Monday, May 08, 2006
Teacher Education is a Messy Field
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.
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.
# posted by A.J. Castro @ 1:04 AM 
