When I was in pharmacy school we spent a fair chunk of time learning how to be pharmacists. The entire forth year of the curriculum was spent in clerkship rotations basically acting as a pharmacist (under supervision, of course) and learning how to do the job. Sure, there are things that I had to learn on the job — the peculiarities of a computer system, who to call at the wholesaler if there’s a problem with the order, etc. — but the nuts and bolts of my profession were taught to me before I took my licensure exam and jumped behind the counter.
This just isn’t the case with many teachers in our education system. If a new teacher is incredibly lucky he or she may have had a good mentor during a few months of student teaching — hopefully in the same subject area that the student teacher will be employed in — and a good department (supportive dept. head, mentoring teachers…) at their first school. Only very rarely does the instruction of new teachers go beyond the theory and get into the real nuts and bolts of how to actually teach children anything.
This article from the New York Times Magazine profiles an educator who is trying to do just that. Doug Lemov is videotaping successful teachers and trying to codify their techniques to eventually find ways to better train teachers. He found some eye-opening things.
When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge.
This begs the question why we don’t actually train teachers to teach. It seems that has a lot to do with the Industrial Revolution and the exploding need for teachers to educate the emerging working class.
Between 1870 and 1900, as the country’s population surged and school became compulsory, the number of public schoolteachers [sic] in America shot from 200,000 to 400,000. Normal schools had to turn out graduates quickly; teaching students how to teach was an afterthought to getting them out the door.
So, we found ourselves in a situation where we had to have workers, so we needed lots of teachers to give them the rudiments of an education. Most of them weren’t college-bound so the demands were low on the teachers. Also, teaching was one of a relatively small number of career paths for American women. Things have changed drastically since the early- to mid-20th century. Now a much higher percentage of American children are at least trying to get into a college or university. The demand for teachers to perform well (read: get their students prepared for college) is higher than ever. At the same time many potential teachers find more attractive prospects in other, more lucrative careers. Add this to the fact that we still aren’t truly teaching the techniques of successful teaching the end result is lower quality teaching expected to rise to higher performance. It simply will not work.
Part of the answer is to decrease somewhat the expectation that every child be tracked into a college prep course of work. Not every child needs to go to college and not every child has the aptitude. That is not to say that we should discourage any child from trying, but that we should provide other opportunities as well. Why does every child have to have a high school diploma? Wouldn’t a diploma from a trade school be sufficient to start a successful career?
A larger part of the answer is that we need to teach our teachers more successful ways of teaching. Any teacher, of any subject, should be completely comfortable and in total control of the classroom on day one of his or her first year teaching. That may be an unrealistic pipe dream, but it is a noble thing to strive for.
