My philosophy in teaching is that if a child fails to learn, a teacher has failed to teach. I don’t believe in excuses. I don’t listen to them. Everything has to do with the teacher. This is true if I am teaching a first grader or an undergraduate. I have put a lot of thought into my cognate lately and realize that if I am going to make a career of being a teacher educator, teacher education and first year teachers need to be the focus of my research. If I wanted to research how children read or how they feel, then I needed to continue as a classroom teacher. Here’s how I see it. If teacher educators’ research agendas helped create highly effective teacher education programs that trained highly effective teachers, then those highly effective teachers could go into classrooms and research what works with the children and their learning. This could take awhile, especially with the gloomy statistics being released regarding teacher education programs in our country. But I have been thinking about it a lot lately. I want to answer the age old question, “Why do new teachers say they learned nothing about teaching until their student teaching?” Something is missing.
If a child fails to learn, a teacher has failed to teach.
What are teacher preparation programs failing to teach pre-service teachers?
This is such a touchy subject because teacher preparation programs are full of professors, once classroom teachers, who pride themselves in the work they do. Being asked to change implies wrong doing, which is then taken personally, which leads to defensiveness. It is human nature.
But the current preparation programs are the perfect place to be unaccountable. Undergraduate students are naïve. They trust that what they are paying thousands of dollars a semester to hear and be trained in will work and prepare them to be highly effective classroom teachers. But what if what they hear isn’t training them to work with the diverse population of students they are about to have sitting in front of them? They don’t know this at the time. Only when those teacher candidates get their first classroom do they realize something may have been missing in their training. Even then, they may not say anything because “that’s the way it has always been.” School districts are left with the task of providing even more initial training of the first year teachers in the areas in which they struggle. They have to provide the professional development because they are accountable.
If a first year teacher is lucky enough to join a district that offers such professional development, they have a chance of outlasting the average new teacher. It seems most districts are spending the majority of their time working with new classroom teachers on classroom management. But universities don’t always require a course in classroom management.
If a child fails to learn, a teacher has failed to teach.
Passion, excitement, and a love for children will only take a novice teacher so far if unprepared. I, personally, think it is a very exciting time to be entering the field. But it is a different time. Our pre-service teachers need to be trained differently.
A teacher affects more than a single group of children. A quote clearly stating just how critical the job of a teacher is, and how even more critical my job is in preparing them for it:
“Your behavior as a teacher not only affects your students individually; it affects the quality of collective intellect and morality, and therefore the strength of our civilization.
Parents give their children to teachers--hoping, expecting, and paying teachers to educate their children. As a teacher you have a contract with children and families, your school and district, and society itself to fulfill your moral obligation to teach well. You and the citizens of [Colorado] are paying me to teach you how to teach other people’s children. Therefore, I have a contract with you and your family, the school and district that employ you, and society to fulfill my moral obligation to teach you well.”
--M. Kozloff, University of North Carolina, 2009
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I agree that something can be changed in teacher education programs to improve the confidence and well-being of first year teachers. It needs to be based on getting people teaching in front of kids early, like during their first year in college. We can all sit around and talk about good teaching and feel warm and fuzzy or we can get out and teach and learn from our mistakes. At Doane, where I attended college, we were in the classrooms teaching and assisting as sophomores. Why not a year earlier? It would weed out those who don't want to teach, hone the skills of those that do, and give more time so teachers can learn to be teachers. I feel that many times the investment of four years of college and thousands of dollars corners people who are education majors into teaching when really they should be doing something else.
ReplyDeleteMy first year of teaching was much like my first marathon. I had read all about it, had had experience that felt like it, but until the real thing, nothing compared. I think we can prepare teachers better, but when it truly comes down to it, having ones own classroom is much different than any pseudo-teaching done in undergrad.
Tina, I used to believe that if a student didn't learn, then I didn't teach. I've amended that. I can't force anyone to learn. I can offer opportunities to learn and help students assess what they have learned and what they still need to learn. Every individual chooses whether to push toward understanding or stay still. The hardest students to teach are those who believe I should give them answers and ask for regurgitation. My responsibility is to help students gain access to knowledge, to attempt to entice them into learning until the pleasure of learning outpaces the pain of not knowing. For some individuals, though, it's easier to stay unlearned than to risk failing. Those I cannot teach, despite my best offerings.
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