This is in response to a blog post with the same title. The title attracted me I’ve just started work within a teacher preparation program and have some concerns about such programs being irrelevant.
Very briefly, the post reports on a study the interviewed 39 US-based national award winning teachers (part of this project). The aim being to learn about what worked for the top teachers.
31% of the 39 completed a traditional four year teacher certification program. Online 10% (4) of the 39 agreed that their official teacher training was relevant to their current practice.
It appears that these teachers came from a number of fields and that their training in that field influenced their teaching more heavily than teacher training.
I like the post because it adds some evidence to argue against an over-emphasis on standardisation and credentialism of teaching. i.e. if you haven’t done X, Y and Z you can’t be registered as a teacher. Not that is inherently a bad idea, it’s just when it gets taken to extremes…
And I don’t think anyone could argue against the ineffectiveness of traditional professional develop as illustrated by the photo in the original post. But…
Some problems
This study doesn’t really establish causation.
It doesn’t answer, and probably doesn’t aim to answer, questions like:
- Are these teachers national award winning teachers because of their non-traditional background?
- Are there other teachers who have non-traditional backgrounds that are not national award winning teachers?
- Are there non-traditional background teachers who are very bad teachers?
- Will ignoring traditional teacher training and focusing on non-traditional training create a greater percentage of good teachers?
- Do teachers with non-traditional backgrounds succeed in the current system because of the nature of the system or some other factors?
The question of purpose
To figure out if something is irrelevant, the question has to be asked “irrelevant for what?”. What’s the purpose of teacher training. The purpose of traditional teacher training may not be to produce the type of teachers who win national awards. I can quite easily see a few educational bureaucrats being quite happy with the relevance of traditional teacher training.
Traditional teacher training certainly has its flaws. As does traditional training for just about every field. Whether or not its irrelevant is probably another type of question.
The relevant for what is the key consideration. You can prepare teachers who are trained to fit into the existing system. There is mixed research about what beginning teachers think about how prepared they were from their training. Let’s assume that more or less they are, although as you suggest, none of it can be perfect. One assumes this qualifies as relevant. But then you have to ask is the current system “relevant” for the kids in it? Does it do what it purports to do, prepare them for some kind of productive life in the world? This is a much trickier proposition and there is a very large amount of research that says the current system appears to work for perhaps a third of each age cohort at best. IMHO I think the 1/3 is generous. This puts teacher training between a rock and a very hard place, i.e. you could imagine a teacher training program that was a lot better for kids but did not fit at all well within the existing system and its constraints. Would these teachers be attractive to existing systems? I very much doubt it.
And when the folk who believe they set the purpose for schools (e.g. Oz government) are getting increasingly top-down, the idea of doing something different becomes all the more harder. I think that’s likely to become an interesting challenge, navigating through the forces of accountability, standardisation etc. towards something more useful/interesting.
David, Thanks for the thoughtful response on the piece. You are right on when you suggest that the study is limited. “Best practice” studies usually don’t attempt to show causation, only to compile a narrative. Good narratives can direct strong questions and further study.
Initially I expected to find 5-10 separate stories and be able to compile lists of varying ways that these teachers were finding valuable PD, yet when the stories looked so similar across cases, that should cause us to ask all of the questions that you have listed above. Much more research admittedly needs to be done to nail this done more.
Best,
S
G’day Sean, You point about the similarity between stories is important and why it is interesting. How we go about addressing the apparent problems is going to be an interesting task. David.