Powerful Teacher Education

Lessons from Exemplary Programs

Linda Darling-Hammond

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118429433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden

Powerful Teacher Education describes the strategies, goals, content, and processes of seven highly successful and long-standing teacher education programs - Alverno College, Bank Street College, Trinity University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Southern Maine, University of Virginia, and Wheelock College. All these colleges and universities have succeeded in preparing teachers to teach diverse learners to achieve high levels of performance and understanding. In discussing the common features of these programs, Linda Darling-Hammond shows what outstanding teacher education models do and how they do it, and what their graduates accomplish as a result. Powerful Teacher Education also examines the policies, organizational features, resources, and relationships that have enabled these programs to succeed.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

CREATING POWERFUL TEACHER EDUCATION

Wheelock does a better job of preparing early childhood teachers than any place I know.

—Boston school principal

I have sought out Bank Street graduates in all my positions in the last ten years.

—New York City school principal

As I look for teachers, I most immediately look for Alverno applicants. . . . I’ll take ten more teachers like the two I’ve had this year.

—Milwaukee school principal

I take all the DTE grads I can get. . . . They are the best teachers—outstanding, dedicated. It is a program that stands out.

—San Leandro, California, principal, on graduates of the University of California at Berkeley’s Developmental Teacher Education Program

UVA’s five-year program has made a huge difference. All of the student teachers we have had have been excellent.

—Charlottesville, Virginia, school principal

ETEP graduates are sought out for interviews. [They] have an excellent success rate in our district.

—Southern Maine principal, on graduates of the University of Southern Maine’s Extended Teacher Education Program (ETEP)

When I hire a Trinity graduate, I know he or she will become a school leader. These people are smart about curriculum; they’re innovative. They have the torch.

—San Antonio high school principal

In a world where education matters more than it ever has before, parents and policymakers alike are asking how to find the extraordinary teachers who can help all children acquire the increasingly complex knowledge and skills they need. As the social and economic demands for education grow, so do expectations of teachers’ knowledge and skills. Teachers must be able to succeed with a wider range of learners than they were expected to teach in a time when school success was not essential for employment and participation in society. In the early 1900s, when our current school system was designed, only 5 percent of jobs required specialized knowledge and skill; today about 70 percent are “knowledge work” jobs that demand the ability to acquire and use specialized information, manage nonroutine tasks, and employ advanced technologies.

To meet these demands, virtually every state has enacted more ambitious standards for learning tied to new curriculum expectations and assessments. These standards expect students to master more challenging subject matter content, as well as to think critically, create more sophisticated products, and solve complex problems, rather than merely perform routine tasks. The standards press for deeper understanding and for student proficiency in applying knowledge that requires far more than rote recall of facts or application of rules and algorithms.

Teachers are also being asked to achieve these goals for all children, not just the 10–20 percent traditionally siphoned off into gifted and talented programs or honors courses. Furthermore, students have more extensive needs: as education becomes more important to life success and schools both expand the range of students they educate and include more of them in “regular” classrooms, teachers encounter more students with learning differences and disabilities; with language learning needs; and with difficult family circumstances, from acute poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and lack of medical care to violence, abuse, and abandonment. Teachers in many communities need to work as professors of disciplinary content, facilitators of individual learning, assessors and diagnosticians, counselors, social workers, and community resource managers.

Although it is now widely accepted that teacher quality is a critical component of a successful education, there is little agreement about how to fill the nation’s classrooms with teachers who can succeed at the more challenging mission of today’s schools. Many still believe that good teachers are born and not made. Others believe that good teachers figure out how to teach on their own over time through classroom experience. This book starts from a different premise: if the nation’s classrooms are to be filled with teachers who can teach ambitious skills to all learners, the solution must lie in large part with strong, universal teacher education.

This book is about powerful teacher education programs—programs that prepare teachers to teach a wide range of students successfully, including those who struggle to learn from their first days in the classroom. These are programs whose graduates are sought out by principals and superintendents because they prove consistently capable of creating successful classrooms and helping to lead successful schools, even in circumstances where the deck is traditionally stacked against student success.

The need for such teachers is especially great where schools are the critical lifeline for student success. It may not take much training to teach children who are already skillful learners; who are supported by highly educated parents who build home libraries, take them to museums, pay for summer enrichment programs, and hire tutors when their own knowledge runs out; who have the advantages of steady income, health care, food, and home stability; and whose language and culture are compatible with those of the adults in the school. However, these home and community supports are the exception rather than the rule in most urban (and many suburban and rural) public schools, and teachers who rely on “magical learning” that takes place outside of school are not adequately prepared to meet the real needs of their students.

The programs we describe here have long track records of developing teachers who are strongly committed to all students’ learning—and to ensuring especially that students who struggle to learn can succeed. The programs also develop teachers who can act on their commitments; who are highly knowledgeable about learning and teaching and who have strong practical skills—teachers who can manage, with grace and purpose, the thousands of interactions that occur in a classroom each day; who know how to teach ambitious subject matter to students who learn in different ways; who can integrate solid teaching of basic skills with support for student invention and inquiry; who can teach language and literacy skills in every grade and across the curriculum; and who can work effectively with parents and colleagues to assemble the resources and motivations needed to help children make progress.

Hide and Seek: Looking for Good Teacher Education Programs

Such powerful teacher education programs are, by most accounts, relatively rare. Indeed, some opponents of professionalization might consider the very notion of an effective teacher education program to be an oxymoron (see, for example, Ballou and Podgursky, 1999). Teacher education has long been criticized as a weak intervention in the life of a teacher, barely able to make a dent in the ideas and behaviors teachers bring with them into the classroom from their own days as students. Since normal schools for training teachers were incorporated into universities in the 1950s, a steady drumbeat of complaints has reiterated the perceptions of program fragmentation, weak content, poor pedagogy, disconnection from schools, and inconsistent oversight of teachers-in-training (see, for example, Conant, 1963; Clifford and Guthrie, 1988; Goodlad, 1990).

Although there are certainly accounts of teachers who have valued their preparation, more popular are stories of teachers who express disdain for their training, suggesting that they learned little in their courses that they could apply to the classroom, or that if there was any benefit to their training it was to be found primarily in student teaching. These views have often led to the perception that if there is anything to be learned about teaching, it can be learned on the job, through trial and error if not with supervision. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige argued in his 2002 report on teacher quality that “burdensome requirements” for education coursework that make up “the bulk of current teacher certification regimes” should be removed from teacher certification standards (U.S. Department of Education, 2002, p. 8). The Secretary’s report argued that certification should emphasize tests of verbal ability and content knowledge while making most education coursework and student teaching optional (p. 19).

For all the criticism, there is substantial and growing evidence that teacher education matters for teacher effectiveness. (See Chapter Two for discussion of this evidence.) Furthermore, over the many years since Horace Mann created the first normal schools for teachers—and increasingly in the last two decades as teacher education reforms have taken hold—some places where teachers are taught have been known among practitioners as extraordinarily effective.

This book is based on case studies of seven such programs—public and private, large and small, undergraduate and graduate—that, despite their surface differences, share a great deal in terms of how they go about the work of preparing people to teach. Spanning the country, the programs are at Alverno College in Milwaukee; Bank Street College in New York City; Trinity University in San Antonio; the University of California at Berkeley; the University of Southern Maine near Portland; the University of Virginia in Charlottesville; and Wheelock College in Boston. These seven programs are by no means the only ones that could have been studied. They were selected from a much longer list of candidates in order to represent elementary and secondary programs in distinctive institutions serving a variety of clientele in representative parts of the country.

Two of the programs, at Alverno and Wheelock, are undergraduate programs for elementary teaching candidates. Both can be finished in the traditional four years of undergraduate school by those who focus intensely on program requirements, or in an additional semester or two by those who carry a more normal load. Two other programs, at Trinity and UVA, are designed as five-year models that result in a bachelor’s degree in the discipline to be taught by their secondary teaching candidates, plus a master’s degree in education. Three are graduate-level programs that serve individuals who completed their bachelor’s degree and later decided to teach. The Extended Teacher Education Program (ETEP) program at Southern Maine is a one-year internship model. Bank Street College’s graduate program, serving mostly midcareer recruits to teaching, can be completed in eighteen months. The Developmental Teacher Education (DTE) program at Berkeley is a two-year graduate-level program.

A team of researchers conducted in-depth case studies of these programs, interviewing and surveying graduates and employers of the graduates (comparing them to a random comparison group of new teachers); observing the programs in action and the practices of graduates in local schools; and studying syllabi, assignments, clinical placements, and other evidence of how the programs work. Through this intensive examination of these places, we set out to learn how good teachers can be “made” and how the critical components of effective preparation can become more widely available.

Better Than Good: The Contemporary Challenge for Teacher Education

Although the seven programs differ markedly in locale and program design, they have in common an approach that prepares teachers to practice in ways that we describe as both learning-centered (that is, supportive of focused, in-depth learning that results in powerful thinking and proficient performance on the part of students) and learner-centered (responsive to individual students’ experiences, interests, talents, needs, and cultural backgrounds). These programs go well beyond preparing teachers to manage a calm classroom and make their way through a standard curriculum by teaching to the middle of the class. They help teachers learn to reach students who experience a range of challenges and teach them for deep understanding. They also help teachers learn not only how to cope with the students they encounter but how to expand children’s aspirations as well as accomplishments, thereby enhancing educational opportunity and social justice.

The study was designed to understand the work and outcomes of these programs and to teach about the teaching of teachers, by revealing in detail how it is these programs accomplish their goals. Alongside the myths about teaching and teacher education that predominate in our society, the stuff of teacher education is to a great extent a mystery.

Most people tend to think of the act of teaching as largely intuitive: someone knows something and then “teaches” it to others—a fairly straightforward transmission model. From this image, the job of teacher preparation appears equally simple: be sure that candidates know what they are to teach and have some tools of the trade for presenting that information to students. However, as mountains of research now demonstrate, this notion of transmission teaching doesn’t actually work most of the time. The reality of effective teaching is much different: successful teachers link what students a...