Preparing to Teach

Teaching is really hard. 

The old cliche, "If you can, do. If you can't, teach," could not be more wrong. In order to teach you've got to first know what you're talking about, then get the attention of twenty or thirty kids, then encourage them, cajole them, or inspire them to focus on the work, exert some effort, and take some risks. If you're teaching in a high school, you do this five times a day, each time with a whole new group of students. In elementary schools, the kids stay all day, sure, but in a hour or so you need to switch to a whole new topic.

And the other cliche - "You don't know something until you can teach it," is an oversimplification of something real and true. To teach any concept, you not only have to know and understand it yourself, you've got to be able to see if through the eyes of someone who doesn't. Then bridge that gap.

Oh, and some kids will quit on you because they are scared, others because they don't believe they could learn it anyway, and some because they're fourteen or still act like it.

It Takes Time to Learn to Teach

There is an October 2014 article in the New York Times about a program to help aspiring teachers get a handle on all this by serving in a "residency" under a mentor teacher for a full year before being allowed to take over a classroom by themselves. The article focuses on the approach taken by the Aspire Public Schools, a  charter school network, and also looks briefly at some of the policy and theory behind this approach.

According to the Times:

The idea is that teachers, like doctors in medical residencies, need to practice repeatedly with experienced supervisors before they can be responsible for classes on their own. At Aspire, mentors believe that the most important thing that novice teachers need to master is the seemingly unexciting — but actually quite complex — task of managing a classroom full of children. Once internalized, the thinking goes, such skills make all the difference between calm and bedlam, and can free teachers to focus on student learning.

The article sites some examples of the kinds of skills the residents learn like fist-bumping students at the classroom door and using Popsicle sticks with student names written on them to call on kids. These are, however, single examples of broad areas of teaching practice. The first touches both on how to build relationships with kids and how to start the lesson right away without any down time in the crucial first few minutes. The second deals with issues of maintaining student attention and checking broad student understanding of the lesson.

The article points to the real problem and a real solution. We need to abandon both the idea that anyone can teach and that undergraduate courses alone, or mentoring alone, could prepare someone to master the complexity of the craft. Residencies are a step in the right direction. But what's really needed is a redesign of teacher preparation programs to include:

• rigorous undergraduate preparation in an academic field
• high standards for entry into graduate programs in education
• reliable assessments to ensure that graduates have mastered the theory of teaching
• residency programs for aspiring teachers that slowly relinquish classroom responsibilities to novices
• licensing standards that ensure that novice teachers are ready before being allowed to lead their own classrooms
• ongoing, required professional development to ensure that practicing teachers remain current
• valid performance assessments to ensure that incompetent or mediocre teachers are identified at any point during a career

Many of these steps are defined and explored by Linda Darling-Hammond, at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, whose articles and books are widely recognized as the definitive platform for any discussion of teacher preparation and whose blog looks at this issue from both policy and practice perspectives.