Close your eyes and remember your favorite teacher. Picture her or him teaching you. Now, blink twice. Whatever your memory calls to mind is out of date for contemporary teaching! That image does not appear in a classroom today. This begs the question – Are we preparing teachers to look like our memory of what a teacher used to be or are we preparing teachers for what they need to be? In fact, teacher prep programs, like our memories, are stuck in time and need to change.
Teacher preparation programs in colleges, universities and educator preparation centers are fundamentally of the last century. The template for teacher education is universal across institutions and all states. An undergraduate completes the institutional liberal arts requirements during the freshman and sophomore years. In the junior year and half of the senior year, the prospective teacher completes courses prescribed for the chosen major and minor baccalaureate emphases, pedagogical courses, and pre-student teaching experiences. One semester of clinical student teaching is completed in the senior year. This produces a DPI-issued teaching license. Is this preparation an adequate preparation for a pandemic and post-pandemic teacher. I think not.
Let’s look more deeply in to the three semesters of the junior and senior year reserved for teacher preparation. A college student completes an average of five courses (15 credits per semester) or 15 courses (45 credits) in the junior and senior year prior to student teaching. In our state, at least three courses are required to meet the statutory requirements for minority relations, conflict resolution, responsibilities of teachers for special education, ethical responsibilities of teachers, and environmental education (9 credits). Twelve courses remaining. In almost every topic essential to teacher prep, one course leads to introduction and a broad view coverage. It takes two courses to move from “I know about that” to “I know that”. We need teachers who “know that”.
Why is there a distance between “I know about that” and “I know that” in teacher preparation. It is because we historically have viewed a first year teacher as an apprentice becoming a journeyman. We immediately assign a mentor teacher to each newly hired teacher and the mentor continues the college training with on-the-job training. We assume that professional development and required continuing education will fill out the remaining needs of teacher preparation. Lastly, most teacher contracts treat first to third year teachers as probationaries. The assumption is that some probationaries will not be successful and resign or be terminated. Please consider what this says to children being taught every day by an apprentice/journeyman/may-not-make-it teacher. It says we accept less than fully polished teaching. Bad practice!
Some of our deficits in teacher prep are made apparent by the pandemic and other deficits have been brewing and erupted parallel to the pandemic. I will speak to four of these deficits. When I examine more than a dozen colleges of education and teacher education programs in our state, I find a woeful lack of teacher preparation in these four areas of study. At best, some teachers can say “I know about that”. Few programs create teachers as the solid practitioner a teacher needs to be entering her first job.
Child psychology. Undergraduates study the theories of psychological development of infants through teens in an “introduction to psychology” course. That’s it – a one semester course to prepare a career teacher to understand and successfully teach children through their most difficult years of intellectural and personality development. If nothing else, the range of generational characteristics and values that lives in schools and affects how children relate to parents, teachers, peers, and society at large demands more in-depth work in behavioral, cognitive, social, and biological psychology. Teachers are not psychologists, but children today are so complex that teachers must have a psychologist’s lens for viewing children. Our Gen X and Millenial teachers, each with their own distinct set of characteristics, are instructing as-yet undefined Gen Z children, the most diverse generation, yet. Atop their generational traits, Gen Z now is the pandemic generation. Never before have we needed more understanding of psychological development to shape our teaching.
Clinical teaching. Student teaching for most teaching licenses prepares a teacher for whole group instruction. We quickly learned in the pandemic that remote teaching and learning requires very purposeful, strategized and consistent teaching to the individual learning needs of every child. A general announcement made in class of “turn to page 68 and read the first paragraph” goes nowhere in remote education. In class, a teacher scans to see children lift their book, turn the pages, and begin their reading. On screen, a teacher cannot scan but needs to see each child perform this. A usual “Are there any questions?”, may allow a teacher to move on in an in-class lesson. On screen, a teacher needs to focus on the screen shot of each child, especially children with learning needs, to assure that child is ready to move on. Whole group assumptions do not translate to remote teaching and learning.
When a teacher sits with an individual child for personalized, individualized or prescribed instruction, proximity is a good thing. Using all her senses, the teacher knows and perceives how the teaching is being learned. On screen, there is no proximity. The knowing and perception must be created through clinical questioning and listening to the totality of a child’s response and reaction to teaching. Individualized instruction on-screen is very doable, but it requires a clinical planning, strategizing and implementation to ensure learning. Teacher preparation must teach teachers how to prepare, strategize and deliver clinical teaching to individual children.
The major flaw we see today arises when a teacher must deliver reteaching interventions to individual children. This is where clinical teaching lives and the need is greatest.
Phonics-based reading instruction. Parallel to the onset of the pandemic, the science of reading is impacting reading instructional practices. The science is teaching us that all children can be taught to be readers and allowing children to self-develop as readers is not acceptable, because too many children do not. Setting aside the history of the so-called reading wars, statutory and DPI rules now require a stronger preparation in phonics-based reading, but their language leaves it to the college to determine the quantity and quality of that preparation.
An “I know about it” preparation about the science of reading will not do. Teacher prep requires in-depth, laboratory-based preparation that causes a first year teacher to be a strong teacher of reading for every child.
Meta cognitive development of mathematics. The current critique of student learning during the pandemic is that academic achievement will be significantly less than annually anticipated for most children and math achievement will slide down more than reading achievement. Aside from the teaching/learning downside of remote education is the fact that most teachers of mathematics are good mathematicians but not as good in understanding and teaching mathematical thinking. Simply stated, a math teacher was a good math student and able to answer questions correctly. However, the ability to solve math problems is not the same as understanding the thinking processes, sequences, and mental gymnastics required to teach another person to solve math problems. Too much of math teaching is “do it like this” rather than “think about the thinking necessary to solve the problem”. We observe this in “show me your work”, an observation made more difficult due to the pandemic and to the perfunctory nature of “show me your work”. Instead, it should be “talk to me about your thinking in solving this problem”. Too few teachers are prepared for this conversation. Every elementary teacher must be taught how to think mathematically and teach mathematical thinking.
Studio teaching. Pre-pandemic, almost all teachers were users of usual school technologies – laptops/desktops, tablets, smartphones. They taught using tech knowing that their daily work was in-person. The scenario shifted to this: how will you teach students living on Mars if you and your school are on Earth? That is a fair description of remote teaching. Few teachers were ready for the totality of on-screen teaching and learning. Studio teaching is when a teacher uses cameras and video screens When a teacher is teaching via a camera and screen, especially multiple screens, it is studio teaching. Studio teaching doubles in complexity with in-school children are in the classroom.
Teaching and learning with technology is more psychological, personal and preferential than we thought. The task of assembling the necessary cameras and screens and setting up a classroom as studio is easy. Creating the emotional and personal commitment to studio teaching is much more difficult. Veteran teachers said, “This is not teaching” or “This is not the way I teach”. And, they were right. They were not prepared for studio teaching. Teacher prep must train teachers for studio teaching.
What have we learned?
The Time of COVID is teaching us to reconsider how we prepare teachers. To quote a song, the times not only are “… a-changing…”, they have changed and our conventions for educating teachers have not kept pace. Our children need teachers who are ready for today’s and tomorrow’s classrooms not last century’s.