What does it take to make a teacher?

Allowing teachers to learn at children’s expense is unethical. We must build a system for ensuring that new teachers have the requisite professional skills and know how to use them.

The gateway to teaching has been widening. Although the principal way to become a teacher used to be through higher education, most states now sanction a variety of options, including district-based “residency” programs, “alternative” programs such as Teach for America, and training online. Compared with other professions, there are increasingly varied ways to enter the field.

That it is so easy to enter teaching should give pause. The stakes — the education of young people — are high, and teachers’ work is far from simple. Consider teaching a child to read, making algebra sensible to a group of uninterested adolescents, leading a productive discussion of a short story, or communicating effectively with parents. Add to that assessing students’ learning and interpreting and using data to improve the effectiveness of instruction. These are not tasks that come naturally. Yet we lack a reliable system for preparing those who want to teach. The sheer need for teachers — the nation’s largest workforce — has always overshadowed the need to refine their training.

The fact is that we do not know the best way to train people to do this work skillfully. This is a serious collective problem. Banking on untested approaches to teacher education, some of which rely primarily on common sense and experience, is a risky formula for the education of our nation’s youth. When a beginning teacher does not figure out the job, students are the losers. But we now have the opportunity to change this. We are in the middle of a significant national experiment in how to educate teachers. There are distinct approaches worth studying: extended internships with practicing teachers, aggressive recruitment of elite college graduates, and virtual coursework, to name just a few examples. Even “traditional” higher education is far from homogeneous.

Pivotal time

This is a crucial moment for education in this country. Although most U.S. teachers continue to be pre pared in colleges and universities, public confidence in the value of university-based teacher education is low. In fact, there is widespread skepticism about professional preparation for teaching,

We call that viewpoint the “smart people” perspective. Its adherents believe that the “soft” curriculum of education schools insults the intelligence of people who want to become teachers and fails to pre pare them for the realities of classrooms. The key fallacy in the “smart people” argument is that it assumes that effective professional training is not possible and, therefore, not necessary. This view implies that knowing one’s subject and then gaining teaching experience is all it takes.

Although teachers need to thoroughly understand the material they teach, that is not the same as knowing how to teach it.

There is a sensible logic to this view, but it glosses over vital distinctions. What does it mean to “know one’s subject” well enough to teach it? And when does experience contribute to developing skill, and when is it merely time spent? If teaching were so simple, then veteran teachers would be uniformly skillful. Certainly, not all teachers acquire high levels of instructional prowess. They do not hear students’ ideas adequately, they lack skill in talking with parents, they do not track on their students’ understanding, and they are occasionally impatient and even unkind. Nothing about “having experience” automatically develops and improves teaching.

If the “smart person” perspective is simplistic, then what’s a more developed one? The natural experiment currently under way offers an unparalleled opportunity to uncover the key elements of responsible professional training. It is not a competition be tween “traditional” and “alternative” paths to teaching. What is most important is that graduates of any path must be capable of effective practice. To figure out how to ensure that requires research on the out comes of different approaches.

Three key domains of professional preparation merit careful investigation: teachers’ preparation in the content they will teach, the curriculum of practice essential for beginning teaching, and the approaches and settings best suited for effective professional learning. We have a great deal to learn in all three of these areas.

Content knowledge

There is a common agreement on the importance of teachers having solid content knowledge. How ever, it’s not so easy. Although teachers need to understand thoroughly the material they teach, expertise is often tacit. Being good at something does not carry with it the ability to unpack it for a learner. Understanding photosynthesis in detail, for example, does not enable teachers to make it comprehensible to learners who already believe that plants gain nourishment from plant “food” (Smith and Anderson 1984: 685); being able to analyze a passage in The Grapes of Wrath oneself does not fully bring the capacity to open the text to 9th graders; being able to determine whether a math function is continuous does not necessarily afford the insight to see the concept through the mind of an adolescent who does not know what a function even is. Teachers not only need to be able to figure out, swiftly, what student thought processes might lead to difficulties, but they must also be able to explain in ways that students can understand. Being able to do this is more than simply knowing the subject.

In the past two decades, researchers have studied the kind of content understanding needed in teaching. This work has made clear that although teachers need extensive knowledge of the field and perspective on its practice, they also need a special kind of knowledge that enables them to expose the subject to learners, to highlight potentially confusing is sues, and to pose strategic questions designed to help novices learn. This knowledge involves the bifocal capacity to understand ideas and to see them from the perspectives of others who are first encountering them.

Several teacher education programs provide opportunities for learning how to develop the appropriate content knowledge and ways of using it. Some, such as Math for America and, on a smaller scale, Teach for America, are beginning to experiment with intensive teacher training focused entirely on one subject. What do they include in this training? Does it influence what graduates do in the classroom, and in what ways? Given that the individuals who enter these elite programs typically bring strong academic preparation, how does their prior understanding of their fields interact with what these programs provide? What approaches help candidates with strong subject-matter knowledge develop the capacity to use that knowledge in teaching?

University-based teacher education programs also could contribute a great deal to research and development in this area. Because of their proximity to arts and sciences departments, these programs are uniquely poised to identify those aspects of the disciplines most germane to the school curriculum and to learning the field. Education faculty can collabo rate with colleagues in the disciplines to provide professional education that draws on that understanding. What are the key elements of history crucial to learning the subject? Particular interpretations? A sense of how historians work? A crucial set of questions? And in mathematics, what are the ideas, principles, and orientations to the field that are vital for teachers to know? Similar questions attend every school subject, yet few of them have been closely studied. Collaborations that combine expertise about school curriculum, the work of teaching, and student thinking could refine — and test — hypotheses about the crucial content knowledge needed for teaching.

We also need studies of how best to help people acquire this sort of content understanding. It may be that sequencing the study of disciplinary knowledge with the study of learning and teaching may be more fruitful than treating these subjects separately. With the variety of arrangements and emphases in our teacher education nonsystem, the opportunity is here to define and improve the specialized content preparation needed for teaching.

The curriculum of practice

Managing to get 30 young people to engage in even the best-designed science investigation, tackle a perfectly honed writing prompt, or analyze historical sources carefully assembled for their review is far from easy. Teaching entails establishing and maintaining a productive learning environment, creating routines, and attending closely to a diverse group of learners. The work is intense, without pause, and varied in its demands. Teachers decide whom to call on during class, keep track of individual students’ progress, communicate with families, assess mountains of student work, find ways to interest and motivate children, and attend to changes in students’ physical and emotional states. They must teach respect, develop habits and values needed for life in a diverse democracy, and manage behavior.

This work requires skills that most competent adults would find unnatural. Teachers must suspend quick assumptions about what a child means and yet move fluidly to ask a good probing question. Teaching requires helping without doing the work for the learner. Teachers must cultivate a sense of new won der about ideas that are, to them, familiar. And teachers must interact fairly with all students whether or not they “like” them. These skills and habits are not simple.

Yet, after more than a century of organized teacher education, we still lack a well-defined curriculum of practice for prospective teachers. In other professions, from aviation to medicine to the clergy, novices learn to carry out specific elements of their work and must demonstrate their ability to perform key tasks before they are permitted to practice independently. Prospective pilots learn to execute take offs, landings, and turns, for example. In contrast, teachers are not prepared through analogous performance-based professional education to perform the core tasks of teaching. Much professional preparation remains a collection of uncoordinated, knowledge-centered courses and “field experiences.” Specific professional practices — such as conducting effective class discussions or accurately diagnosing a child’s reading difficulty — are rarely assessed.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, new kinds of simulations offer opportunities for learning particular aspects of practice.

Several teacher preparation programs have developed their own curricula for learning to teach, and there is much to learn from their experiments. But there are more than 1,300 teacher preparation pro grams in this country, and some do little to train teachers in the actual tasks of teaching. Those that have identified curricula of practice have based them on their own hypotheses about what beginning teachers need to learn to do well. All of these curricula are unlikely to be equally effective, but which work best? What’s the difference among the learning goals developed in each program? Are some more important for some kinds of people? Do some matter more to certain kinds of teaching contexts? Which are the most effective for what kinds of be ginning teachers?

Instructional activities and settings

Finally, we know little about what might be called the “pedagogy” of teaching teachers and about the range of settings in which practice might be learned. Professions such as medicine and nursing have developed laboratories and clinical settings specifically designed as sites for novices’ learning. In teacher education, learning experiences often occur in regular classrooms with real children. However, a 1st grader who is taught reading by an inexperienced student teacher is likely to be underserved. In no other domain do we allow trainees to assume so much responsibility for clients. This is worthy of concern.

Although teacher education programs are often criticized or praised for the amount of time that their student teachers work in schools, time alone is not the key. Like practice in any other endeavor, the kind of practice — and the kind of coaching and supervision that is part of it — makes all the difference. Student teaching and other kinds of “field experience” need to be carefully supervised and structured, with clear attention to what candidates need to learn to do and how they’re going to learn to do it. Field based instructors need to learn how to give appropriate feedback and to coach novices so that they can develop skill.

District-based residency programs are trying yearlong internships, and many have attempted to improve the capacity of mentor teachers to coach novices. Other approaches seek to structure opportunities to learn practice through rehearsals, pre scribed clinical assignments, and detailed instruction in practice. However, few studies have tracked these approaches, and we know little about how they affect beginners’ capacity to carry out specific responsibilities of teaching or how they compare to other strategies.

Other projects focus on developing new pedagogies of teacher education. A number of programs are experimenting with using videotape and other records of teachers’ practice in order to help novices learn to study instruction closely. Others, in both university and school-based settings, are developing rehearsal and feedback cycles to support clinical training. Disciplined documentation and study of these approaches could contribute crucial understanding and foster improved research of the sort that the field lacks.

Perhaps the most damaging obstacle is our collective, deep-seated belief that good teaching is either innate or learned through hard knocks.

Much could also be learned from how other professions tackle analogous problems of learning practice. Pamela Grossman and her colleagues (2009) conducted an ambitious study of professional preparation in occupations as varied as nursing, psychotherapy, and the clergy to explore how the intricacies of professional practice are opened up for novices. Nurses, for example, must combine scientific knowledge with relational skills as they seek to learn about patients’ health. They must develop the ability to pose productive questions and to listen carefully to the answer, probing to be sure they understand. Like teachers, they must deal with anxious or upset family members and work across cultural and linguistic boundaries. How, then, do training programs for nurses structure clinical training? What’s known in nursing education about more and less effective experiences? How do nursing educators select accomplished practitioners to supervise novices’ experience?

Other professions could offer insights into clinical training. As technology becomes more sophisticated, new kinds of simulations offer opportunities for learning particular aspects of practice. Surgical residents, for example, can practice specific skills in virtual cases, rather than on actual patients. Digital records of practice enable beginners to study cases that might not arise in typical clinical settings but are nonetheless crucial to learn.

Some professions develop tools to scaffold the work. Checklists, for example, provide physicians with support for the complexity of the demands on their memory. Are there similar tools for teaching, and how might these support beginning teachers in the bustle of classroom practice? Other professional schools are solving problems of preparing beginners for practice. Education professionals should take advantage of this work as they develop, test, and refine their own new approaches.

The potential of the moment

Clearly, many barriers exist to improving the quality of teacher education. One crucial obstacle is the lack of a common K-12 curriculum that would enable a coherent system of instructional materials and comprehensive teacher training to achieve that curriculum. Other high-performing countries take this for granted. Another obstacle is schools that are not organized to use the systematic analysis of data and do not commit the resources needed for continuous professional improvement. Still another is an incoherent “quick fix” orientation marked by a stream of uncoordinated and often unproven interventions.

But perhaps the most damaging obstacle is our collective, deep-seated belief that good teaching is either innate or learned through hard knocks. Even if this were true in some cases, it cannot be the foundation for preparing novices for a profession the size of teaching, a profession with grave responsibilities for children’s lives and education. There are more than 3.6 million teachers in the United States. No other occupation even comes close to having so many members. Thus, we need high-quality education and professional development that can help large numbers of regular people develop the ability to teach effectively.

Students must have teachers who are prepared to help them learn, not beginners who are struggling themselves. Allowing teachers to learn at our young people’s expense is unethical. To change this, we must build a system for ensuring that teachers have the requisite professional skills and know how to use them. The current array of teacher preparation programs offers an unprecedented opportunity to move past trial and error and opinionated debate and to identify the key features of readiness for responsible practice and how it can be learned and assessed.

References

Grossman, Pamela, Christa Compton, Danielle Igra, Matthew Ronfeldt, Emily Shahan, and Peter W. Williamson. “Teaching Practice: A Cross-Professional Perspective.” Teachers College Record 111, no. 9 (2009): 2055-2100.

Smith, Edward L, and Charles W. Anderson. “Plants as Producers: A Case Study of Elementary Science Teaching.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 21, no. 7 (1984): 685-698.