Improving Teacher Education

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Obama administration want to improve teacher education. Me too. I always have. So I went to the president of the university I was then working at and showed him university data that I had collected. I informed him that a) we were running the cheapest program on campus, even cheaper to run than the English Literature and the History programs; and b) that some of our most expensive programs to run, computer science and various engineering programs, produced well-trained graduates that left the state. But teachers stayed in the state. I told my president he was wasting the states resources and investing unwisely.

I told him that with the same amount of money as we spend on the students that leave the state I could design one year clinical programs so every teacher does clinical rotations in the classrooms of schools with different kinds of students, rotations modeled on medical education.

I said more money was needed to pay the teachers recognized as expert, say Board certified teachers, so I could place teachers in training to observe the regions’ best teachers. I said that more money would also allow me to design video labs for viewing great teaching and for doing micro-teaching so that future teachers could experience, in safe environments, how to teach. In such micro-teaching classroom they would receive feedback on how they taught from the students they just taught and from supervisory teachers who work in the laboratory. I modeled my proposal for a lab on the then newly outfitted kinesiology laboratory of which the university was quite proud.

I said that more money would allow me to buy a five bedroom house in the lowest income community and have teachers who volunteered to spend two weeks there under the tutelage of the communities leaders — their priests and ministers, their concerned parents, the social workers there. The teachers would be the guests of the community and we would pay the community leaders to feed the teachers, to take them on tours around the neighborhoods so they can learn about the strengths of these communities, not their deficits.

I said more money would allow me to provide a one-year support system for all new teachers placed in our region. The support would be provided by clinical professors of practice that visited each new teacher from our university about every ten days. Their job would be to help the new teachers emotionally (teaching requires a great deal of emotional labor), to help them schedule time (teaching requires enormous time commitments) and to provide instructional support. I estimated that would cut the rate of teachers leaving the profession by half. A savings of significant amounts of state and local monies.

The president listened to my proposal and when I was through, he politely threw me out of his office! Charles Baron policy director for Democrats for Education Reform, quoted in the New York Times said it well: “I think you need to wake up the university presidents to the fact that schools of education can’t be A.T.M.s for the rest of the college or university.” Although so much is wrong with the policy recommendations of Democrats for Education Reform, in this case they sure have it right!