Preparing Teachers for a Changing World

What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do

Linda Darling-Hammond, John Bransford, Linda Darling-Hammond, John Bransford

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119461166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Métodos de enseñanza de la educación

Based on rapid advances in what is known about how people learn and how to teach effectively, this important book examines the core concepts and central pedagogies that should be at the heart of any teacher education program. Stemming from the results of a commission sponsored by the National Academy of Education, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World recommends the creation of an informed teacher education curriculum with the common elements that represent state-of-the-art standards for the profession. Written for teacher educators in both traditional and alternative programs, university and school system leaders, teachers, staff development professionals, researchers, and educational policymakers, the book addresses the key foundational knowledge for teaching and discusses how to implement that knowledge within the classroom.

Preparing Teachers for a Changing World recommends that, in addition to strong subject matter knowledge, all new teachers have a basic understanding of how people learn and develop, as well as how children acquire and use language, which is the currency of education. In addition, the book suggests that teaching professionals must be able to apply that knowledge in developing curriculum that attends to students' needs, the demands of the content, and the social purposes of education: in teaching specific subject matter to diverse students, in managing the classroom, assessing student performance, and using technology in the classroom.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

John Bransford, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Pamela LePage

To a music lover watching a concert from the audience, it would be easy to believe that a conductor has one of the easiest jobs in the world. There he stands, waving his arms in time with the music, and the orchestra produces glorious sounds, to all appearances quite spontaneously. Hidden from the audience—especially from the musical novice—are the conductor’s abilities to read and interpret all of the parts at once, to play several instruments and understand the capacities of many more, to organize and coordinate the disparate parts, to motivate and communicate with all of the orchestra members. In the same way that conducting looks like hand-waving to the uninitiated, teaching looks simple from the perspective of students who see a person talking and listening, handing out papers, and giving assignments. Invisible in both of these performances are the many kinds of knowledge, unseen plans, and backstage moves—the skunkworks, if you will—that allow a teacher to purposefully move a group of students from one set of understandings and skills to quite another over the space of many months.

On a daily basis, teachers confront complex decisions that rely on many different kinds of knowledge and judgment and that can involve high-stakes outcomes for students’ futures. To make good decisions, teachers must be aware of the many ways in which student learning can unfold in the context of development, learning differences, language and cultural influences, and individual temperaments, interests, and approaches to learning. In addition to foundational knowledge about these areas of learning and performance, teachers need to know how to take the steps necessary to gather additional information that will allow them to make more grounded judgments about what is going on and what strategies may be helpful. Above all, teachers need to keep what is best for the child at the center of their decision making. This sounds like a simple point, but it is a complex matter that has profound implications for what happens to and for many children in school.

The importance of preparing teachers to exercise trustworthy judgment based on a strong base of knowledge is increasingly important in contemporary society. Standards for learning are now higher than they have ever been before, as citizens and workers need greater knowledge and skill to survive and succeed. Education is increasingly important to the success of both individuals and nations, and growing evidence demonstrates that—among all educational resources—teachers’ abilities are especially crucial contributors to students’ learning (see, for example, Ferguson, 1991a; Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain, 2000; Wright, Horn, and Sanders, 1997). Furthermore, the demands on teachers are increasing. Not only do teachers need to be able to keep order and provide useful information to students, they also need to be increasingly effective in enabling a diverse group of students to learn ever more complex material and to develop a wider range of skills. Whereas in previous decades teachers were expected to prepare only a small minority for the most ambitious intellectual work, they are now expected to prepare virtually all students for higher-order thinking and performance skills once reserved for only a few.

To meet the expectations they now face, teachers need a new kind of preparation—one that enables them to go beyond “covering the curriculum” to actually enable learning for students who learn in very different ways. Programs that prepare teachers need to consider the demands of today’s schools in concert with the growing knowledge base about learning and teaching if they are to support teachers in meeting these expectations. This volume was developed in response to this challenge: to summarize what is understood about how people learn and what teaching strategies support high levels of learning and to examine what approaches to preparing teachers can help them acquire this body of knowledge and skills.

The goal of preparing teachers who are equipped to help all students achieve to their greatest potential raises a number important questions, for example:

1. What kinds of knowledge do effective teachers need to have about their subject matter and about the learning processes and development of their students?
2. What skills do teachers need in order to provide productive learning experiences for a diverse set of students, to offer informative feedback on students’ ideas, and to critically evaluate their own teaching practices and improve them?
3. What professional commitments do teachers need to help every child succeed and to continue to develop their own knowledge and skills, both as individuals and as members of a collective profession?

We focus especially on preparation for new teachers—knowing full well that it takes many years of experience to develop sophisticated expertise. We understand that teachers continually construct new knowledge and skills in practice throughout their careers rather than acquiring a finite set of knowledge and skills in their totality before entering the classroom. The goal for preservice preparation, then, is to provide teachers with the core ideas and broad understanding of teaching and learning that give them traction on their later development. This perspective views teachers’ capacity not as a fixed storehouse of facts and ideas but as “a source and creator of knowledge and skills needed for instruction” (Cohen and Ball, 1999, p. 6). An important goal of this volume is to help teachers become “adaptive experts” who are prepared for effective lifelong learning that allows them continuously to add to their knowledge and skills (see, for example, Hatano and Inagaki, 1986; Hatano and Oura, 2003). Later chapters explore in more detail the concept of adaptive expertise as it is applied to teaching.

In addition to preparing teachers to learn throughout their lifetimes, we seek to describe the initial understandings that teachers need to serve adequately the very first students they teach. We believe that these students, like all others, are entitled to sound instruction and cannot afford to lose a year of schooling to a teacher who is ineffective or learning by trial and error on the job. This is especially important since beginning teachers—and those who are unprepared—are disproportionately assigned to teach students in low-income, high-minority schools and students in lower track classes who most need skilled teachers in order to succeed (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996).

So beginning teachers need to have a command of critical ideas and skills and, equally important, the capacity to reflect on, evaluate, and learn from their teaching so that it continually improves. We believe this is more likely if the essential knowledge for beginning teachers can be “conceptually organized, represented and communicated in ways that encourage beginners to create deep understandings of teaching and learning” (Barnes, 1989, p. 17). Although we focus on the conceptual map that novices need to begin to navigate the classroom landscape, we hope that the information in this volume will also be useful to veteran teachers. One of our major goals is to suggest frameworks for helping teachers organize their knowledge and their thinking so that they can accelerate their learning throughout their careers.

This report does not speak exclusively to traditional programs of teacher education organized for undergraduate college students. Its recommendations are for initial preparation programs of all kinds, including alternative programs designed for midcareer recruits and others who prepare in postbaccalaureate programs based in universities or school districts. Although program qualities, and quality, vary widely across the many contemporary routes into teaching, these do not divide neatly across categories often used to describe them. Both so-called “traditional” and “nontraditional” programs can range from at best rudimentary to highly coherent and effective. Many programs that states have designated as “alternative” provide strong preparation that has the added advantage of connecting candidates to the districts that want and need to hire them (for examples, see National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996, p. 93). Many “traditional” undergraduate programs also have found ways to provide strong preparation for teaching, sometimes within the usual four-year parameters and sometimes by adding an additional year of study and clinical training (for examples, see Koppich, 2000; Merseth and Koppich, 2000; Miller and Silvernail, 2000; Zeichner, 2000). Our focus is not on the format, length, or location of teacher education but on its substance: what prospective teachers need to learn and how they may best be enabled to learn it.

THE CONTEXT OF TEACHING

If improvement in education is the goal, it is not enough to prepare good teachers and send them out to schools. If teachers are to be effective, they must work in settings where they can use what they know—where, for example, they can come to know students and families well; work with other teachers to provide a coherent, well-grounded curriculum; evaluate and guide student progress using informationrich assessments; and use texts and materials that support thoughtful learning. Unfortunately, given the patchwork of policies, the plethora of competing decision makers, and the fragmented design of factory-model schools, these conditions are not present in many, perhaps most, U.S. schools.

Many analysts have noted that there is very little relationship between the organization of the typical American school and the demands of serious teaching and learning (Darling-Hammond, 1997; Elmore, 1996; Goodlad, 1984; Sarason, 1993; Sizer, 1984). Unlike schools in many other countries, U.S. schools are typically not organized to keep students with the same teachers for more than one year or to provide extended time for teachers to plan and study teaching together. Furthermore, the systems that U.S. schools sit within rarely provide coherent curriculum guidance that includes supports for teachers to develop sophisticated lessons and teaching strategies. And, unlike those who attend schools in most other industrialized countries, students and teachers in relatively few U.S. schools are guided by challenging assessments that require the presentation and defense of ideas and the production of work that demonstrates how they can inquire, assemble and evaluate evidence, reason, and problem solve. Finally, U.S. schools are struggling both to overcome the vestiges of societal and educational discrimination and to develop models of organization and methods of instruction that successfully provide access to challenging curriculum material to the full range of learners, rather than rationing such curriculum to a small subset of students.

Given these challenges of contemporary schooling, it would be naïve to suggest that merely producing more highly skilled teachers can, by itself, dramatically change the outcomes of education. We must attend simultaneously to both sides of the reform coin: better teachers and better systems. Schools will need to continue to change to create the conditions within which powerful teaching and learning can occur, and teachers will need to be prepared to be part of this change process.

Although the system changes that are needed go far beyond what individual teachers should be expected to effect, there are at least three ways in which teacher education is implicated in supporting needed systemic reforms. First, because working in professional learning communities is a key to changing school cultures, we argue that the teacher education curriculum should help teachers learn how to work on the improvement of practice as members of such collaborative communities (see for example, Fullan, 1993a; Lieberman, 1988; Louis and Kruse, 1995; McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001). Second, if prospective teachers are to support more equitable and powerful education for their students, they will need to develop a strong sense of moral purpose, and they will need to understand the change process in organizations so that they can be constructive contributors to school reform (Fullan, 1993b). Finally, teacher education programs need to consider how they can engage in partnerships with schools and districts that work to transform schooling and teaching in tandem. In this way, prospective teachers can be prepared for the schools they need in order to teach effectively, and they can learn firsthand how to wor...