teacher preparation. teacher identity

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Voodoo Educational Reform

George I, our forty-first President, separated himself from his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, by declaring that the “trickle-down” theory of stimulating the economy was “voodoo economics.” By that he meant that the trickle-down theory assumed an outcome of prosperity from lowering income taxes or deregulating commerce: a cause and effect that were not directly connected. Like sticking a pin in a doll of your enemy was supposed to harm your enemy.

In the Twenty-first century all the happy talk of voodoo economics has spilled over to public education.  Down with restrictions and up with schools that will thrive in their absence, the charter schools, the parochial schools, the experimental schools with suspended teachers’ contracts.  Free schools mean innovation, and innovation means better schools.

Well, we have seen the results of free markets over the past decade, both in the economy and education, and reviews are mixed, to say the least.  There are pockets of success, like computer and wireless technology, like the KIPP schools which mentor new teachers in a high-pressure learning environment. But the overall health of the economy and the nation’s schools continues to falter, while the mantra of deregulation of business and unshackling of school administrators persists, with its dogged faith in freedom producing prosperity.  The triumph of hope over experience, someone once said.

Now comes Tom Watkins, former State Superintendent of Michigan’s schools with more voodoo predictions, now directed at teacher education.

What if our colleges of education did not have an exclusive franchise on preparing future teachers? What if we opened the teacher preparation business up to educational entrepreneurs who could demonstrate through scientific research that their methods actually produce more effective teachers? [http://www.thecenterformichigan.net/guest-column-taking-the-charter-school-to-college/]

In a commentary, ominously titled “Taking the Charter School to College,” Watkins suggests that the monopoly of teacher preparation institutions is stifling the growth and innovation of teacher preparation. Clearly the colleges and universities that prepare teachers are not interested in reform or applying scientific research to their methods.  This is like saying that a “small market” sports team is not interested in winning.  A mediocre record in professional sports must be an indication of lack of effort or seriousness from the mediocre team.

Anyone who has followed baseball or basketball in Cleveland knows that even when the spirit is willing, the resources may be weak. The free market has not been kind to these franchises.  Perhaps the management can be blamed, but ultimately the available resources can dictate the quality of the team.

So throwing the market open to genius and experimentation does not guarantee a better product, in baseball, basketball or pre-service education. There is no invisible current of innovation waiting to burst the dams of certification law and collective bargaining.  It is not as simple as converting potential energy to kinetic energy. Would that it were, Tom Watkins.

The research on teacher preparation cited by Linda Darling-Hammond emphasizes the collaboration of schools of education with exemplary K-12 schools in creating an environment where excellent teaching is modeled with students from culturally disadvantaged backgrounds.

One thing that is clear from current studies of strong programs is that learning to practice in practice, with expert guidance, is essential to becoming a great teacher of students with a wide range of needs.  To improve preparation, states and accreditors should require a full year of clinical training for prospective teachers, ideally undertaken in professional development schools (PDS) that, like teaching hospitals, offer yearlong residencies under the guidance of expert teachers.  These PDS sites develop state-of-the-art practice and train novices in the classrooms of expert teachers while they are completing coursework that helps them teach diverse learners well (The Flat World and Education 316-17)

The professional development school is not a vision, but a declining institution of twenty years’ experimentation.  In most cases both the university and its partner school are hobbled by the expense of paying full-time teaching supervisors and for the released time or stipends of mentor teachers.  Schools have to find the space and time to sustain professional education alongside the education of K-12 students. It is a model that hospitals have successfully maintained for medical interns, but the public schools have too often been overwhelmed by time and expense of nurturing novice teachers.

Instead the dominant model of teacher preparation in the United States is a ten-week highly controlled practicum experience, followed by certification, followed by throwing the novice in the deep end of the pool.  New teachers inevitably acquire the classes the veteran teachers are trying to avoid, are saddled with the extra-curricular activities that older teachers have jettisoned from exhaustion, and receive the closest scrutiny, based on the expectation that they will fail. The expected tightening of requirements for evaluation and tenure will only exacerbate these conditions.

The current dogma that increasing the funding of education does not improve the quality of education has led us to the ill-considered conclusion that multiplying options for education will yield better quality by driving inferior services out of the marketplace.  We subscribe to indirect means of improving education (voodoo reform) instead of direct means (infusion of material and professional resources). Rather than considering that our tax dollars might be more wisely spent, we assume that tax dollars are never wisely spent.  Hence our renewed and desperate faith in the marketplace to improve what indiscriminate funding did not.

Professional development schools could transform teacher education, but they will need financing–federal or private, it doesn’t matter. But it will be a direct infusion of resources at the point of need.  Not a magical spell cast on the educational marketplace that releases the pent-up genius of innovation.  Voodoo had its chance in the first decade of the Twenty-first century. Let’s put our money where our best institutions are and put our faith in committed professionals.

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How Long to Make a Teacher?

The “Op-Chart” in the Sunday Times takes a fascinating look at the incubation of “street cops,” “Presidents,” and “Lawyers,” and many other roles and processes. It takes three years to make a good street cop, four years to make a President, five years to make a lawyer and six years to make a friend. I could not help but wonder: How long to make a teacher?

In every case the relationship between formal education and experience is the crucial variable. You can learn everything you should know about the principles of law in three years or the essentials of education in two years of schooling, but applying that knowledge to real cases and real students is the most critical phase of the incubation period.  In fact “Teach for America” made its reputation on shortening the formal instruction of a teacher and intensifying the field experience, essentially making it “on-the-job” training.

You can make a case for a teacher’s learning curve beginning with a year of formal preparation, followed by two years of hard knocks in the classroom, as the TFA model would advocate.  Research has shown that the students of these teachers are performing nearly at the same level as traditionally-prepared teachers at the end of two years in the classroom.  As I noted in “School Reform: the Popular Narrative”

In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year (Darling-Hammond 47).

So, by the standards of Teach for America it takes two years to make a teacher and three years to disillusion one.  Arguably the reward system of TFA does not promote longevity in teaching, but I would argue that something else is going on in that third year, based on my own experience in the classroom and the experience of teachers who attend our Summer Invitational Institute for teachers of writing.

As the current Common Core State Standards reveal, there are two kinds of learning in English Language Arts and in the other academic subjects: formal content and “capacities of the literate individual.”  The “capacities” are given cursory attention in the ELA section of the Common Core State Standards. Among them are “independence,” “adapting their communication in relation to audience, task, purpose, and discipline,” “comprehending and critiquing,” “citing specific evidence,” “using technology and digital media capably,” and understanding “other perspectives and cultures” (7)

For most teachers the centrality of these “capacities” or “habits of mind,” as they are often called, becomes evident after three years of teaching to a formal curriculum, i.e. the standards in place in their state or district.  They discover, by trial and error, that students fail to consolidate what they learn in the formal curriculum because they are not acquiring the necessary “habits of mind” along the way. They discover that habits of mind are not casually absorbed in the process of mastering the content of the curriculum, but must be taught explicitly as part of the curriculum.

This is where the Common Core State Standards misses the mark. It treats the processes of learning as incidental to the content of learning and gives the processes, i.e. the habits, short shrift. Every teacher who makes it beyond the second year of teaching eventually becomes aware of the centrality of these “habits,” and it either inspires them to reinvent their teaching or drives them out of the profession.

There are many reasons for teachers leaving the profession, but I would argue this is a significant cause: the discovery that teaching is not only the delivery of content, but the assimilation of hard-won habits.  And I would argue that this is a developmental process. You have to watch students learn and forget before you see the underpinnings of that learning, the habits, the meta-cognitive skills, the conscious disciplines.

Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” skills in the preparation of teachers, there is only so much about habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is a late-developing awareness for most teachers. To be frank, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the essential truth of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize their impact on my students until then.

So how long to make a teacher? Four years at best, and for the slow learners like me, eight, nine or ten years.  To think that teachers are made by the straightforward delivery of the formal curriculum is to maintain a short-sighted view of education. It is the unfortunate view of the current Common Core State Standards and the microwaved preparation of teachers modeled by Teach for America.

I think the Chinese proverb paraphrased in today’s Times says it best: It takes ten years to sharpen a sword (New York Times, p. 9).

Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Flat World and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.

Common Core State Standards Initiative: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects, 2010.

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Reading and Writing: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Are Readers from Venus and Writers from Mars?

As a teacher of future secondary English teachers, I am always struck by the many  future teachers who proclaim themselves readers, but not writers, especially writing they call “creative.”  It is just this distinction that has inspired many reform documents, such as The Neglected R, to recommend that “Statewide policy and standards should require that teacher preparation programs provide all prospective teachers with exposure to writing theory and practice” and to “provide support for multiple workshops and other opportunities that encourage teachers already in the classroom to upgrade their writing skills and competence as writing teachers” (26).

Considering that English Language Arts is defined as the integration of reading, writing, speaking, listening and viewing, it is surprising how many English teachers identify themselves as readers, but not writers.  Writing teachers should be writers, just as reading and literature teachers are readers, but in reality, not so much. Why should this be? I would  venture an explanation with the analogy of competitive and non-competitive sports.

First, obviously competition is a function of individuals, more than sports. There are some who could make a competition out of coin flipping (you know who you are) and some who can play basketball without keeping score (not even in your head).  So, these are admittedly crude analogies.

Reading is like a non-competitive sport, such as jogging or biking or swimming. There are many readers who receive intrinsic pleasure from the act itself and enjoy sharing their experiences with a few trusted friends, especially readers of the same genres, such as mystery, romance, sports, or political expose.  We can choose to count the books we have read and choose to share with opinionated types, but we could be content just to read and not expose ourselves to the competition.  This is not to say there aren’t plenty of competitive readers, but we don’t have to talk to them.

Writing is like a competitive sport, such as soccer, basketball, or tennis. You play to keep score and you declare winners and losers.  The competition arises from committing your own words to print and allowing indiscriminate readers to review them.  You can protect your privacy and receive personal satisfaction like Emily Dickinson, but generally writers like to be read. If no one is reading them, their motivation wanes. Yet if critical readers vivisect their writing, it can be just as destructive to their motivation, and reading writing reflexively calls for criticism.

You might think, when I say “critical readers,” I am alluding to professional critics of writing (teachers, editors, reviewers); they are indeed a fearsome audience for a writer. But the imminent danger for writers comes from friends, family and fellow students, people we thought we could trust.  Those we trust with our writing can be most critical, merely because they have been raised in a culture where writing is described by its deficiencies.  (Q. What do you think of this poem, Mom?  A. Very nice, but did you know you misspelled “sincere”?) Writing is perceived as a competitive sport and to excel, we must constantly be reminded of our weaknesses. When we remind writers of their weaknesses, we also exert some temporary power over them.

Reading, therefore attracts both the competitive and non-competitive in the realm of literacy, but writing tends to attract those who believe they have a competitive advantage and can escape the most scathing criticism.  The upshot is that most of my pre-service English teachers declare themselves readers, while many declare themselves writers of only the most formulaic texts. Everything else they label “creative writing,” as if outlining the perimeter of an abyss.

So our history records that all literacy is divided into two parts: reading teachers and writing teachers.  Research continues to report this as a tragic mistake for teaching and learning. Most recently a report from the Carnegie Corporation “Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading” (Steve Graham and Michael Hebert, 2010) validates ways in which writing about a text could increase comprehension gains on standardized tests.

So all evidence indicates that reading and writing should be intimate partners, in spite of the incompatibilities of their proponents.  Like all marriages, this one can be saved only if the spouses learn to respect the virtues of the other partner.  And like most marriages, it may thrive more without intense competition. Writing, in particular, needs to appropriate the non-competitive culture of reading.

What will this mean for our conversations about writing and how we treat writers? Stay tuned.