Herald Editorial: Future teachers should spend more time in classroom

Herbert Kohl, the educator and author (not the senator), has been instrumental in the reform of America’s education system. How does he view America’s standards of training teachers? Deplorable. By the way, his “seminal” books are required reading in Western Michigan University’s Educational Psychology courses.

Kohl is not alone. A major problem with education programs is that students preparing to teach do not spend enough time with kids. Teachers spend hundreds of hours in college classrooms, learning things that many teachers report are seldom useful.

For many reasons that will be discussed in detail later, education programs in the United States should put students into internships as early as possible. 

Consider the chef.

To learn to cook delicious food, chefs need classrooms that facilitate cooking delicious food. Culinary classrooms have stoves and thus are more akin to vocational programs than the traditional scholarly programs.

Which is good. America’s ever-growing population of corpulent individuals will testify that food here is pretty tasty.

Why does it work so well? The ability to cook relies on know-how. Knowing how to cook something is more valuable than knowing the ingredients. It’s that same old rhyme about book smarts versus know-how — procedural knowledge versus declarative knowledge is the technical nomenclature.

The same logic holds in training teachers. Like cooking, teaching is a task that relies on knowing how to do something. “Teaching sensibility” is learned only through practice. 

While the ability to perform math is requisite to the ability to teach math, it does not follow that the ability to perform math implies the ability to teach math. Nor does it follow that training in mathematics develops skills in teaching. To learn their trade, prospective teachers need to be placed in classrooms. 

We already know this. Teachers at different colleges undertake internships of varying length and intensity. But internships typically last less than a year. Which is not very long. Not long enough, anyway.

Education majors need to be in the classroom early and often, and here are a bunch of reasons why.

Foremost are the benefits for education majors. For one, real teachers in a school setting could no doubt be a valuable learning tool for an education student. For instance, they could provide feedback on students’ interactions with pupils and provide general advice about their methods and performance.

Education majors pay big bucks to spend four years of their lives pursuing certification as a teacher. Yet many have little experience with children before their internship. Many don’t step foot into a classroom until their senior year. This is bad. What if they don’t like children?  

One could argue that opportunities to work with children — whether through WMU or elsewhere — are out there and that it behooves students to seek them out. But that stance seems a bit peculiar given that students have already demonstrated their seriousness about wanting to become a teacher by enrolling in college to become a teacher.

Plus, the burden of creating educational opportunities is supposed to fall upon the college you go to. Or at least, many would say “creating educational opportunities” is a very robust criterion for judging the quality of a program.

Beyond this, teachers and school districts would also benefit. They are now in the midst of a financial crisis, just like everybody. Maybe they could use thousands of free man-hours. Should we even bother asking?  

A shift from training teachers inside lecture halls to training in classrooms would likewise help students. In general it would free up time for teachers. Regardless of what they had their collegiate interns doing — be it grading papers or helping groups of students hack their way through some tough material — their service could greatly aid teachers. 

Plus, many scientifically-based academic interventions are based on materials that were tested on small groups. A common complaint is that teachers don’t have the time to carry out those interventions. This sad fact is that these groups of children need the most attention. With student helpers, these children could get the help they need.

Many, especially education professors, might argue that these suggestions are themselves unrealistic and unfeasible. But that begs the question of “why?” It seems so simple: place prospective teachers into classrooms so they can help teachers and learn more pertinent, real-life things about teaching. What’s the hang-up?

It doesn’t seem like there can be any hang-ups. Currently, college students are placed in classrooms, just not until late in their educational careers. Not only that, one can’t even say that college freshmen are too “immature,” because many high schools offer classes that place students inside local classrooms without protest.

Could it be that ideas like this unnerve and displease college professors because they make their job look sort of superfluous and threaten their employment?

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=12988

Posted by heraldstaff on Dec 6 2009. Filed under Editorial, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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