Teaching and Teacher Education

Teaching and Teacher Education: An Absent Presence During the Early Years

During AERA’s early years, which I designate as the period from AERA’s birth in 1916 through the decades of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the topic of teaching and teacher education was largely absent from the addresses of AERA’s presidents, although it was not absent from the nascent field of education research. One reason for this has to do with the conceptions of education research that were foundational in the early years. Noted historian of education Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (2000) famously summarized the emergence and early development of education research with extreme parsimony—“Thorndike won, Dewey lost” (p. xi). Lagemann argued that during the early years, the ideas of E.L. Thorndike, the father of the measurement movement, shaped the emergence of education research as a scholarly field much more so than did the ideas of educational philosopher John Dewey. Although Dewey believed in the idea of science as part of the path to human improvement, he favored a collaborative and distributed approach to the study of education, which included teachers and parents, based on a notion of teaching as a way of nurturing people’s social capacities to sustain a democratic society. Lagemann (2000) noted that Thorndike, on the other hand, regarded teaching as a technical process and promoted a hierarchical approach to decisions about school goals, curriculum, and instruction. With this approach, “higher authorities” who were, as Lagemann documented, male education administrators, supervisors, psychologists, and researchers, made decisions based on test information and teachers, who were, as Lagemann also documented, women assumed to have limited intellectual capacity, were expected to carry them out as “efficiently and economically” as possible (p. 60).

Consistent with the early emphasis of education research on testing and measurement, AERA’s first four presidents focused on improving instruction through measurement, and three of the four actually used the words teaching or instruction in the titles of key addresses during the presidential years. Along these lines, AERA’s first president, Frank Ballou (1915–1916), titled his address “Improving Instruction Through Educational Measurement” (Ballou, 1916). He identified three steps in the improvement process: measuring educational results using the best standardized tests available, conveying unsatisfactory results, and retesting for improvement. AERA’s second president, Walter Monroe (1916–1917), also considered standardized tests as a means of improving instruction, claiming that tests should directly influence teaching. Sounding interestingly up-to-date, he said: “We now have sufficient scientific evidence to show that the measurement of the abilities of pupils at appropriate intervals and the use of this information in planning future teaching will increase the abilities of the pupils” (Monroe, 1920, p. 97). In something of a contrast to Monroe, Stuart Courtis, AERA’s third president (1917–1918), discussed the use of the “Hillegas Scale” in English composition classes, arguing explicitly that its value and only appropriate use was as an administrative and supervisory tool for determining the efficiency of instructional methods, not as a tool to be used by teachers in their daily work (Parker & Courtis, 1919). Finally B. R. Buckingham, who was AERA’s fourth president, serving from 1918 to 1920, described “A Proposed Index of Efficiency in Teaching United States History” (Buckingham, 1920). Buckingham’s work was based on the premise that teaching efficiency was a function of measured change in the knowledge of students; his address focused on the implications for test development of high correlations between scores on “fact” and “thought” questions on U.S. history tests.

As this brief bit of history shows, teaching was not entirely absent as a topic in the work of the earliest AERA presidents. Instead it was what might be called an “absent presence.” That is, all four of AERA’s first presidents assumed that the rightful purpose of educational measurement was improving the efficiency of instruction, a term they used more or less synonymously with teaching, although neither term was problematized or clarified. This suggests that there was some concept of instruction or teaching beneath the surface of what these presidents said about the purposes of research and that this concept shaped their questions and analyses. Nevertheless, teaching itself was neither explicated nor studied in the research they highlighted. Rather, reflecting the heavy emphasis on testing and measurement in the emerging field of education research at this time, and as Thorndike had advocated, the logic of the earliest AERA presidents was that decisions about instruction were made by authorities outside the classroom (and often outside the school) based on empirically established “laws of learning” (Lagemann, 2000) and accurate measurements of teaching efficiency. In essence, the earliest AERA presidents were occupied with developing tests and measurements of what they presumed to be the effects of instruction—students’ scores on the best tests they could devise—but paid no attention to instruction itself or to the contexts of teaching and the students who were taught.

In the 20 years following the addresses of AERA’s four earliest presidents, teaching and instruction were completely absent as the focus of presidential addresses, with a single exception in 1940, to which I return in a moment. However, it is important to note that even though AERA’s presidents in the early years did not take up the topic of teaching in their addresses, there was indeed an emerging body of work during this time on “teaching effectiveness.” In fact, there was a push between 1920 and 1940 to upgrade the teaching profession with numerous advisory councils and several massive investigations that used surveys as the primary research tool to find out “scientifically” what the most important characteristics and traits of teachers were (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005; Zeichner, 2005). This work, which reflected a view of teaching as the efficient transmission of information, was intended to identify teacher characteristics that predicted effectiveness. In fact, as I point out in the next section of this essay, which is about the middle years of AERA’s history, there were many education researchers during the early years who were involved in research on teacher efficiency, which was intended to inform selection and hiring decisions of teacher training programs and school administrators.

The single presidential address during AERA’s early years that actually took up the topic of teaching was by Bess Goodykoontz, who was AERA president in 1939–1940 and simultaneously the assistant U.S. commissioner of education. Under the title “Refining the Process in the Classroom,” Goodykoontz’s (1940) address, ³ which lies more in the tradition of Dewey than of Thorndike, opened with these words:

Refining the process in the classroom is a slippery term—hard to get hold of, hard to pull apart. It sounds deceivingly simple, like refining the process of planting a new rosebush . . . but actually classroom processes are numerous, complex and difficult. (p. 1)

Goodykoontz went on to name some of the complex and difficult classroom problems she had in mind, including wide variations in the reading levels of students in a single classroom, the tradeoffs between traditional and “letter-type” report cards, the potential uses of radio in the classroom, and dealing with midyear shifts in enrollment in ways that both introduced the “stranger” to the school and also protected the rights of the “permanent[ly] enrolled” (p. 2). Especially if we think of radio as the emerging technology of the times, Goodykoontz’s list of issues sounds remarkably contemporary, as does her assumption that teachers play a central role in how classroom problems are solved. In her address, Goodykoontz characterized the teacher as a “whole person” whose responsibility was to close the gap between knowledge and practice by working out appropriate classroom processes in keeping with “scientific facts” (p. 7), such as the recommendation that formal arithmetic work could be delayed until second or third grade as long as readiness activities were provided. Goodykoontz concluded her address by asserting that teaching was a job “for artists, for experimenters, for persons who like to try out new things” (p. 8), which required hard work but was also fun.

As far as I can determine, Goodykoontz’s address was an anomaly in the early history of AERA, at least in relation to the addresses and articles of its other presidents and also in relation to the emerging body of research that sought to identify teacher characteristics that predicted effectiveness. In this early period when the most common topic taken up by AERA’s presidents was testing and measurement, it is probably not a coincidence that Bess Goodykoontz was not only the sole AERA president to make the work of teaching her topic. She was also the first woman president of AERA, and she herself had been a teacher in rural schools in Iowa and Wisconsin before taking an academic position at the University of Pittsburgh and later being appointed to the post of assistant commissioner of education. Goodykoontz was one of a handful of AERA presidents in the early years who had actually been teachers, and she was an early childhood education specialist at that. This would have given her quite a different perspective on the work of teaching from those who assumed, following Thorndike and others, that educational problems should be solved by higher authorities or by those who sought to identify empirically the key characteristics and traits that predicted teaching efficiency.

Teaching and Teacher Education: An Emerging Presence During the Middle Years

During AERA’s middle years, the period from 1950 to 1980, research on teaching and teacher education emerged as a major field of study, and it appeared four times as a topic of addresses by AERA’s presidents: Arvil Barr (1952–1953), Hermann Remmers (1954–1955), David Ryans (1961–1962), and Nathaniel Gage (1963–1964). Tellingly, all four of these men served together on the AERA Committee on Criteria of Teacher Effectiveness, whose work culminated in the AERA publication The Handbook of Research on Teaching (Gage, 1963a), which has continued to be a major AERA project (Travers, 1973, second edition; Wittrock, 1986b, third edition; Richardson, 2001, fourth edition; Gitomer & Bell, 2016, fifth edition). The Committee on Criteria of Teacher Effectiveness issued reports in 1952 and 1953 (Barr et al., 1952, 1953), which were intended to address questions that had been of interest to the education research community since AERA’s early years about what distinguished superior and inferior teachers (Doyle, 1977). The reports concluded that much of the research on teaching effectiveness over the previous 40 years had been problematic in part because it often attempted to identify single characteristics or traits of effective teachers, based on ratings by “untrained” persons (Barr et al., 1952, 1953). The reports called for research on teaching effectiveness that recognized differences among teachers, used reliable and consistent means of classroom observation as the best source of data, and contributed to stronger organization and theoretical grounding of this work.

The perceived failure of previous studies of teaching effectiveness was an important part of the context in which the topic of teaching and teacher education emerged in writings by AERA presidents during the middle years. For example, in his article titled “The Measurement of Teacher Characteristics and the Prediction of Teaching Efficiency,” Barr (1953) described the potential importance but considerable weaknesses of extant studies exploring teacher–pupil relations, teacher personality, and criteria for defining and measuring teaching efficiency. Remmers used an article title almost identical to Barr’s with the words in college appended at the end (Baker & Remmers, 1952). Like Barr, Remmers concluded that very little was actually known about the relationship of teacher characteristics and the prediction of college teaching efficiency, and he too called for more research that was more rigorous. By the 1960s, researchers’ perceptions of the state of research related to teaching had apparently improved a bit. Ryans (1962) noted that more research was being done about teacher behavior based on observation. Citing Mitzel’s (1960) work, Ryan also noted that important strides had been made in explicating the presage, process, and product criteria of teacher effectiveness. Gage, who was the fourth AERA president to take up the topic of teaching and teacher education during the middle years of the organization’s history, laid out the empirical and psychological foundation for a science of teaching (Gage, 1964) in an address ⁴ titled “Psychological Theory and Empirical Research for Teacher Education.”

In the remainder of this discussion about teaching and teacher education as a topic of AERA presidents from the middle years of the organization’s history, I use Gage’s address to stand for the much larger (and varied) body of research on teaching that emerged during this period and to situate this work within its intellectual and social times. Gage began his address by precisely defining research on teaching: research wherein teachers’ behaviors and characteristics are the independent variables and pupils’ learning is the dependent variable or research wherein ways of recruiting, selecting, and educating teachers are the independent variables and teachers’ behaviors and characteristics known to be correlated with pupils’ learning are the dependent variables. With this, Gage succinctly summarized what he called the “criterion of effectiveness” (Gage, 1963b) paradigm for research on teaching (Floden, 2001), which came to be more widely known as “process–product” research because it focused on the search for teaching behaviors (or processes) that predicted pupil’s learning (or products).

Gage justified the need for more and better research on teaching in response to highly publicized critiques of teaching and teacher education, specifically Conant’s (1963) critique of the education of American teachers, which had concluded that teacher training programs should put more emphasis on liberal arts and humanities and less on pedagogy and methods. This was a clear sign of the times and the larger context in which Gage’s address and process–product research more generally emerged. Included was the startlingly contemporary-sounding critique that teacher education programs at colleges and universities had failed to adequately prepare the nation’s teachers and that the schools had failed to adequately prepare the nation’s children for the demands of post-World War II society (Lagemann, 2000). There were other much harsher critiques of the nation’s schools and of teacher training institutions during this time, including Bestor’s (1953) scathing charge that the schools were an “educational wasteland” and Koerner’s (1963) blunt declaration that education faculty were intellectually inferior to faculty involved in liberal education.

An important aspect of the times that shaped Gage’s address and the broader program of research on teaching that he and others developed was the charge that the “science of education” had not yet come of age (Conant, 1963) or—worse—was ensnared in the “trap of scientism” (Koerner, 1963, p. 29). Gage and many of those who conducted research on teaching and teacher education during the 1960s and 1970s were influenced by the critics’ conclusions that there was no compelling science of education. As important, as this line of research on teaching developed, Gage and the many other major contributors to the development of the process–product research paradigm were also influenced by the widely disseminated Coleman report (Coleman et al., 1966) on educational equality, which was mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and sponsored by the U.S. government. Although what the Coleman report actually concluded was that school factors were not powerful enough to overcome the impact of student background and socioeconomic status in determining student outcomes, the report was often misinterpreted to mean that teaching and schools had no impact on students’ learning (Lagemann, 2000). The development of process–product research was in part an attempt to demonstrate empirically that teaching did indeed make a difference and to identify those teaching processes that were consistently linked with desirable student outcomes across contexts and settings (Doyle, 1977; Dunkin & Biddle, 1974; Shulman, 1986a).

In fact, the ultimate goal of this new line of research was to develop “the scientific basis for the art of teaching” (Gage, 1978) by specifying effective teacher behaviors and applying them as treatments to classroom situations. As Gage (1964) said in his address:

So what I wish to urge, along with all my predecessors, is a way of proceeding that will base both the content and method of teacher education less on opinion and more on scientific knowledge. And the source of knowledge about the science and technology of teaching must be research—and research on teaching in particular. In the long run, what else is there? (p. 4)

What else indeed? As this quote suggests, the early process–product research, which set out to determine the features of classroom instruction that supported student learning, was animated by behaviorist views of teaching and learning and the assumption that the relationship between the two was fairly linear, whereas the later work expanded to explore “mediating” factors between teaching and learning, including students’ and teachers’ thought processes (Clark & Peterson, 1986; Wittrock, 1986a, 1986b). The goal of process–product research on teacher education was to identify transportable teaching and training processes that predicted pupils’ and teachers’ learning. What researchers were learning through “scientific” research on teaching was assumed to be the rightful content of the teacher education curriculum.

So what’s the difference between the research of the first four AERA presidents, mentioned in the first section, who addressed the improvement of instruction through educational measurement 50 years before Gage, on one hand, and the research on teaching conducted by Gage and many others during AERA’s middle years, on the other hand? One short answer to this question is that the earliest AERA presidents were engaged in developing measures of what they presumed to be teaching’s effects (i.e., students’ scores on the best tests they could devise), not of teaching itself. In contrast, with process–product research on teaching, the point was to open up and illuminate the black box of teaching rather than simply to study its presumed endpoint. Along these lines, Gage and colleagues used classroom observation protocols and audiotape recordings to explore and study the actual processes of teaching in terms of identifiable behaviors that teachers enacted in real classrooms that supported and predicted students’ learning.

A second more complex answer to my question about the difference between AERA early and middle period approaches to studying teaching effectiveness has to do with the vastly different social and political times in which the research was conducted. The research on teacher efficiency during the early AERA years was carried out primarily in the period leading up to and during the beginning of World War I. This was also the early years of the development of the field of education research itself, and as I have noted above, there was an emphasis on improving instruction through measurement.

In contrast, research on teaching during the middle years of AERA’s history emerged in the post-World War II era and was developed during the period of the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, and dramatic social upheaval in the schools related to desegregation in the North and South. These social and political times brought marked attention to inequality in the schools and opened up a whole new world of questions about its social and educational causes and consequences.

The line of inquiry that Nate Gage described in his 1964 address dominated research on teaching for nearly three decades—virtually the entire period of AERA’s middle years (Shulman, 1986a). However, multiple alternative and competing paradigms of research on teaching, building on work in anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and/or critical theory, also emerged during this time (Erickson, 1986; Evertson & Green, 1986; Hamilton & McWilliam, 2001; Lather, 1986). Much of this work explored how classroom, school, and larger policy/political factors produced and reproduced school failure for groups of students traditionally marginalized by the system. Concurrently, the process–product paradigm had many critics on methodological, conceptual, logical, theoretical, empirical, paradigmatic, and critical grounds. Topping the list of these critiques were the paradigm’s failure to challenge the existing social arrangements of school (and society) that sustained and reproduced inequality and its failure to problematize the paradigm’s underlying assumptions about teaching, learning, learners, causality, schooling, uniformity, diversity, effectiveness, and professional competence.

Teaching and Teacher Education: A Growing Presence During the Current Years

As is well known, during the time period overlapping the middle years and into the current years of AERA, social science research in general was greatly influenced by the broad philosophical shift away from positivism and approaches borrowed from the natural sciences and toward more social, interpretive, cultural, critical, and political epistemological and methodological perspectives (Eisenhart, 2001; Howe, 2013; Lather, 1992, 2004). During this time, research on teaching and teacher education greatly expanded and grew as a major field of study animated by multiple and often competing perspectives and paradigms (Donmoyer, 2001; Floden, 2001; Hamilton & McWilliam, 2001), the full history of which is far too complex and nuanced to account for in this brief essay. It is worth noting, however, that a proliferation of approaches to research on teaching and teacher education was concurrent with the expansion of AERA’s Division K, which was founded in 1984 and grew quickly to become the largest division of the association, and with the birth of a number of SIGs related to critical, cultural, ethnicity, and situation- or subject-specific fields of research on teaching and teacher education. At the same time, multiple initiatives related to the enhancement of research on teaching, teacher education, and teacher quality were launched, including new organizations, conferences, journals, handbooks, and book series.

Arguably three developments were among the most important influences on the general development of research on teaching and teacher education during this time (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2014; Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). First, there were major changes in prevailing ideas about how people learn and what they need to know to thrive in the new knowledge economy. Building on the research of the previous decades, learning came to be understood as an active social process wherein learners draw on preexisting knowledge and experiences to make sense of new ideas. New conceptions of learning require new kinds of teaching, tailored to specific subject matters and students and designed to help them reconfigure existing understandings. In turn, new understandings of teaching and learning necessitate more powerful opportunities for learning to teach throughout the professional lifespan.

Second, there was a mass movement of people across the world prompted by the shift to a global economy, which dramatically transformed the student population in many countries. In the United States, new migration patterns were coupled with a long history of racism and the impoverishment of minority children and families as well as major movements to include students with disabilities in general education (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2014; Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). These changes brought diversity and educational inequality to the forefront of deliberations about policy and practice regarding teaching and teacher education but also revealed fundamental disagreements about the causes of (and possible solutions for) achievement and opportunity gaps. Third, the major shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy that had begun several decades earlier brought unparalleled attention to the quality of education systems around the world and in particular to teacher quality (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2014; Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). Although an incorrect premise, many politicians, policymakers, and researchers around the world came to agree that teachers were the single most important influence on how, what, and how much students learned. Unprecedented attention to teacher quality was consistently coupled with the development of new and more rigorous standards for teaching and learning, new pathways into teaching, new providers of teacher preparation, and multiple outcomes-based educational accountability regimes. These three complex overlapping trends are among the most important developments that shaped research on teaching and teacher education during the current AERA period.

Aspects of one or more of these trends were taken up in each of the six presidential addresses that addressed teaching and teacher education during the current AERA years. In the 1980s, Lee Shulman (1984–1985) considered conceptions of teachers’ knowledge (Shulman, 1986b), whereas David Berliner (1985–1986) focused on expertise in teaching, particularly the differences between what experts and novices knew and could do under particular conditions (Berliner, 1986). During the 1990s, Jane Stallings (1994–1995) made an argument for comprehensive school-linked services that ensure rich teaching and learning opportunities for all students given the unequal conditions of society (Stallings, 1995), and Linda Darling-Hammond (1995–1996) argued for the necessity of well-prepared teachers for democratic societies within the new knowledge society (Darling-Hammond, 1996). Finally, during the decade of the 2000s, Hilda Borko (2003–2004) analyzed research and practice related to professional development for experienced teachers in terms of phases of development and directions for the future (Borko, 2004), whereas Cochran-Smith (2004–2005) identified and critiqued features of what she called “the new teacher education” (Cochran-Smith, 2005). Given space limitations, I concentrate on three of these presidential addresses, one from each decade (Shulman, Darling-Hammond, and Cochran-Smith).

Lee Shulman’s (1986b) presidential address was titled “Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching.” His central argument was that teachers’ subject matter knowledge had been ignored in contemporary teacher tests and in existing research paradigms for studying teaching:

But no one focused on the subject matter content itself. No one asked how subject matter was transformed from the knowledge of the teacher into the content of instruction. Nor did they ask how particular formulations of that content related to what students came to know or misconstrue. (p. 6)

Building on changing conceptions of how people learn and influenced by the much larger shift away from behaviorist approaches to research on teaching, Shulman called this “the missing paradigm” problem, the consequences of which were significant for both policy and research. Unpacking the contemporary separation of content and pedagogy, Shulman argued for a new way to think about the blending of these by conceptualizing teacher knowledge as an amalgam of content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and curricular knowledge in addition to knowledge about students and school contexts, a framework that was remarkably generative, suggesting many new research questions about teaching and teacher education.

Situating Shulman’s address in its social and intellectual times means understanding that it was in part a response to the by-then widely critiqued, but still robust, paradigm of process–product research. Pointing to what that body of research had left out, Shulman also critiqued the way policymakers and test-makers had applied the research, claiming to offer “research-based” evaluations that were narrowly focused on techniques and procedures. Shulman’s address emphasized that although good teachers were in fact skilled in tasks such as classroom management, they did not simply implement “research-based” behaviors. In addition and as importantly, teachers were professionals who translated their knowledge of content into appropriate representations, asked questions, responded to students’ misconceptions, and offered content-specific explanations. Shulman and his students explored the missing paradigm for more than two decades, spawning a still very healthy national and international program of research about how teachers develop and enact pedagogical content knowledge and about the sources and forms of teachers’ knowledge. This work helped to shift researchers’ attention away from what teachers did to what they knew and how they learned over time.

A decade after Shulman, Linda Darling-Hammond (1996) addressed the AERA membership on “The Right to Learn and the Advancement of Teaching: Research, Policy and Practice for Democratic Education.” Darling-Hammond argued that rapidly changing economic, social, and technological conditions of society made it essential that we change the historical pattern of providing a quality public education only to the advantaged few:

This is the first time in history that the success, perhaps even the survival, of nations and people has been so tightly tied to their ability to learn. Because of this, our future depends now, as never before, on our ability to teach . . . I will argue that the problem of the next century will be “the advancement of teaching” and its resolution will depend on our ability to develop knowledge for a very different kind of teaching than what has been the norm for most of this century. (p. 7)

Darling-Hammond argued that quality education for “all students” required both higher standards and more complex teaching practices that built on the resources of diverse students. Reflecting grave concerns about the rise of alternative entry routes into teaching that drastically streamlined preparation, in this and other writing at about the same time, Darling-Hammond emphasized that opportunity to learn from fully prepared and fully certified teachers was the “birthright” of every student (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996). She located the blame for the current situation on growing income inequalities, school personnel policies that placed the least prepared teachers in the poorest schools, and the widespread use of “research-based” checklist-like teacher evaluations that undermined good teaching. Darling-Hammond concluded that real reform required policies that contributed to teachers’ education rather than control of their actions.

Darling-Hammond was AERA’s first African American president and first president of color (also see Banks, this issue, pp. 149–158). Her address reflected all three of the larger trends, noted earlier, which were rapidly converging during the 1990s—the idea that a new kind of teaching that prepared all students for the knowledge society was necessary; an increasingly diverse school population coupled with a history of inferior education for minority, immigrant, and poor students; and the rising tide of accountability regimes that attempted to evaluate and control teachers rather than support them as professionals. Darling-Hammond’s address was groundbreaking and controversial, not simply in the sense that it argued that “the advancement of teaching” was the central problem of the next century. Darling-Hammond’s address was seminal also in that it framed as a civil rights issue and a question of social justice the provision of well-prepared and well-qualified teachers to those who had been historically marginalized by the educational system.

A decade after Darling-Hammond, my own AERA presidential address was titled “The New Teacher Education: For Better or for Worse?” (Cochran-Smith, 2005). I argued that a “new teacher education” had emerged, which reflected a dramatically changing policy context and the shift to a knowledge economy, which had also meant a shift to neoliberal economics:

The new teacher education grows out of the changing notions of accountability that surfaced in the mid-1960s (Cuban, 2004) and, more specifically, the educational reform movements that began in the 1980s (Sirotnik, 2004). In addition, the new teacher education is influenced by the continuing educational achievement gap, the enlarged role of the federal government in education, the elevation of the science of education, the embrace of a market approach to education policy, and the history and status of the profession. (p. 4)

I suggested that the new teacher education was part of a more general “policy turn” regarding teacher quality, assuming that manipulating the right policy levers would fix teacher quality and thus fix the achievement gap and the schools. Second I suggested that the new teacher education was driven by evidence, as illustrated by then new federal reporting requirements and accreditation standards, all of which required evidence of impact. Finally I suggested that the new teacher education was based on outcomes, particularly the measured effects of programs on student achievement. There is little doubt that these trends, which I identified in 2005, have continued and intensified in the decade since then (Cochran-Smith, Baker et al., in press; Cochran-Smith, Stern et al., 2016) in addition to the many new education reform advocacy organizations, social entrepreneurs, and philanthropies that are now involved in providing and/or supporting teacher preparation.

Reflecting my grave concern about the “ed reform” paradigm that had become dominant in policy and politics, my presidential address concluded that we needed a different “new” teacher education:

The major pieces of “the new teacher education” . . . are problematic, particularly in their narrowest form. . . . Instead, we need a new teacher education with three somewhat different pieces: teacher education constructed as a policy problem and a political problem, teacher education based on evidence plus [values, history, and critical analyses], and teacher education driven by learning. (p. 15)

Emphasizing that teacher education involved struggles over ideas, ideals, power, and competing notions of justice and public/private interest, I urged the educational community to challenge the many aspects of the new teacher education that did not serve the interests of students and did not acknowledge the complexity of school contexts and cultures.

I believe that a major contribution of my presidential address was that it called attention to teacher education construed as a policy problem based on the assumption that teachers were the critical component in boosting students’ achievement and that test scores were the single best measure of accountability. My address pointed out that these problematic assumptions were coupled with equally problematic and very limited notions of equity that did not seek to interrupt the forces that reproduced inequality:

The trap here is [the assumption] that the goal of policies for high poverty, hard-to-staff, and minority schools is providing teachers who will do no harm because they are “good enough” to maintain or slightly increase existing very low levels of achievement rather than investing in approaches that interrupt the cycle of inadequate resources, low expectations and poor achievement. (Cochran-Smith, 2005, p. 12)

Conclusion

As this essay has shown, there are some ways in which analysis of the absence, presence, and shifting treatment of teaching and teacher education as a topic of AERA presidential addresses mirrors the general contours of the emergence and historical development of the field of research on teaching and teacher education. In this sense, the presidential addresses referenced in this essay highlight some of the most salient shifts in the mainstream research on teaching and teacher education. In many other ways, however, as noted in the introduction, this kind of analysis allows only a partial view of the field and leaves out a great many significant developments, especially in terms of themes, topics, issues, and perspectives that exist on the margins of the field. This limited view is unavoidable, given the fact that AERA presidential addresses are an imperfect prism for considering the history of the research on teaching and teacher education and an approach that clarifies some ideas, issues, and voices but distorts and omits others.

It is likely that over the coming decades, given the enormous emphasis placed on these issues in today’s global society, there will be many more presidential addresses that take up topics related to teaching, teacher education, and teacher quality either directly or indirectly. Hopefully future presidential addresses will draw on research that is informed by everything we have learned over the last 100 years about the complexity of the activity of teaching, the multifaceted challenges of the enterprise of teacher education, and the immeasurable influence of both of these on preparing future participants to survive and thrive in a democratic society.