such as a belief in caring or in student ownership, when given specific situations to respond to, the preservice teacher might not have actually acted upon those beliefs. She offered possible explanations for this discrepancy. First, many beliefs are abstract in nature and, thus, ill-defined. Therefore, when a professor speaks about caring for students, the preservice teacher might have a completely different view of what that entails. Second, it might be possible that the preservice teacher is able to hold different, sometimes contradictory beliefs simultaneously and refer to one set of beliefs in one context and another set beliefs in different context. Third, although the preservice teacher might sincerely hold a specific belief, such as caring for all students or accepting diversity in the classroom, he/she may not know how to actually turn those beliefs into actions. The danger is that the preservice teacher might fall back on his/her own past experiences (the “apprenticeship of observation”) that most probably centered on traditional ways of teaching.

What does this mean for the Henderson group? It means that it is quite possible for students to espouse beliefs in each of the six dispositions, but not actually act upon them. If the Henderson group refers to what the candidate writes, says, and does, then the writing and saying may not be connected with the doing. And, as is the case for many undergraduate programs, professors rarely have access to witness the candidate “doing” in the context of the public schools with real kids and in a real classrooms.

Note on sources: Harrison, J., McAffee, H., Smithey, G., Weiner, C. (2006). Assessing candidate disposition for admission into teacher education: Can just anyone teach? Action in Teacher Education, 27 (4), 72-80.

Kennedy, M. (1999). The role of preservice teacher education. In Darling-Hammond, L. & Sykes, G. (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession (pp. 54-85).—This chapter is a MUST READ for any teacher educator. You can find this chapter at Mary Kennedy’s Website under publications: http://www.msu.edu/~mkennedy/publications/ValueTE.html

A.J. Castro, www.thoughtsonteachered.blogspot.com

This is my response to a debate at the "Wall of Education" website for teacher educators: http://thewallofeducation.blogspot.com/2006/05/educating-teachers.html

Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2005) summarized two major problems concerning the debate over teacher education and the policy at large: reform rhetoric and the complexity of teaching. Basically, current “reformers” who oppose the process of teacher certification speak in slogans—simplistic, reductive statements about teacher education and education in general. They make outrageous statements, such as the current system is “broken” (US DOE 2002) and reduce teaching to a bottom line: achievement via standardized testing (Hanusek 2002, Ballou & Podgursky 1998 & 2000), as if learning only manifests itself on achievement tests. Rhetoric from people like George Wills (2005) in Newsweek arguing against the role of beliefs and dispositions (and anything cognitive really) in teacher education claim a commonsense-speak, a simple-right-in-front-of-your-nose (duh!) answer.

Like the “reform” movements of the past, a crisis is being generated, but this time generating this crisis comes with real significant costs. This isn’t just report making that Berliner and Biddle (1995) described in their Manufactured Crisis. Legislation has been built around these reductive notions: learning achievement is tested achievement, knowing your content makes a person a good teacher, research is only about numbers, and if schools ran like businesses (and within a free competitive market) then they would be better. These quick-fix, easy-to-bear, slogan-like ideas are being imposed on our current system of education with equally lofty goals of 100% perfection.

The second problem facing teacher education and the fight for public awareness deals with the complex nature of teaching. Nestled within the rhetoric of reform is the “commonsense” belief that teaching is all about imparting knowledge. However, teachers know that teaching is a complex, dynamic process. Lampert (2001) discussed ways that teaching is a challenging profession: teaching is never routine, has multiple goals, involves forming relationships with diverse groups of students simultaneously, and requires to the teacher to integrate different types of knowledge (pedagogy, content, developmental, psychological, organizational, motivational, etc) to teach effectively. Now, try to create a slogan for that!

The act of teaching (students or teachers or anyone else for that matter) always exists within the context of politics. Questions of who determines what is taught, by whom, to whom, and for whose benefit always surround institutions that bear a major responsibility for regulating society in general. These “reformers” control the dialogue, the conversation at the dinner table. It is a conversation that most people, non-teacher educators, can understand and happily join in. “Can you believe it, those teachers at it again…Oh, my….”

The real issue at hand, unfortunately, involves much more than just a marketing problem. The very conception of what is legitimate knowledge for students (testing) and for scholars (scientifically-based research, research funding) is being altered and, in the process, limits what counts as legitimate discourse.

Note on sources: Cochran-Smith (2005) Politics of teacher ed and the curse of complexity. JTE 56 (3)...; USDOE (2002) Rod Paige's 1st report...; Hanushek (2002) Teacher Quality in Izumi & Evers (ed) Teacher Quality; Ballou & Podgursky (1998) Case against teacher certification. Public interest; Ballou & Podgursky (2000) Reforming teacher prep and licensing. TchrCollegeRcd; Lampert (2001) Teaching problems and the problems of teaching. Yale U. Press.

In their inaugral issue of the Journal of Teacher Education, Hilda Borko, Daniel Liston and Jennifer Whitcomb (all from University of Colorado at Boulder) reviewed some of the major hurdles in teacher education. The voices within and outside the field are at odds, each pushing for a different vision in teacher education. Researchers have formed different stances on the nature of knowing in teacher education. Many of these scholars have been placed in camps against each other, such as Linda Darling-Hammond and the standards movement versus the Abell and Fordham Foundation and the deregulation movement (see Zeichner 2003). These editors see that the Journal should be a space of negotiating these diverse viewpoints. They wrote, "What we need as a profession, now more than ever, is a shared place for this dialogue and critical examination--a place that is inclusive of the broad range of views, vision, and enactments" (203). Although I favor the democratic move on the part of the new editors, I wonder just how likely members of the deregulation agenda, such as Michael Podgursky or Kate Walsh, will view this as an invitation to publish their views on the dismantling of teacher education. Would publishing such viewpoints contradict the purpose of the journal, to promote dialogue within the field of teacher education instead of against it?

Note on sources: Borko, H., Liston, D., & Whitcomb, J. (2006) JTE, 57 (3)...; Zeichner, K. (2003) Adequacies and inadequacies of 3 current strategies to recruitment, prepare and retain the best teachers for all students. Teacher College Record...

Awake at 3:30 a.m. It seems that I do most of my thinking at night.

Back to the topic: What the hell is teacher education anyway? Attempting to define teacher education as a field would provide a tremendous challenge. Although the act of teaching, has existed for some time, I think teacher education research evolved slowy. Doyle (1990) in his chapter on "Themes of Teacher Ed Research" wrote about how teacher education research initially grew out a quest for quality control and supervision of new teachers. So, like other education research at the time, a sense of creating a codified body of knowledge about what teachers should know and learn to do began. The foundations of this base came from the process-product paradigm of teacher research. Through process-product, researchers isolated many key variables of teaching to determine their significance. Brophy & Good (1986) posited many of these "winning" teacher behaviors, listing things like wait-time, appropriate feedback, and direct instruction. Furthermore, in the same handbook, Rosenshine and Stevens (1986) had reduced teaching into a set of functions, such as delivering instruction, etc. So, teacher education started as a Technical Problem--one of teaching the skills and behaviors of a "good" teacher (Cochran-Smith 2004, Cochran-Smith & Fries 2005). But the story did not stop there--thank goodness!

From a training problem, it became a learing problem. The shift represented a movement towards cognitive science in learning and teaching. The new purpose teacher ed adopted consisted for producing problem-solvers and decision-makers. From this movement, the quest for a knowledge base for teaching expanded to not just how and what of teaching, but also to the why and so what. Skills didn't cut the mustard. Instead, elements such as beliefs and attitudes, perceptions and predispositions, came into play.

The Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd Edition, presents a chapter on teacher education (Lanier & Little 1986), which seemed to address some of these learning problems. So, basically, we had a field torn between two views: technical (skills) versus learning (problem-solving).

Cochran-Smith (2004) carries the story forward into the 21st century (teaching as a policy problem) and the rise of NCLB and its insists on the return to a technical approach to teacher education.

So, what does this mean for teacher education as field? Teacher education must address technical aspects, cognitive aspects, and policy aspects. The student of teacher education must address the key fundamental issues of instruction: know-what, know-how, and know-to (predispositions, beliefs, etc). This same student will have a background in curriculum and instructional design, educational psychology, and educational policy. As this student works to decipher who said what, what policy mandated this or that, and which study revealed this or that, he or she may begin to question whether or not it is possible to make sense it all.

Where does this confusion stem from? Mary Kennedy (1990) provided a good overview of the challenge between the competing goals of teacher education (skills vs. problem-solving) by comparing how two different professions answer this same question. In medicine, the focus is on a codified set of knowledge and skills. In Law, the focus is on decision-making and problem-solving. What is teaching any way? Where does it fit between these two viewpoints? Because the teacher education community, including scholars and policy makers, can't agree on answering these questions, the field exists in a state of tension.

Sources to look up: Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2004) "Problems in Teacher Education" published in Journal of Teacher Ed; her chapter "Researching Teacher Ed in Changing Times" in Studying Teacher Ed 2005, edited by her and Ken Zeichner; Walter Doyle (1990) and Mary Kennedy (1990) in the Handbook of Research in Teacher Ed edited by R. Houston; From the 3rd Edition Handbook of Research on Teaching: Brophy & Good, Rosenshine & Stevens, Lanier & Little.

Hello. I plan to use this blog to organize my thoughts on teacher education. My current interests include synthesizing some of the research on teacher development and researching factors affecting second-career teachers decisions to teach. As my interests change, I will add more posts.

A note on citations: Although I use APA formatting, I will find myself posting stuff and citing articles, chapters, etc. as they pop into my mind. At the end of the post, I'll try to give some hints on where to find the citations. But consider that in most cases, I will not have the actual source with me.