I agree with the rest of what you say — which is why non-educator corpocrats and political appointees cannot be trusted to determine teacher quality. If it can be defined at all.

However, there are are a few things that I would like to comment on.

1) Basketball is not like baseball. In basketball, there is a constant flow of changing variables. It can be an incredibly quick game. It is not just about individual skills. To be able to actually PLAY basketball, you need to be able to take in the action, figure out what is possible and engage in action to further your desired ends. And you’ve got to do it incredibly quickly. The idea of film study for basketball is slow the action down, so people can better understand what they saw — or failed to see — and take more time to figure out what is possible in that sort of situation in the future.

2) Of course experience is needed for improvement. But we can provide scaffolds and guides so that learning from experience is accelerated. And we can perform after-action review sorts of lessons, so that experience can be better mined for learning quickly. And there IS value in learning from vicarious experience, especially because it can prime a person to learn from their own.

2) I have filmed my classes, and my colleagues have filmed their classes. Real teachers, real classes, real students. And Woodlass is right that the first few minutes a visitor is in a room, the kids act differently. But the 5th day in a row, they act like the usually act. So, if you set up your camera(s) in the corners and record for multiple days in a row. Woodlass is right that the first day or two won’t be real useful, but if you know that and just record over those immediately — as we did — then that’s not a big problem. You use the later tapes.

3) It is not a surprise to anyone that teacher prep does a horrible job with classroom management. We all know that. Fixing that is an important issue, and how we induce ed schools and alternative training programs to address it needs more attention. But it is a well known issue.

4) I’ve seen lots of teachers who are great in front of the kids, keeping them engaged and managing the classroom well. But many of them have not been so good in the work they do when NOT in front of the kids. Writing meaningful comments on their work, planning lessons or units, keeping the larger lessons/objectives in mind. Yes, this comes out when they are in front of the kids, but the missing or misunderstood work is when they are not in front of the kids. How much time do teachers spend working NOT in front of the kids? 1/4? 1/3? 1/2? I spent one week one year without lesson plans — I don’t mean big formal plans, but rather what I usually did to plan the week and each day. Everyone else taught without plans at that school, so why shouldn’t I? Well, I ended up teaching like them. And the kids got less out of that week, and my larger objectives for them were not advanced.

The sports analogy doesn’t work for me either, nor the marriage counselor. There’s a real difference between helping someone improve his own game (or marriage, for that matter) and trying to teach someone how to perform in a stream of endless variables. In the former, you’re dealing with the improvement of one’s own personal skills; in the latter, whatever techniques you have may or may not work in a particular group of kids on a particular day. You can only say that if you’re a good teacher, you’ve acquired a set of skills that in general, not necessarily always, allows you to adjust to a variety of situations so that most kids, not necessarily all, will learn something. Only with experience do you learn what to expect, how far you can push, which things work best for which kids, and what never produces good results.

You mention videos of “real classrooms,” but videos by definition are fabrications, there’s nothing real about them. For one thing, the students are selected (no real classroom teacher gets to choose his students), and more often than not the classes are small, I’d say half the number of students there’d be in the real world. Then there’s the fact that most kids behave extremely well when they know they are being taped. Heck, they even behave well when someone they don’t know comes into the room for a few minutes, let alone tapes them. I’ve never seen a video that resembles a real teaching environment, and I don’t think it exists. So, what you’re going to learn is not how to deal with a classroom, but perhaps a bit of procedure here, a trick there, a kernel of a method that you could maybe shape into something useful if you experiment with it for a while.

I’m not so hard on ed courses as NYC Educator, but I was NTE-certified. (I don’t know if that exists anymore, but 20 years ago if you had a Masters in a content area but not in education per se, you could get city certified if you had state certification, take the NTE and city exams, get 12 credits of special ed and some other kind of BoE requirement I can’t remember now, and do some student teaching.) Dabbling in the few ed courses I was required to take didn’t bother me too much. I picked up a few things, but nothing relating to classroom management. Those I got from a one-page handout an AP gave me early on, which had things in it like stand at the door and don’t let anyone in who isn’t upon entry conforming to your standards of behavior, and never fully turn your back on the class. Really practical items. I gave that sheet to someone years later, but it was the single most useful document of teacher training I ever saw. 20 items, one page.

Sounds a lot like what Malcolm Gladwell recommended in this article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell

Makes a lot of sense to me. If I would have had a proven mentor from whom to learn during my first year as a teacher, my first year would have gone much better. I stuck with it, but many people with great potential at my school did not stick around, and the profession is worse for it.

Some people, when thrown in the deep end, can instinctively doggie paddle, and some will drown. Of the doggie paddlers, some will become truly great swimmers, but many of the drowning victims could have become great swimmers if they’d had those inflatable arm bubbles with which to learn.

I’d like to see something more like a combination ed degree/apprenticeship. Half a year of student teaching (or less if you’re TFA or a Fellow) just isn’t enough. At least a year under the supervision of a master teacher (someone like me, for example *grin*) would be a great help. We could guide talented newbies in the right direction, and steer those who can’t hack it into something else. Of course, this will never happen, because it would cost real money.

I’m sure somewhere, there are good ed. professors with an eye toward the practical. But personally I’ve never seen one. I think there’s a better way than the trial by fire that you alluded to when discussing first day jitters. Of course I don’t think we should jettison training altogether–that’s a very bad idea, utterly without merit, and not thought out at all by those who advocate it.

My aversion to sports analogies has more to do with administrators who make preposterous comparisons with sports figures, asking why we complain about working in decrepit crumbling trailers when you never hear NY Yankee pitchers asking such questions. When the NY Yankees face conditions like 1.1 million public school students do, when they have to use subway ads, 800 numbers, intergalactic recruitment and job fairs to fill their ranks, then we can talk sports analogies.

First, let say how ideas in your comment I agree with. There are bad education classes, and there are bad education professors. And there are LOTS of bad assumptions (e.g. in my first NYC teaching semester — not my first year teaching, btw — I taught in three different classrooms. In my second, I got it down to two. So, I couldn’t set up much in any particular room.). And there are lots of important things that are not well covered in preparation programs — or even covered at all!

But that doesn’t mean that preparation is not important or that it cannot be done well.

Second, I understand skepticism with analogies. But that doesn’t mean that they are useless. If you don’t like the physical analogy, how about an emotional one? Does a person have to have a happy marriage his/herself to be a marriage counselor? Could a divorced person understand the issues of marriage and tensions and pressures, and all sorts of other things such that s/he could be able to help others, even if his/her marriage failed?

But I would I also like to get back to what I wrote earlier. Perhaps the professors did not have the mental dexterity to handle a classroom in real time (in the moment), but can help others understand what need to be considered, what needs to be managed and what needs to be done? Could s/he not help aspiring teachers to look at videos of real classrooms and help them to understand what is going on, what the teacher is doing, what data the teacher was taking in to make decisions in the moment? Film study of real classrooms can be an incredibly powerful tool for aspiring teachers — as for athletes — because the action can be slowed down and even paused. An expert can help a trainee to learn what to look for, how to process it and how they may act on it — all at a pace that the trainee can take it. The fact that the professors did not have the mental dexterity — if we might call it that — to do all of that his/herself doesn’t mean that s/he cannot help the trainee.

In fact, I might even argue that the expert practitioner might particularly ill-suited to training aspiring novices. How is that? Well, I have never heard a principal tell a novice teachers, “Here is something that never worked for me, but I think that it will worked really well for you.” Rather, I have only heard them say, “This is what I did,” or “This is how I would would handle it.” And when I say this to other teachers, they agree with me, telling me they’ve seen the same — though they didn’t realize it. You see, an expert practitioner can get caught up in how they do it successfully, in a way that blinds them from seeing other approaches that might prove more successful for others. (And that doesn’t even address the expert practitioner who understand that s/he is successful, but misunderstands why s/he is successful.)

Look, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down with a teacher after s/he has graciously allowed me to observe his/her class and complemented him/her on something I thought s/he did really well and been meant by a blank stare. They don’t consciously know what they are doing, or why it works.

This is not to say that expert practitioners cannot make good teachers of practice. Rather, it is point out that they might not, and that others might.

Perhaps you’re right about NBA coaches who understand what must be physically done but lack the physical skills to do it. Personally I’m wary of all comparisons of teachers to sports figures.

In any case, as a beginning teacher, I worked in a Bronx classroom with little experience, no textbooks, no course outlines, no assistance, and the very least desirable classes. There was the time-honored philosophy of, “You can’t teach, and they can’t learn, so you’re a perfect match.”

I sat through classes with a very nice college professor who urged us to do things like taking all our resources and creating a classroom library, based on the wholly erroneous assumptions we had books, or classrooms. There was absolutely no consideration given to how to control classes, and I suppose they just assumed we’d learn on the street or something.

These people were wasting my time, though I needed the credits. I am not at all surprised when teachers tell me their time is similarly wasted today, including those who go through the much-ballyhooed Teaching Fellows program. It can be done a whole lot better.

I find it possible that those without the physical dexterity to play pro sports can show talented candidates how to develop their skills. Still, I find it hard to believe that anyone who can’t control a classroom of kids can effectively demonstrate to young teachers how it’s done. In my view, and in my experience, those who can’t do this, who don’t know this, can’t teach it either.

Maybe I’m not an expert either. But honestly, while I’ve had great college professors as far as underlying subject matter, I can help new teachers a whole lot more than any college professor I’ve ever had. And frankly, it’s not as though experienced teachers are in such short supply or anything.

>I’d also like to see these courses taught by people who have experience doing so,
>rather than professors who’ve written a book on how to do so but have not the
>remotest notion what goes on in public schools.

I would like to make sure that you are not setting up a false dichotomy. You might not be, but I want to make sure.

There are many people who are very good at doing things, but are not that aware of how they are doing it. And there are many who are aware of how they are doing it, but cannot explain it to others. And there are those who can explain, but still cannot teach it to others — which requires recognizing where the others are, their misunderstandings and figuring out how to help them to get to the point where the do understand.

I firmly believe that people can understand how to do something, without actually being able to do it well themselves. For example, the Van Gundy brothers never played professional basketball, or even the highest levels of college ball, and yet both have been excellent coaches in the NBA. I can imagine someone who couldn’t handle the enormous demands of teaching in real time (and therefore could not do it effectively) and yet understands the issues, dilemmas, pressures, problems and techniques in a way that allows him/her to teach others to do it far far better than s/he did his/herself. And it might not even take personal experience to get that kind of understanding. Does a great film director have to have been even a decent actor in order to help actors give better performances?

Sure, there are professors who never taught k12, and don’t know what they are talking about. No doubt. But it is a myth that only an expert practitioner can teach others, or that all expert practitioners can teach others what they themselves do so well.

Of course we need to consider the costs. No question. But other fields also see the loss of high quality candidates because of their far far higher entrance requirements, and yet no one raises that as issue.

Let me take up and apply Ingersol’s point. It’s not that we have a shortage of candidates entering the field. The problem is attrition, because we lose so very many teachers after then enter. It’s a leaky bucket, he explains, that we keep filling up.

* We wouldn’t need that many candidates, or that many high quality candidates, if we could keep people in the profession and turn them into good teachers. With less turnover, we’d need fewer new teachers each year.

* We need to all accept the fact that first year teachers know almost nothing and are not good teachers. Some of them make up some of their lack of expertise with lots of hard work, but that can only accomplish so much. Teaching, like all other work, is something that even the best get better at over time. (Even Michael Jordan got better over time. At 23, he had major flaws in his game and had a lot to learn.)

* Putting the previous two points together, we lose huge numbers of teachers before their peers in law even finish their formal education. (Lawyers do not get get their licenses until more than 3 years after they enter law school, and it takes even longer for doctors to be certified!) Of course our teaching corps is not what we would want it to be; we lose them just as they might be getting good. Making entry into the profession easier does not actually address the true reasons for our teacher quality problem.

It might seem counter-intuitive, but raising standards, increasing the time to full licensure and requiring full licensure for full responsibility could well be the better path to solving our apparent teacher shortage. Putting underprepared high potentials on the firing line so often leads to frustration and abandonment of the classroom, if not the entire profession.

Of course, I am talking about making it MORE expensive and time-consuming, with real induction programs that gradually increase novice’s responsibility and gradually decreases their level of supervision until they are actually ready (i.e. until they have demonstrated) that they are deserving of the kind of license that would permit them to operate independently — as most teachers today do virtually all the time, even first year teachers. That model would set them up for success, and successful people are more likely to stay.

We should realize that the “alternative” paradigm of setting up warm bodies for failure doesn’t get us a high quality teaching force.

****************************

I believe that the federal government subsidizes medical residency training, and it’s not chump change. That’s not for med schools, but for the kind of supervised and scaffolded on the job training that a professional needs.

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=17&type=0&sequence=1 (an old link. I don’t know what the current numbers are.)

****************************

I would like to clarify and again give credit to Richard Rothstein for the regulation line. The purpose of regulation is NOT to ensure high quality, but to prevent the lowest quality. I heard him apply this to the issue of charter schools. I have not heard of him applying it to teacher certification, however. I’ll take credit for that.

Ceolaf, I agree with just about all of your comments. “Certification… serves NOT to guarantee high quality, but to prevent the lowest quality.” I like that a lot. Of course, I think we need to consider the costs of certification, not just the benefits:

1. The time spent on meeting certification requirements.
2. The money spent on meeting certification requirements.
3. The loss of high-quality candidates that are deterred by the certification requirements.

To me, then, the “best” certification requirements would be the result of an optimization that considered both the benefits you refer to with these costs. My concern is that some parts of the current requirements do very little to accomplish the benefits while hitting the system quite hard with respect to the costs.

Separately, I intend to write a post that deals with the interesting and important comparison between teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. with respect to licensure issues.

I get the feeling, though, that he meant for 30 years there was the possibility of installing underqualified teachers, whereas you believe that using underqualified teachers was the actual norm during all that time.

Kristof, who thinks Meryl Streep and Colin Powell are being held back by their lack of teacher certification, hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about. Perhaps Kristof is frustrated because he himself can’t jump in a classroom and take that huge pay cut he’s looking for. Still, I’ve seen who comes when you drop all reasonable requirements, and Kristof isn’t even in the ballpark.

You wrote, “I would prefer a system in which certification requirements were greatly streamlined and gave schools more flexibility to hire the teachers they think will do the best job.” Do you feel that way about doctors and hospitals? Engineers and construction firms? Lawyers and DA offices?

I think that there is widespread confusion between the possibility that we have ineffective certification requirements and a more general problem with the sheer existence of certification requirements. We have problems with what we require, and how those requirements are met.

And this gets to the larger question of what certification means. It should be a license to practice independently, and it should be a mark of some degree of proven ability. Not a huge degree of proven ability, but some.

I don’t know of a single teacher who was prepared for the first day of school their first year. This is CRITICAL day, one where the tone and expectations are set. Students feel the teacher out and the teacher demonstrates what’s important. And yet we all know that each teacher will face this.

I understand that I am blurring the line between teacher prep and teacher certification, but I think that that anti-certification crowd and the anti-teacher prep crowd are making the same arguments for the same reasons.

So, I understand why people want to get rid of many aspects of teacher certification. But that doesn’t mean that it’s actually a bad idea in the first place. Certification, like all regulation, serves NOT to guarantee high quality, but to prevent the lowest quality. (This was pointed out to me by Richard Rothstein, btw.) If our certifications system is failing to do the former, well, it wasn’t ever meant to do that. If it is failing at the latter, we should address that. But we should not give up the latter simply because it cannot do the former.

(So for the lack of coherent focus on this one.)

Check out my earlier dialogue with NYC Educator to better understand the context of my comments. The “thirty years of underqualified teachers” was a direct quote from a comment by NYC Educator. I agree that that statement could read like an inappropriate generalization, although I didn’t intend it that way and I am guessing NYC Educator didn’t either.