I have heard a number of people speak hopefully about the new teacher certification program at Hunter.

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/school-of-education/special-programs-and-centers/teacher-you

Another spot for you to visit on your journey; and perhaps a home for Ceolaf? they were looking for a Chief Academic Officer last year and I can’t tell if they ever hired one.

I’m going to switch to mathematics now, what I originally thought I’d spend my life teaching.

I was outrageously good at math when I was in school. But would that make be a better math teacher? The fact that I always understood it, even without explanation from the teacher…would that make me a better math teacher? The fact that I taught myself geometry out of the book in one week of one summer (thank you CTY and JHU), would that make me a better math teacher?

Would the number of math courses I took after calculus make me a better algebra teacher? How about my grades in the college science courses I took? What about my college GPA? Does it matter which courses I took in college? More science, or more arts? Social science or more humanities?

Am I likely to better be able to teach my classes and reach my most needy kids if I teach something that I was always good at and always liked, or if I teach something that I struggled with and had to learn to appreciate? Are the kids better off if I’ve always stayed in my comfort zone, or if I have been willing to venture outside of it? Which will make be a better teacher?

With all of these questions in the back of your head, can you explain how you are going interpret whatever you learn about my non-ed academic background when figuring out whether or not I might be a good 10th grade math teacher?

There is lots of bad ed coursework out there, no disagreement there.

A question is whether there is good coursework out there. And then the next question is whether there is coursework good enough to be a requirement for a license. (And there are the other things that go into certification, which might be measured in credit hours but are not traditional classroom coursework.)

_I_ think that there is easily enough good ideas for coursework that it should be required. But a good topic, obviously, does not guarantee a good course. My bad world history & cultures class in 10th grade did not meant that world history and cultures is not a worthy topic. So, any of these can be done poorly.

Essentially, I am about describe — off the top of my head, because I have not given this a ton of thought — what I would want in a certification program. I got certified in in middle and high school ELA, so I’ll outline some elements of that one. Here we go, vaguely in the order they might be taken.

1) Developmental psychology, with a focus on the the part of childhood in question, be it early childhood, elementary or adolescence/teenage years. All aspiring teachers should have the overview, but they should know even more for their kids.

2) Strategies for teaching reading — both in the sense of decoding and basic comprehension, and in the sense of literature and other content. This is so fundamental to the subject that is should be required, because we should ensure that teachers do not have to reinvent the wheel. One course is hardly too much to ask for such a critical area.

3) Strategies for teaching writing. Same logic. There is creative writing, including both prose and poetry. There is personal narrative. There are essays and longer reports. And much more. Again, one course it hardly too much to ask.

4) Joint class and field experience in classroom observation. Some things to look for when doing classroom observations — which students should do at least .5 days/week for the semester. Of course some small group discussions each week about what they saw, which well help them to get more out of their future observations. This is probably a double credit class.

Semester break.

5) How to work with other teachers. I’ve seen seen this before, but I think that it would be invaluable. Education is so siloed, with teachers of one subject having no idea what is really taught in the other subject, and yet we want — and should want — interdisciplinary work and projects that connect the curriculum. So, one semester looking at the broader content standards for all subjects, working with aspiring teachers for those other subjects to understand their objective BEFORE being a full-time teacher. Heavily focus on time constraints, so aspiring teachers don’t walk in with dreams of the impossible. It would also include training in collaborative work issues — especially hard for teachers who get very accustomed to running their own classrooms.

6) School law. Sorry, but this is rather important. I might also include actually reading the local contract. We should know children’s right, and teacher’s rights. And we should shut up about the fictions that that get spread like gossip as to what those right are. And we should understand administrator’s right, too.

7) Assessment. We have teachers who don’t know how to write tests, how to use test data, what tests are useful for and what they are not useful for. They don’t know how to use data from standardized test. They don’t know the difference at summative and formative assessment (hint: it’s not multiple choice vs. essay). And I can’t tell you how many teachers I know who don’t understand how the math works out in how they weight various assignments. This is a HUGELY important topic. And I haven’t even mentioned informal assessment.

Well supervised student teaching. Start with one class, and work up to two or three classes. For each one, start with observing, and work up to co-teaching and then to leading. If you ask me, this should last a whole semester — by which I mean a school semester, not a college semester. There should also be a non-graded support group with other teachers of the same topic and an experienced teacher. This is hard work, and admitting failure is important to getting better. That is much easier when you are not being graded.

I could come up with more, but I wouldn’t want to come up with very much more. I took a “Teaching Shakespeare” class for my masters — after I was already certified. It wasn’t that great, certainly not good enough to be required for certification, even though nearly every high school teacher teaches Shakespeare to each class each year. There were some other ed courses that weren’t that great. But I’d want to reserve the right to add a course or two.

So, I ask everyone, which if those courses should NOT be required of aspiring English teachers? Do they sound like busywork or hoops to jump through? Would you want you child to have a first-year teacher who hadn’t taken them?

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So, to get back to Ken’s question, “what you think about the defense of government required ed school coursework by comparisons to the medical and legal coursework requirements. To what extent is it an apt comparison?”

I think that there are well known and established ideas and principles in education, in law and in medicine. I think that there are entirely uncontroversial things that people can learn in each of these fields that will help them to understand their work better. I think that people who say that medicine and law have agreed upon bodies of knowledge and that education has no analogue are mistaken. We have bodies of knowledge; we just don’t have absolute answers. There are lots of ways to teach non-narrative non-fiction writing (e.g. essay), for example. We don’t have a single best way, but that doesn’t mean that aspiring teachers wouldn’t benefit greatly from learning multiple different approaches.

What can we learn from medical and legal education, if we want to apply some lessons from there to education education?

* Preparation for independent practice cannot be done entirely from the classroom.

* There are principles that can be learned from the classroom that can accelerate workplace learning by providing a scaffold.

* Preparation for independent practice take years. YEARS.

* One purpose of legal and medical education (including graduate education) is to weed out those who were mistaken in thinking that they could handle or were interested in the work. That is NOT a bad thing, and it is not incompatible with provides supports for growth and opportunities to succeed even after failure.

* Medical education and legal education have enormous issues and are often complained about. But those who came before don’t want the youngin’s to have it any easier than they did. Yes, there is a huge element of hazing involved, by the profession of the aspirants. This is not something we should take as a positive example.

But is it really an apt comparison? Well, they get years of training in school, followed by years of training after school. We get maybe 15 months of training, and then are thrown into the deep end (i.e. given the hardest classes to teach). I think that they show the inadequacy of our training.

You can get continuing legal education (CLE) credits for leading CLE classes. Presumably, the idea is that you are staying current, you can do that by taking CLEs. To lead CLEs, you’ve got to stay current, too. (And you get more credit for leading a CLE unit than taking it.)

As for relevance to what you actually practice, well that’s a potential problem of any relatively unregulated system. A system that required you to take relevant courses — at least an easily enforceable system — would generate even more complaints.

* You’d have to register what areas of law you actually practice. And it might have to be pretty specific.

* You’d probably have to register what level of expertise you have, at least generally.

* Every CLE offering would have to be registered for what areas and what levels of expertise it would be useful for.

* If you wanted to add a new expertise, even within your field, you’d have to register it.

And then, there’s be a bajillion complaints. If you read a book to get the basics and then went to an advanced CLE course in a new area, you’d not qualify.

Too much paperwork. Too much regulation.

So, leave it to the professionals to figure out for themselves what is worth their time.

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Are there parallels to teachers’ coursework to increase their salaries? Some. But there are differences as well.

1) CLEs are required every couple of years. Required for everyone.

2) CLEs requirements are quite small, just 24 hours every two years. That’s one hour a month. Or, more realistically, 2 hours a week from Thanksgiving through the end of the year.

3) CLEs themselves are small, usually just an hour or two. (Hours which, by the way, are fifty minute long, just like our hours.) And they can often be done online. From home. While cooking dinner or folding laundry. (Yeah, they are passive. We are talking about lectures, not classes.)

4) CLEs are required to keep your license, not optional.

5) Income is not subject to change based on CLEs, at least not directly.

Is this system gamable? Yeah. But is there really incentive to do so? Not a lot.

I think that the truth is largely what I brought to the table. I was a mediocre student until WW II made me lose four years K through 12. I felt stupid. My parents put me into a boarding (Catholic) school with other social misfits. Had one teacher, female, who considered teaching a calling. She taught all subjects, except religion.I worked harder than before and became the valedictorian! Personal motivation and a good teacher seems to have made the difference. Also a disciplined environment.

Went on to public school. Co-educational. Succeeded socially, but lost much of my interest in learning in the loose academic environment of the school Became student body president.

Went to Berkeley. Enjoyed four years socializing and cramming for finals. Passed. Went to grad school. Passed. It seems that attendance earned an A minus. At the same time, I went to work. Learned skills that produced a value to employers. Chose to pursue a career (calling?) in public service. Rose like a rocket. Learned by doing under capable supervisors. Enjoyed and suffered the experience. Retired as a high level career senior executive.

In review, teachers have some impact in the learning process, but after 15 plus years of “schooling” perhaps 3 teachers made a difference. Credentials seems to have meant less than a personal and even accidental triggering of admiration and respect. Interest and the actual doing the work counts a lot. Peers count a lot. Facilities do too, but tend to be overvalued.

To summarize, a disciplined and learning environment that nurtures and feeds the interest of students counts. Teachers facilitate. Students learn.

[NOTE: hard returns are not showing up! My paragraphing is all messed up!]

Regulation setting a floor, but not guaranteeing a ceiling, sounds right to me.

What I’ve experienced in both professions is that:

– They require a lot of experiential learning that can’t be done in a classroom or assessed by a standardized test;

– They are both intensely social professions (teaching even more than lawyering), requiring human interaction, and the practitioner will be more or less effective depending on the humans involved.

As Mr. A Talk wrote, some classes make me look fabulous, and some make me look incompetent. Some semesters I’ve taught the same exact lesson 5 times a day (with, of course, ongoing modifications based on my being a reflective practitioner), and it never works the same way twice. With experience I think I’ve improved overall, but I still don’t know what kind of certification program could better prepare me for handling roomfuls of unruly teenagers.

Based on my personal experiences, I would tend to agree that less ed coursework could be a good idea. Competency exams – especially on content, if you’re teaching content – are good, but more apprentice-type training could benefit both professions.

My 1st year required law classes (torts, contracts, criminal, Constitutional, property, etc.) served as a good grounding in basic areas of law, but all the rest of my classes were elective. I could take commercial transactions, or blood feuds. It was in a law school clinical program that I actually got to depose a witness and review my questions on a transcript to see where I could improve.

My ed classes . . . well, it’s harder to draw a connection between much of the coursework and what I do every day. Also, I’ve come to value highest the advice and guidance from people who are doing what I’m doing: teaching the kids in my school, not just administering, not just college teaching, and not teaching in a school with a different culture and different resources.

As for ongoing professional education, it sounds nice, but my experience suggests it is mostly a boondoggle for the providers. Continuing legal ed is useful if it relates to what you’re practicing, but it can be hard to find 24 hours of courses that all relate to what you actually do, so you can learn about anything to satisfy the requirement. Continuing teacher ed that is planned, or at least co-planned, by the people who are doing the job – again, the teachers! – seems to me more likely to provide useful information than the stuff I’ve been subjected to.

For the record, I attended a well-regarded law school, passed bar exams in 2 states, practiced in a big firm for several years, became a NYC Teaching Fellow, have permanent NY State teacher certification, and am now in my 6th year of teaching.

And I’d love to give this more thought but I need to teach again in 10 minutes!

I would note that I am having trouble finding people that defend the course work requirements except as a hurdle to keep people that aren’t sufficiently serious out of the profession. (I would love to hear from people that defend the course work as a necessary step to learn how to teach.) My feeling is that it also keeps people with a lot of potential out of the profession and, for those that enter the profession, wastes considerable amounts of time and money that could be devoted to more productive activities.

Actually, parents choose a school, not a teacher. I doubt you’d shunt your child from school to school in each grade hoping to find a good teacher. I woulnd’t care too much about course work, either, but if this were a new teacher, I’d certainly want some evidence that the teacher made a conscious decision to become a teacher–and not because they saw a slick subway ad for TFA.

Private schools really aren’t the issue here. I think you make the common mistake of believing that private school teachers are superior because they get better results. But the truth is they get better results because they have a better population to deal with–highly involved parents with a monetary stake in their child’s success. A private school teacher who you might be considered great could easily be eaten alive by some public school classes. You see, we public school teachers don’t get to pick and choose our students. We take whoever we get and do the best we can.

As for your criteria, let’s take them one by one:

1. My personal impression of the teacher.

Important, but mostly irrelevant. As a teacher who has sat with countless parents of failing children, I know how to be engaging no matter what I have to say. Even as a teacher, I’ve been fooled by other teachers who seem quite impressive but fail to do the job. Unless you’ve seen that particular teacher work for an extended period, you have no idea how good that teacher really is.

2. The teaching experience of the teacher. I would be concerned with first-year teachers in particular.

I agree that experience is important. VERY important. I disagree that you should only be concerned about first year teachers. It takes between 5-8 years before a teacher becomes truly competent. That’s not to say there aren’t good young teachers. Experience, IMO, counts more than anything else in making a good teacher.

3. The opinion of parents that had children with that teacher in the past.

Great if you can get it. How do you propose that? Idiot sites like ratemyteachers.com are havens of malcontents.

4. Any data on the effectiveness of the teacher.

Sorry, no. People kick around the word ‘data’ as if it means ‘inviolable truth”. I’ve had great classes that made me look like a genius, and terrible classes that made me look bad. (I know–you think teachers should be able to change that around. Dream on.) Data, at best, is a snapshot of a period of time. Without accounting for all the possible variables, it is completely meaningless.

5. The non-ed-school academic background and success of the teacher.

This sounds like TFA talking. The most academically successful people I know–the professors who taught me, for example, who all hold doctorates–are some of the worst teachers imaginable. There’s no reason to assume that a teacher with a 3.0 GPA is worse than one with a 4.0. Of course, it’s important that a teacher thoroughly understand his or her subject matter, but it’s wrong to think GPA has anything to do with teacher success.

I only had to take 15 credits in education to get my MS. I didn’t mind that–I knew I needed it to reach the standards of my peers. It seems to me you are suggesting lowering the bar, and that is a truly bad idea. If anyone can become a teacher, anyone will.

Your questions and comments really help me with my thinking. A few thoughts I have:

1. My biggest concern with teacher certification is the coursework requirements. So, when I complain about teacher certification, I should really narrow my complaint to these particular requirements. By using the phrase “teacher certification”, I think I often create confusion, since that issue has other elements besides coursework.

2. This post in particular tried to address the comparisons between teachers on the one hand and doctors and lawyers on the other with respect to coursework requirements. In short, I think the situation is quite different for a long list of reasons, some of which I listed and some of which you helpfully listed as well (and hadn’t occurred to me or I was ignorant of).

3. Points 9 through 11 give some possible reasons that ed school coursework has not evolved in a manner that leads people to think their services are useful for practical teaching. In short, ed schools are not subject to many competitive pressures that might force them to become more useful. These points don’t argue whether or not it is possible that coursework could be useful enough that the government should require it for all teachers. Overall, upon review, I think my list should have been broken up into a few pieces with clearer explanation of what each piece was arguing.

Thanks again. One thing I would be curious to know, when and if you have time, is what you think about the defense of government required ed school coursework by comparisons to the medical and legal coursework requirements. To what extent is it an apt comparison? You touch on this in your comments, but I would be curious to read your conclusions.

I understand your concerns that without any coursework requirements by the government, perhaps things would go too far. I am not sure of that. If we provide checks on the system through parental choice, competency exams, and government oversight through things like standardized exams and school visits, I am not sure that additional coursework should be required by the government. Perhaps people would still take the coursework if it is viewed as useful by teachers, school leaders, and parents. My concern is what the government requires.

Separately, I love your concluding sentence “When you ask yourself whether credentials are important, think who you’d want teaching your own kids.” As private schools demonstrate, parents can make this decision without government regulations. Also, I have seen no indication that private school parents are concerned about the ed school coursework taken by the teachers of their children. For me, depending on the age of my child and the subject being taught, all of the following (in no particular order) would be much more important than the ed school coursework taken by the teacher:

1. My personal impression of the teacher.
2. The teaching experience of the teacher. I would be concerned with first-year teachers in particular.
3. The opinion of parents that had children with that teacher in the past.
4. Any data on the effectiveness of the teacher.
5. The non-ed-school academic background and success of the teacher.

Ed school coursework would have little meaning to me. I would be curious to know what others think about this.

I figured out what wanted to say about your points 7, 9 – 11: I don’t understand what bearing you think these points have on certification?

Whether teaching is or is not a profession, or whether it should or should not be, is a huge question. Is that what you are tying to address?

You spend a lot of points writing about graduate school, not about certification. I know that the topics are related, but we should try to keep in mind which is responsible for what.

Medical education does not end with med school. There even is term for that other stuff (i.e. residency and fellowships and the like), “Graduate Medical Education.” This is hospital-based training, with authentic work and a combination of increasing responsibillity and declining supervison as medical school graduates learn about practice. If we want to discuss the education and training of professionals, we cannot confine it to med school.

Moreover, med school is largely classroom based in years 1 and 2, but largely hospital based in years 3 & 4. Then you graduate from medical school, but you’re not certified or licensed. In most states you need multiple years of supervised training to get your licensse, and in the handful of others you only need one.

I know a LOT more about legal education, especially in big firms, however.

1) Students graduate from law school, but in order to pass their bar exams to get their licenses, they ALL take special bar exam prep courses. In other words, law school does not prepare them for the bar exam. What does that say about how well agreed upon the required body of knowledge actually is? Law schools teach one set of knowledge, and bar exams test something a bit different. Oops.

2) First year associates — even after they pass the bar exam — are relatively useless. They don’t actually know how to practice law. Everyone knows that law school doesn’t actually teach people to be lawyers. It teaches some legal principles, and hopefully how to do legal research. But learning how to be a lawyer? They learn that on the job.

3) Over the years, associates gradually build up skills and knowledge. From working on relatively small and discrete task, they work towards eventually doing larger tasks with many parts that need to be managed.

4) Junior associates (years 1 & 2) are supervised by mid-level (years 3 -5) or senior associates (year 6+). And all of them are supervised by partners. And this is MUCH closer supervision that ANY teacher gets. (Partnership can come at year 8 or later, in most cases).

5) There is a complex collaborative set of relationships to get the work done, which both allows lower levels to see what higher levels are doing (and hopefully learn from it) and higher levels to see what lower levels are doing (and hopefully catch mistakes).

6) Malpractice insurance companies require that a partner be on every case, and is responsible for everything in that case.

What does all this add up to? Well, you can’t run your own cases until you are a partner. And that takes like 8 years finishing law school. That’s 11 years after entering law school.

And there are the internships that lawyers do between their years of law school. So, they have a year of school, an internship, another year of school, a second internship and then their final year of school. During the years, they might do law clinics, which many of will later tell you taught them more about the practice of law than all their classwork combined.

So, in the law, you get license six months after graduating, but the big firms only gradually let you work more and more independently. Yes, you could put out your own shingle and and try to get business. But if you go to work in the legal culture, it’s years more until your are really responsible for any sort of independent work.

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You make some other claims about differences between law/medicine and education that I’ll not address here, as they are not about certification or training. Maybe I’ll address them after I go see the Oscar nominated shorts this afternoon.

Let’s take the argument to its logical conclusion. Is it really necessary to have college graduates teach our kids? Why not high school grads–after all, they have likely mastered enough of the curriculum to teach third grade by then, haven’t they? Come to think of it, why not hire 4th graders to teach 3rd graders? They know the material and they are going to be far less costly than those college grads. And forget about tenure–they literally don’t know the meaning of the word.

It seems to me that the only people in the “anyone can do it” camp are those who haven’t done it themselves, or those who have done it with little success for short periods of time. A shout out to Klein and Rhee.

I want my kids taught by someone who has studied both education and the subject area they intend to teach. I also want someone with experience who has decided that education is their calling and not a bit of padding for their resume.

When you ask yourself whether credentials are important, think who you’d want teaching your own kids.