Abstract
This article presents responses from four College of Education deans to a series of questions posed by the Penn State University Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) editorial team.
As we describe in this issue’s editorial, this is the last issue of the Penn State JTE editorial team’s tenure. Inspired by a newsletter that Dean David Monk wrote for the College of Education at Penn State (Monk, 2013) in which he reflects on the state of teacher education, we thought it would be interesting to end our tenure with a “conversation” with additional Deans of Education about the state of teacher education today. Three additional deans graciously accepted our invitation to contribute to this Deans’ Corner and wrote responses to a set of questions addressed in Monk’s original newsletter about teacher education in the U.S. Contributing Deans (in alphabetical order) are Deborah Loewenberg Ball (College of Education, University of Michigan), Pam Grossman (Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania), and Donald E. Heller (College of Education, Michigan State University). We also included Dean David Monk’s responses to those questions as represented in his Connections Dean’s Column. These four deans represent a diversity of academic backgrounds and tenures as education deans. For example, Drs. Monk and Heller have situated their major research areas outside of teacher education, 1 while Drs. Ball and Grossman are highly influential researchers in the field of teacher education. 2 Drs. Ball and Monk have served many years as deans of Colleges of Education, whereas Drs. Heller and Grossman are relative “newbies” to their position as dean. Full biographies of each (replicated from respective websites) are located at the end of this article.
What follows are their responses to the following seven questions:
We represent their responses in toto; any editing we did was for clarity purposes only. Please note that not all four deans have a response for each question. We hope you find these responses as interesting as we do and that the questions and responses provide content for you and your colleagues to discuss.
As teacher educators, we have arguably the most important job for the future of our country: preparing tomorrow’s teachers to be safe practitioners, even as beginners. However, there are thousands of teacher preparation programs, and the training and guidance we offer to novice teachers vary greatly across these programs. As a result, the teaching profession lacks a shared codified professional knowledge and a common specific curriculum for preparation for entry-level teaching. Instead, there is an overreliance on conventional academic credentials as the standard content knowledge. The result is a widely shared view of teaching as individual and learned on the job. In other words, there currently exists no common standard of performance for entry to independent practice with (on) young people.
Complicating all of this are competing popular notions: teaching is simple, really good teaching is rare, some people are born to teach, teaching has to be learned “on the job.” There is little faith in professional training for teachers. In fact, teachers themselves often perpetuate this belief by saying things like, “I was a mess for the first couple of years” or “I can’t explain what I do. Teaching is really an art and I have to follow my intuition a lot.” Or even “Teaching has always come naturally to me.” These kinds of statements represent the dangerous (and utterly false) belief that teaching can’t really be taught—that people have to learn to do it on the job, through hard knocks, and trial and error. The fact that many teachers do eventually figure out how to teach this way does not mean that this is a good or reliable approach to producing skillful teaching at scale. And for students who are learning from a teacher who is trying to figure things out on the fly, this is not only unfair, but also unjust. This would be bad enough if it weren’t also the case that the children most likely to have underprepared and under-supported teachers are students of color and low-income students.
As the people and institutions responsible for preparing the next generation of teachers, we have a professional, moral, and ethical obligation to hold ourselves accountable to the students in the classrooms of these beginning teachers. We must stand up for the power of teaching. We must articulate a specific common curriculum for initial preparation. And we must make entry to independent practice selective and based on skill.
Moreover, it is crucial that we understand the direct relationship of diversity to quality in our profession. When the proportion of teachers of color is less than 1 in 5 but approximately half our nation’s students are children of color, we must recognize the many ways in which this shortchanges teaching as a field. A key priority must be to close this gap. Crucial to our ability to learn to serve our nation’s youth is both who we are as a profession and what we share as professional knowledge, skills, values, and commitments.
In many ways, the predictions I made in my JTE piece “Responding to Our Critics: From Crisis to Opportunity in Teacher Education” (Grossman, 2008) have come to pass. University-based teacher educators are competing with numerous other providers, including non-profits, charter management organizations, school districts, and others for jurisdiction over the preparation of teachers. This struggle has created more fragmentation in how teachers are prepared in the United States. At the same time, the number of people entering all routes into teacher education has declined, creating challenges for programs in the short term and for the teaching workforce in the long run. With the looming shortages of teachers, the time is ripe to re-imagine how we prepare teachers in this country, with the goal of recruiting and preparing a talented and diverse workforce for our nation’s schools.
Teacher education is currently undergoing major change in the United States. Most traditional teacher preparation programs, such as those in colleges of education and education departments in colleges and universities, have seen declines in enrollment over the last decade. Part of this decline is due to the rise of alternative certification programs nationally and in many states during this period. In addition, there is anecdotal evidence that some students are being dissuaded from entering teaching because of the changes that have occurred in the profession in recent years. These changes include increased accountability demands in schools and for teachers, a perception (often confirmed by reality) that teachers have less autonomy in the classroom and are being pressured more to “teach to the test,” and constraints or reductions in teacher pay, benefits, and union protections. These changes are putting immense pressure on many teacher education programs, which have long been seen as “cash cows” that brought many undergraduates into their institutions. As these enrollments are drying up, I think that many colleges of education are struggling with their changing roles in the institution.
Imagine a continuum with three points each corresponding to three distinct and nested views about what is required to become a truly excellent teacher. At one end of the continuum is a point reflecting the view that no preparation is needed and that a high level of innate intelligence is the only necessary ingredient. Those holding this view stress the importance of attracting “smart” people into teaching and are dismissive of entrance requirements other than measures of “smartness.” While pure versions of this view may not be common, the logic holds water and defines a useful point of departure.
Moving along the continuum, let’s define the next point as a reflection of the view that “content is king” with the accompanying belief that excellent teachers are those who are intelligent and who also have thorough knowledge of their content areas. The requisite content knowledge does not arise magically and it follows that deliberate preparation efforts, focused on developing content knowledge, need to be designed and implemented.
Pushing further along the continuum, we reach the view that content knowledge alone, even if coupled with a high level of intelligence, is not sufficient and that excellent teaching also presupposes knowledge about how to teach effectively which includes an understanding of learners coupled with the ability to form meaningful and caring relationships with them. This view sets the stage for building preparation programs that attract bright candidates and combine efforts to develop content knowledge with efforts to develop teaching skills.
Now, to make things more interesting, it’s not clear at all what we mean when we say things like “you need to be smart,” or “you need to know your content,” or “you need to know how to teach.” There are lots of ways to be smart; knowing content can mean many things; and knowing how to teach can mean many things. Vast amounts of research have opened up in each of these three areas.
And to make things even more interesting, think about the three points along the continuum in terms of trade-offs. Trade-offs arise because of resource constraints and because of what economists call separability (in contrast to jointness) in production. In the absence of resource constraints, there would be no limit on our ability to attract phenomenally intelligent men and women into teaching and to prepare them without limit in terms of content as well as pedagogical knowledge. But resource limits are an important part of reality, and these limits force choices or trade-offs.
Moreover, trade-offs can be avoided if we can find ways to jointly generate basic intelligence, content knowledge, and pedagogical knowledge. This is, indeed, a happy place where we are able to have our cake and eat it too. Efforts to achieve jointness in production are worthy and should be encouraged. But, true joint production can be elusive and trade-offs come into play to the degree that one type of outcome (basic intelligence, content knowledge, or pedagogical knowledge) comes at the expense of the others.
Let’s assume trade-offs are relevant, at least to some degree, and in this light, it becomes meaningful to ask how willing you would be to trade some level of basic intelligence among teaching candidates for a higher level of content knowledge or a higher level of teaching knowledge? Or, holding the level of basic intelligence constant, how willing would you be to trade knowledge about teaching for knowledge about content? I suspect we all can recall a very bright teacher who knew his or her subject matter well, but who was a disaster as a teacher.
I sense a strong prevailing drumbeat in favor of ever greater content knowledge and this suggests considerable reverence for the “content is king” frame of mind. While it is clear to me that content knowledge is important, it can be foolish to privilege it above basic intelligence and knowledge about how to teach. We are in serious need of accurate information about the nature of the trade-offs among intelligence, content knowledge, and knowledge about teaching as we design teacher preparation programs. And what counts as content knowledge for teaching is an interesting and unsettled question.
Despite how commonplace it may seem to people outside of the profession, teaching is far from simple work. Doing it well requires detailed knowledge of the domain being taught and a great deal of skill in making it learnable. It also requires good judgment and a tremendous capacity to relate to a wide range of young people, understand culture, context, and community, and manage a classroom. It requires interpreting and using data to improve the effectiveness of instruction. And as we seek to increase the academic standards and demands that we want our young people to meet, the challenges of good teaching will only escalate. Teaching complex academic skills and knowledge, not to mention skills of collaboration, interaction, and resourcefulness in an increasingly networked world, is still more difficult than teaching more basic skills.
Because of this complexity, the only “trade-offs” I am comfortable with are those that do not compromise on our promise to ensure beginning teachers are “safe to practice.” A close look at how others, such as nurses, airplane pilots, or electricians, are prepared to take care in their work with their “clients” shows that responsible training demands a focus on the core tasks of the work. It requires supervised and structured practice, with plenty of specific feedback. Protecting the safety and interests of clients demands reliable preparation and support. We must bring that mind-set to teaching. The safety and well-being of children are as crucial as the safety of patients, passengers, or customers.
Given the relatively limited amount of time teacher educators have for preparing novices for the complex practice of teaching, one of the major trade-offs has to do with what we choose to focus on in preservice teacher education. We need to recognize that learning to teach will take place over at least the first 3 to 5 years of teaching, and identify the core practices that will best prepare teachers for long-term success in the classroom. These practices must equip teachers to navigate the demands of teaching in their first year, while at the same time laying the foundation for developing more sophisticated practice over time. We need to equip teachers not only with pedagogical skill, but with the theoretical understanding of teaching and learning to inform professional judgment in the classroom. While this has often been seen as a trade-off in teacher education, I believe that practice-based teacher education can bundle knowledge and skill together as part of the teaching of core practices.
One of the things we have determined in the College of Education at Michigan State University is that our students need a strong clinical experience to become the best teachers they can be. Thus, we have had for over two decades a 5-year undergraduate teacher preparation program in which students earn their bachelor’s degrees in 4 years (along with engaging in practica in school settings along the way), and then embark on a year-long teaching internship following their graduation. We believe that this strong, 34-week clinical experience, when combined with their coursework in pedagogy and content areas, produces teachers who are prepared for the challenges of education in the 21st century on their first day in the classroom. Students also benefit from doing their teaching internship after they have completed all of their coursework, rather than in parallel with their last two or three semesters of coursework.
The trade-off in this model is that students have to make a commitment of 5 years to earn their teaching credential, when most of our competitors require only 4 years. In an era when both students and their parents are well aware of the rising price of postsecondary education, we know that we have to demonstrate the added value that the commitment to our model requires. But we receive very positive feedback from employers about the preparation of our graduates, and we share this information with prospective students to help them appreciate the value of our program and the commitment it requires.
Researchers still need to address questions around the characteristics of teacher education that make the most difference in preparing teachers to teach well. This is particularly important in under-resourced schools with students most in need of strong teachers. In the decade since the publication of AERA’s synthesis of research on teacher education (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005), we have made some progress in answering questions related to various dimensions of teacher preparation, including the impact of student teaching placements (cf. Ronfeldt, 2015). However, we still know too little about how best to prepare new teachers to teach the growing number of English Learners in our country, for example, or to engage in the more ambitious instructional practices envisioned by the Common Core. These are pressing issues for research on teacher education and we need a more concerted and unified effort to develop rigorous and actionable evidence that can support teacher educators.
While teacher education is not my own area of research, and thus I am not deeply immersed in it, since becoming dean I have read a fair amount of the work that is currently being written. I think the truth is that there is a wide range of quality in teacher education research, some of it very good and some that suffers from serious deficiencies. This is not unlike education research in general. I know that we strive to ensure that our doctoral students who are interested in careers as researchers have strong training in research methods, including research design and methodological techniques, so they will be well prepared to carry out rigorous studies when they become faculty members themselves.
I think that one of the more recent trends in recent years that is helping to strengthen the quality of teacher education research is the entry into the field of people with training outside of education. We are seeing many more political scientists, sociologists, economists, and others who are looking at questions in teacher education, and many are bringing a methodological rigor to their work that at times has been lacking in some teacher education research.
I think one of the key questions that we are still striving to understand in teacher education is, what makes for a good teacher? While we have some good work that has helped us to answer this question, I think we still have a lot more to learn about this.
It is customary these days to lament what is sometimes referred to as the fundamental thinness of the research base that undergirds teacher preparation. And, of course, as the dean of a research-oriented education college, it is easy (and self-serving) for me to join this chorus and use the refrain as justification for more funding of research. Part of what gives rise to the perception of thinness are the recurring difficulties researchers have had at definitively determining what kind of intervention or approach works with what result under particular circumstances.
These difficulties are not to be denied, but they may overstate the “thinness” claim. A skillful teacher can draw upon his or her experiences and tailor responses to the needs of individual learners. This kind of effective tailoring can co-exist with the plethora of “no significant difference” findings that seem to accompany formal experiments with randomized controls. Yes, the tailoring can be going on and can be highly effective, but what is the evidence? The field needs to have more than anecdotes and self-congratulatory descriptions of experiences to capture whatever knowledge is being gained by highly effective teachers through their practice.
I have a vivid memory of sitting in a linear algebra class as a graduate student. The professor dutifully explained some point, but I was befuddled. I raised my hand and tried to frame a question. The professor pondered the probably poorly framed question and then proceeded to repeat word for word precisely what I had not understood in the first place. I recall being tempted to say that a loss of hearing was not my difficulty. Saying it again (even if it was said louder) was no help to me. My professor simply did not know how to help me with what I was struggling to understand. Maybe a more skilled teacher would have known what to do, but it is also possible, perhaps even probable, that the knowledge needed to facilitate my learning simply did not exist.
Limits on our knowledge about what to do when learners struggle are all too extensive. The grim reality is that even the most excellent teachers have relatively few resources at their disposal to turn struggling learners into highly successful learners. We are in serious need for this additional knowledge and we need to recognize that it can come from multiple sources and as a result of multiple types of research.
Because of the changing demographics of U.S. schools, with the percentage of Black and brown children expected to exceed the percentage of White children by the year 2023, teacher education programs need the knowledge, skill, and expertise to prepare teachers for these diverse classrooms. Tomorrow’s teachers need not only the cultural competency to cross boundaries of difference themselves, but also skill in cultivating their students’ facility in navigating across difference and in engaging controversial or contested topics with responsibility and courage. Reliable ways to build these competencies and skills remain elusive and demand further research.
On a related note, our current teaching force lacks the diversity necessary for all students in this country to have teachers who look like them or who might share their experiences. This demographic divide needs to be addressed for a number of reasons. First, the profession responsible for developing the primary human capital of our society should reflect our population. Second, it is important to life outcomes for children to interact with adults in school with whom they can identify. Third, the knowledge base of the teaching profession requires the expertise and experience of people who are diverse with respect to race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, language, and gender. These problems of imbalance in the teaching profession mean teacher preparation programs must actively recruit students of color, first-generation college goers, and those who are multilingual. To do so, we may need to explore alternative recruitment and admissions practices to ensure that we are attracting and admitting students who bring with them the resources, experiences, and skills that are most likely to be crucial in success in learning to teach. To ensure best practices in this area, additional research is warranted.
It is difficult for me to compare the current generation of teacher education students with earlier ones, as I am still new to the field. But I can tell you that I am incredibly impressed with the dedication and commitment of the young people we have entering our teacher preparation programs. We go out of our way to ensure that they are well aware of the challenges they will face when they enter their own classrooms, and they embrace these challenges and tackle them head on. For example, we have a specialized program, the Urban Educators Cohort Program that trains students specifically for the challenges they will face working in urban districts around the country. Students are provided with specialized coursework that focuses on the needs of students in these districts, which often includes high proportions of students living in poverty, with special needs, and who are English language learners. In addition, students conduct their year-long teaching internship in one of the cities with whom we partner, districts that currently include Detroit, Chicago, Lansing, and Grand Rapids.
Our students are also very cognizant of the increasing demands they will face when they become teachers. This includes such pressures as being facile with technology in the classroom, being knowledgeable of the Common Core State Standards, and how to teach a diverse set of students in their classrooms.
I favor the idea that truly effective teachers have firsthand knowledge about what it means to struggle with their learning. I worry about students in preservice teaching programs who have never “hit the wall” in terms of their own learning. The “wall” exists for us all. Its location varies enormously, and its encounter can be quite humbling, but also quite empowering, particularly for those aspiring to teach.
One of the presumed benefits of hitting the wall is the resulting empathy for others facing their limits. My speculation is that empathy is perhaps the least important of the benefits and that there is more to be gained from the fact that a teacher is pushing the limits of his or her understanding with the attendant willingness to struggle when success is not guaranteed. This is fertile ground, perhaps, for the kinds of insights that give rise to the ability of experienced teachers to tailor instruction to meet the needs of their struggling learners.
I heartily encourage quests for teachers, both practicing and prospective, to find and attempt to scale the “wall.”
The most significant change I have noticed in current teacher education students is in their motivation for entering the profession. Historically, people who wanted to become teachers were fairly conservative about schooling, having themselves been successful students in traditional classrooms. Like these previous generations of teachers, today’s teacher education students want to teach children and impact the learning outcomes and future successes of their students. But many also want to change the world. Some enter professional preparation programs with a deep commitment to social justice, having experienced firsthand the challenges resulting from systemic racial and socioeconomic inequality in current K-12 schooling. They believe in the power of education—and in the transformative effect of quality teaching—and are willing to work hard to hone the skills they need to be skillful practitioners. Many have already worked in small and large ways to mitigate educational and social inequalities and are passionately connected to a social justice and equity agenda. Stated simply, they aim to transform the very profession they are entering.
Over my 25 years in the teacher education classroom, students continue to have an unwavering motivation that has not changed. As a teacher educator at University of Washington and Stanford University, I felt incredibly fortunate to work with students who were deeply committed to their students and to learning how best to teach them. What I have witnessed is the increasing lack of support that my students experience for their decision to become a teacher, especially through university-based teacher education programs. As a society, we need to ensure that our teachers are among the best-educated people in our country, as they were historically and still are in many high achieving countries, and that teaching attracts, and retains, the most talented and diverse workforce. This cannot happen without greater investments in future teachers. If we hope to change the trajectories of young people’s lives, we need to ensure that we support prospective teachers, both financially, by funding professional education, and professionally, by investing in continuing mentoring and professional development.
As one of the proponents of the turn toward practice-based teacher education, I support efforts that ground the teacher education curriculum in a set of core practices that prepare teachers to engage in ambitious and equitable instruction. There are a number of teacher educators that are experimenting with such a curriculum in their classrooms, including teacher educators from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, University of Washington, UCLA, Notre Dame, Boston Teacher Residency, and others. A practice-based curriculum would equip teachers to enter the classroom with a foundational set of practices that would enable them to support student learning.
As accreditation standards push for evidence of outcomes of teacher education, I would hope they focus first on teachers’ ability to enact these practices, both in student teaching and in their classrooms. The current effort to accredit teacher education programs based on their graduates’ value-added scores seems much less promising, in large part because there are still many unanswered questions about the stability of such scores and their suitability for accrediting teacher education (see Feuer, Floden, Chudowsky, & Ahn, 2013, for a detailed treatment of this issue). Teacher education programs should be held accountable for what they are able to contribute to their graduates’ knowledge and skill in teaching.
This has been a real challenge for many teacher preparation programs. Here in Michigan, for example, our state Board of Education voted a few years ago to adopt the Common Core State Standards. But then the legislature tried to reverse this decision, but lacking the authority to do so, could only intercede through its funding to the Department of Education. So after a couple of years of working toward implementing the Smarter Balanced tests to replace the existing state-designed assessments, the Department of Education had its funding for implementing the Smarter Balanced assessments eliminated and had to back off and create its own new assessments. These kinds of rapid, back-and-forth policy changes make it difficult for us to structure our teacher education curriculum. But we adapt our curriculum as these changes occur as best we can.
Because we are preparing our graduates to teach anywhere in the country and even around the world (one third of our recent teacher education graduates have taken jobs outside of Michigan), this is a real challenge for us. We strive to have our curriculum flexible enough to prepare students to teach anywhere.
Teacher preparation curricula are already crowded, and it’s disgraceful to see how many requirements are heaped upon those seeking licensure. Moreover, there seem to be calls at every turn for adding more. Witness the calls in recent years for preparing teachers to be better prepared to handle the tragedy of an active shooter in a school, to be more knowledgeable about the needs of children coming from families with members in the military, to be more skilled at recognizing the signs of child abuse along with reporting obligations and intervention options, to know more about how to teach in online environments, to know more about how to handle bullying in and around classrooms, and to know more about how to ensure safety in online environments, to name just a few. These calls for “new” skills build on the long-standing expectations for teachers to be ever more knowledgeable about the content being taught, the measurement and assessment of learning, the uses of technology, the management of classes, the individualization of instruction, and the list goes on (and on).
Again, we face the grim reality of limits on resources. We cannot just add requirements and lengthen programs, regardless of how well intentioned and justifiable each individual addition might be on its merits. Some refuge can be found in the recognition that there is more to the preparation of a teacher than a preservice program. Moreover, I detect some welcome progress toward blurring the distinction between preservice and inservice learning, thanks to endeavors like induction programs that can be coupled with effective ongoing professional development programs.
Right now, teachers are considered “qualified” simply by virtue of graduating from an accredited program or completing a major in the subject that they teach. This sidesteps the real issue, for it relies on poor proxies for teaching effectiveness instead of demonstrated capacity to do the work that will help students learn. This is perilous for our students.
In order to build a reliable system for supplying skillful teaching to all students across the US, we must transform teachers’ preparation by identifying the most important skills and professional knowledge needed for responsible teaching, and building tools, materials, and standardized performance assessments of those core skills. Teacher candidates must be able to demonstrate the requisite commitments, practices, and knowledge in action before earning an entry-level teaching license. Ongoing training and more assessment should be necessary to renew this entry-level license or to earn a continuing basic, specialized, or advanced license.
The initial training of teachers must be connected to a comprehensive curriculum of professional training and licensure that spans preservice education through at least the first 5 years of teaching practice, with corresponding assessments providing information about teachers’ increasing competence as they become more experienced. This approach is a significant departure from current practice in which teachers start teaching with little training in the complex work of teaching and are expected to learn this work from experience. Experience is an unreliable method of learning in any domain, from athletics to skilled trades to teaching. Although knowledge and skill can improve with experience, mislearning often develops and is reinforced through repetition. Many important skills cannot be developed without direct training, supervised practice, and rigorous feedback.
What is needed is an explicit curriculum to develop teachers’ skills and a system of performance assessments to determine whether teacher candidates can perform competently. This curriculum must also include carefully designed and sequenced opportunities to practice these skills in a variety of settings. Teacher candidates should demonstrate proficient performance with each set of skills before they are granted an initial teaching license.
At the University of Michigan, we integrate technology into nearly every aspect of our teacher preparation programs. Our students study electronic records of practice from skillful teachers. They record themselves practicing their lessons and review these recordings with their fellow students and with master teachers to improve their practice. They learn ways to apply learning analytics to measure the growth and learning outcomes of their students. They engage adaptive technologies to ensure that all students have practical ways of learning despite any physical or cognitive differences. They practice in safe and simulated settings in order to develop or improve basic instructional skill without putting actual children at risk. They learn how to integrate a range of technologies in their classrooms, from computers to cell phones to tablets. Technological tools permit our teacher preparation programs to transcend the limits of time and space and enable our students to benefit from a wider range of experiences and feedback.
Many teacher education programs are lagging behind K-12 classrooms, both in their use of technology to prepare new teachers and in their commitment to preparing teachers to use the technologies that are becoming ubiquitous in schools. An even more pressing need is to prepare teachers to use technologies in transformative ways, rather than simply appropriating new tools to teach in old ways. The use of Smart Boards as a 21st-century blackboard might be an example of such appropriation—a new technology used in most cases to deliver very traditional pedagogy. To harness the power of technology to engage students differently, teachers need time to explore, invent, and innovate. Given the limited time available for initial teacher preparation, such time will need to be integrated into existing structures such as subject-specific methods classes. This, however, would require a commitment to investing in teacher education learning and development.
I meet with groups of our graduates as they are completing their year-long internship each year. Two of the questions I ask them are, “What parts of your education prepared you well for your career as a teacher, and in what areas do you wish you had more training?” Invariably, in answer to the second question, what I hear from the interns is that they wish they had more training in how to incorporate technology into their own teaching. While we have included more about technology into our curriculum (and state certification standards require a certainly level of training in technology), it is clear that our graduates want more.
One of the difficulties we have is that there is a wide range of technology adoption by school districts in which our graduates are teaching. Some are well funded and have state-of-the-art technology, including one-to-one laptop or tablet initiatives; others are much earlier in the technology adoption curve. So we work to train our graduates to be able to work with whatever technology they do find in their first classroom.
At Penn State, we take pride in how we are infusing the creative and effective use of technology into how we prepare teachers and how we expect our graduates to teach. (These are two distinct, but inter-connected ambitions.) We see this as an emerging signature of our teacher preparation programs, and we do so with sensitivity to the risks which are real. It is dangerously easy to be caught up in the glitz of the latest shiny new device. Promises of technology revolutionizing the field have been around for many years, and one need look no further than the debate surrounding MOOCS to see a lively and provocative contemporary example. We need to stay focused on what really makes sense from a teaching and learning perspective. The phrase “Any teacher who can be replaced by technology should be” has been attributed to Paul Welliver, one of the pioneers in the field of instructional design at Penn State. More recently, Kyle Peck has built on Welliver’s insight and refines the “replacement” idea. According to Peck, teachers do need to be “replaced,” but not in the sense of being eliminated. Rather, he sees the door opening on teachers being re-placed in the sense of being re-positioned to play new and more important roles (Peck, 2012).
We face a conundrum in our country. University-based teacher education is at risk, even as we know, from international comparisons, that investing in rigorous, university-based teacher education is one of the keys to improving our education system as a whole. It’s time to acknowledge that there is no magic bullet in education—no curriculum or app or school structure—that can work without skilled and knowledgeable teachers. It’s time for teacher educators to work together to define the fundamental knowledge and skills that teachers need to be successful in the classroom and then to commit to ensuring our students cannot graduate without being proficient in these areas. We know enough about teaching early reading to agree, as a field, how best to prepare elementary teachers to teach reading and to hold ourselves accountable for our graduates’ ability to teach reading. Given the number and diversity of teacher education programs in this country, the challenges of such an initiative are considerable but not insurmountable. I look forward to working with other deans and teacher educators to take up this challenge, and to build our field in the process.
There is an April 9 (2013), Huffington Post column by Randy Turner with the title, “A Warning to Young People: Don’t Become a Teacher,” that has made the rounds. It is a powerful piece of writing that is also very disturbing. It is an open letter from an English teacher advising young people to eschew teaching as a profession. My perspective is different, even in the face of the dour cast my economics lens tends to impose on the world. I see teaching as a fine profession, filled with opportunity and hope, and I also see teacher preparation as a fine, intellectually stimulating, and highly rewarding line of work. I was very much buoyed recently by the affirmations I heard from current student teachers at a reception we held in their honor. Without exception they spoke from the heart about their reverence for teaching and their gratitude for the help they’ve received along the way from their professors, their supervisors, and their mentor teachers. Their testimonials were poignant, articulate, and powerful, and I have every confidence that they will go on to distinguish themselves in a vitally important profession. It is this powerful spirit that keeps me deeply engaged in this significant work.
Building teaching quality is a problem of massive scale. The teaching force numbers more than four million—a staggering size second only to retail salespersons—and has a high turnover rate—more than 40% of all teachers exit the profession within their first 5 years. This means that it is crucial that we work together to create high-quality teacher education and professional development that help large numbers of regular people develop the ability to teach effectively, whoever their students are. Simply recruiting bright people to the profession or providing incentives to effective teachers cannot come close to solving the problem.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.