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There are two articles in this issue on teacher education, following a thread established by Kati Haycock's article in the July/August issue on the common “college and career-ready” standards in mathematics, English, history, science, and technical subjects (http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards) that have been adopted for high school seniors in 51 states and territories. This may strike some readers as excessive attention to K-12 education in a magazine devoted to higher education.
I think not. Teacher education touches on so many of our responsibilities that I consider it one of our most important core functions. For starters, it's central to our commitment to serve the public that supports us with tuition, tax dollars, and favorable tax status. As governors are wont to remind us, we can render no more crucial public service than this; they have, as Richard Skinner reminded us in the last issue of Change, “a not-unreasonable expectation that colleges and universities will act as if they are part of an education system.”
But educating prospective teachers well is also in our own self-interest. They are the graduates who will teach the students who will become our matriculants, some of whom will then go on to become teachers. In follow-up work to Measuring Up, the national report card on higher education, one institution's complaints about the quality of the students being sent to them by the local high schools were silenced by the reminder that they educated 70 percent of those teachers.
That they didn't do so to their own satisfaction may be because more and better research regarding which teaching strategies lead to learning needs to be done based on questions generated from a collaboration of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, using research designs that can lead to generalizability. (The scholarship of teaching and learning, or SoTL, valuable as it is in local contexts and in making faculty scholarly about their own teaching, often lacks that essential feature.) Only then will we be able to sort out the crucial variables that lead to success from the myriad variations on teaching and learning that can be found in schools and colleges.
The final and most difficult step we need to take is that knowledge of best practices needs to go public and be taken seriously enough by policymakers and practitioners to change how they operate, which will not happen absent their involvement in setting the research agenda.
Alverno and Teach For America each has its own version of what works, based on research on its own graduates. Alverno unsurprisingly focuses on assessment and feedback, whereas Teach For America has fastened on the idea of leadership. But they have other things in common: they both stress the importance of skillfully mentored fieldwork, they both teach their teacher candidates to be self-reflective in order to continuously improve their practice, they both remind their students to plan their pedagogical strategies, and they both firmly believe that teachers' confidence in their students' ability to learn is crucial to pedagogical effectiveness. They also agree that character (“disposition” in Alverno's parlance and “working hard” in Teach For America's) plays a key role in teacherly success.
Then, in the final analysis, they judge themselves by how well their students' students learn and by how long the teachers they train remain in the profession (although the actual count depends upon what you mean by “remain” and “the profession”).
Here's the rub, though: Pedagogical improvement in the schools won't happen unless the first practice that changes is ours. Students don't learn from what faculty tell them so much as from what we model. Alverno's teacher educators, for instance, demonstrate the self-assessment that they see as crucial to their graduates' continued professional development, just as the Teach for America's staff display the leadership they want to see in their corps members.
Moreover, it's not just teacher educators who need to do this modeling. High school English teachers are more apt to imitate their literature professors as their teacher education professors when they try to demonstrate to a class of hyperactive teens that Shakespeare is worth their attention. Those professors who learned to teach by being thrown in the deep end (e.g., me) have reason to be envious of the careful preparation of teacher candidates described here.
It doesn't need to be this way. Graduate programs have models to emulate if they decide to seriously address the advanced teaching of their fields. The students at North Carolina State's Centennial Campus will have learned from their graduate experience there not only how to be resilient and intellectually nimble but also how one helps students develop such capacities. And what if disciplinary societies developed models for graduate training in teaching their fields that featured not only deeply engaged scholarship but knowledgeably mentored fieldwork, feedback based on their students' students' learning gains, self-assessment, careful planning, and knowing about and believing in the students they teach—as well as other knowledge gleaned from SoTL?
Given academe's status hierarchies, jumping the divide that separates arts and sciences faculty from education researchers is no small feat—it requires leadership. By investing in faculty education in, among other things, the discoveries of the learning sciences and how they can be used to improve teaching, campus leaders are not only (as KerryAnn O'Meara and Aimee LaPointe Terosky point out) developing their institution's human capital—they are also investing in the next generation of teachers and learners.
The K12 common core standards also require our help if they are to be instantiated in teaching and learning in the schools. Kati Haycock recommends, for instance, that we “work with some spectacularly good teachers—teachers who know how to engage their students in rigorous intellectual work—to create robust curricular materials.”
Just like any other engaged scholar, theorists have as much to learn from practitioners as the practitioners do from them, as the NC State faculty have discovered. If Anna Neumann is right that faculty need to be “master learners,” the best example we can set for our students is to show them that learning never stops and teachers are everywhere.
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