Teacher Quality

Williamson F. Evers, Lance T. Izumi

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780817929329
• eBook ISBN: 9780817929336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

In this book some of the brightest minds in education research have studied pressing questions about teacher quality and practices, reviewed thousands of education studies, examined state test scores, explored education theories, and then affirmed that we know what works. We must now ensure that the system provides the best possible education for kids.

Teacher Training and Pedagogical Methods

J. E. Stone

Recent studies have made it clear that significant differences in ability to improve student achievement exist among fully trained and experienced teachers. J. E. Stone’s paper argues that these differences reflect the education community’s view that student achievement is not public education’s highest priority. Rather, achievement is only one valued outcome among many, and it often suffers from inattention.

The education community’s priorities are consistent with ideals that have been taught in teacher training programs for decades, but especially since the sixties. They have come to constitute a pedagogical orthodoxy that the vast majority of educators treat as unquestionable.

The pedagogical concepts in which teachers are indoctrinated shape the education community’s preference for schooling that is relatively ineffective and inefficient. Teachers are taught that it is more important to use stimulating and engaging practices than to use effective ones.

Teacher training and pedagogy is a topic that has not attracted the attention it deserves—at least until recently. Now—because of studies like that of June Rivers¹—it is becoming clear that despite all the teacher training, credentialing, and annual evaluations that teachers have undergone for years, there are enormous differences in effectiveness among fully qualified and experienced teachers. I am going to discuss teacher training’s contribution to teacher effectiveness.

OVERVIEW

The best research brings to mind several questions that we should ask about teacher training:

• Why is there so much variability in the effectiveness among fully trained and experienced teachers? All are trained and experienced, and all undergo regular in-service training.
• Why haven’t the schools of education taken an interest in the success of public schools such as the “No Excuses” schools identified by Samuel Casey Carter and the Heritage Foundation? These are remarkably successful high-poverty schools, so they must have something to teach professional educators about teaching. The conventional wisdom is that teaching cannot overcome the effects of poverty.
• Why is value-added assessment not being studied and taught in schools of education, especially in areas where value-added data is used for school accountability? For example, Tennessee has had value-added assessment for eight years, and the Tennessee schools of education are ignoring it. None offers courses or workshops in it. Surely such a tool would be valuable to educators who are seeking the best ways to improve achievement.
• Why isn’t the massive and unique value-added database being used for research by schools of education from all over the United States? If teacher educators are trying to find which types of teacher training work best, a database containing the value-added gains produced by graduates of various teacher-training programs would be a gold mine of information.

In my opinion, the answer to all of these questions is disquieting but clear: the schools of education are not really in terested in teaching that is primarily intended to improve achievement. In fact, they disapprove of such teaching. They frown on it because they disagree with the proposition that student achievement is the most important outcome of schooling, that is, that student achievement is the indispensable outcome. In their view, schooling that fails to produce achievement is not necessarily failed schooling.

I am going to try to show you why they have this view.

BACKGROUND

Before I begin discussing teacher training quality, there are some things you should know about my background and my perspective. I am licensed as an educational psychologist and a school psychologist, and I am a professor in a school of education. I was trained in educational psychology at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses in child, developmental, and educational psychology at East Tennessee for nearly thirty years.

My experience has mainly been in the front lines of teacher training. In the early nineties, however, I encountered a situation that strongly influenced my thinking about the need for teacher-training reform. The high school attended by my two sons decided to become a leader in educational innovation. I won’t spend time telling you about their proposed innovations. I will say that something like 85 percent of the parents—including me—were opposed, but despite anything we could say or do, the school’s plans were implemented.

That experience permitted me to see in a very personal way how schools treat outside influences and how the doctrines that prevail within the education community place it at odds with what most parents want, indeed with what most of the larger public wants. In 1995, it led me to found the Education Consumers ClearingHouse—a company that provides public education’s consumers with access to consumer-friendly networking, information, and expertise.

Although I am an education professor, I have a consumer’s perspective—and that makes a difference. The views of education’s consumers are not necessarily agreeable to education’s providers. The schools typically think of parents as the junior partners in the school-home relationship. To the contrary, ClearingHouse subscribers generally believe that schools—like hospitals—should offer advice but otherwise respect the aims of parents whether they agree or not.

CONSUMER AIMS VERSUS EDUCATOR AIMS

A recent initiative of the ClearingHouse has been the formation of an Education Consumers Consultants Network—a group of educators and professors like myself who provide consumer-friendly expertise to parent organizations, school board members, legislators, and others on the consumer side of the education marketplace.

Recently, three members of our consultants’ network—a professor at the University of Louisville, another at Western Washington University, and I—have been working on what we call a “Second Opinion.” A consumer group in a Western state asked us to render an opinion with regard to a series of policies and legislative enactments that are being undertaken to reform teacher training in that state. Our objective has been to decipher the blizzard of information put out by the various organizations and agencies and to assess how well these plans and activities are likely to serve the interests and objectives of the consuming public.

As part of this project, I reviewed newspaper accounts of the various events, and I noticed a pattern. Events that drew positive comments from educators were often not well received by noneducators. The opposite was true, too. Events that were welcomed by noneducators were often not well received by educators.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but I find many of the differences in opinion that we hear in public conversations about schooling to be differences between consumers and providers.² Obviously there are overlaps, but producers seem to be primarily concerned about how schools operate, whereas consumers are primarily concerned about whether they are producing expected benefits, that is, concerns about process versus concerns about outcomes. What I want to discuss is what these differences are, why they exist, and how they are related to teacher training.

Differing Educational Priorities

The differences between consumers and providers go beyond factors such as professional expertise and familiarity with schoolhouse life. They stem both from different concepts of education³ and from practical considerations. The discussion that follows centers on conceptual differences, but, as you will no doubt surmise for yourself, there are social, political, and economic factors at work, too.

In a word, both consumers and educators want the best for children, but they have different ideas about what is important. Consumers want results. Educators agree, but they believe that policy makers should defer to the education community’s judgment in defining the result and setting the process by which it is measured.

Public education’s consumers believe that schools should teach children the knowledge and skills that parents and taxpayers consider essential for happy, responsible, and productive lives.⁴ Through their elected representatives, the public establishes curricula; states course and grade-level objectives; sets policies regarding report cards, standardized tests, and so on; and otherwise acts to ensure that students will learn that which their parents and other members of the community expect them to learn. Education’s consumers believe that effective schools and effective teachers are those that are successful in bringing about prescribed results and that true educational reform should serve to improve these results.

Teachers, professors of education, educators who work for the state education agencies, and other members of the education community, that is, public education’s providers, generally take a different view. They believe that the knowledge and skills that consumers consider important are only one part of a broad range of considerations with which schools and teachers must concern themselves. They value academic achievement, but not necessarily as a top priority. They believe that children have varied needs and that ideally schooling should be accommodated to those differences in a way that optimizes overall educational growth—they are concerned with the “whole child.”⁵

Education’s providers hold as ideal those teaching methodologies that are intended to guide or encourage or facilitate “educational growth” in ways that are sensitive to student differences.⁶ They denigrate and oppose the use of those methods that prescribe, expect, or require unaccustomed levels of student effort and accomplishment. They favor flexible curricula, narrative report cards, portfolio assessment, and teacher autonomy. They resist prescriptive curricula, letter grades, standardized tests, and teacher accountability.⁷ They believe that good schools and good teachers are those that maximize stimulation and opportunities for student enrichment, and they think of educational improvement as growth in the availability of enriching educational experiences.

By the way, the perspective I am describing is in education’s mainstream. There are educators whose views lean more toward schooling as an instrument of social and economic reform, and their views are in much greater disagreement with the public than the ones I am describing.⁸

Both education’s consumers and education’s providers talk about learning and achievement, but they accord it very different priorities.⁹ Educators believe that using correct pedagogical process is more important than attaining any particular level of mastery. Their reason for valuing process over outcome is that they believe optimal educational outcomes—that is, a kind of balanced growth of the whole—are possible only when the right kind of teaching is used. They refer to such teaching as “best practice.”

Best practice teaching is the open-ended, facilitative, guide-on-the-side type of teaching that is extolled by professors of education.¹⁰ It is also called learner-centered instruction because it theoretically puts the overall interests of the learner first—in other words, ahead of the teacher’s interest in the student’s acquisition of knowledge and skills. In the world of teacher education, learner-centered instruction is the standard against which all other forms of teaching are judged.

In theory, learner-centered instruction permits the student to grow in a way that respects the full range of individual needs, not simply in ways that parents or teachers believe important. Instruction fitted to individual student needs is believed to be conducive to the emergence of a personal synthesis of understanding, that is, an understanding that is practical, not abstract and bookish, relevant to the learner’s life, and fully integrated into the individual’s worldview. For example, in constructivism—a popular learner-centered view—the desired outcome of an educational experience is for the learner to construct personal meaning.

Learner-centered instruction is intended to be naturalistic—the sort of learning that takes place when experience is the teacher. When experience teaches, however, one never knows whether that which was taught is that which was learned; and to education’s consumers, uncertain outcomes are a problem. They believe that certain types of knowledge and skills must be attained for an individual to become a productive and responsible member of society. They also believe that schools should urge students to maximize their talents.

These are subtle but enormously significant differences. Learner-centered instruction is not simply an alternative means of arriving at the objectives sought by parents and policy makers. It is an approach that places a distinctly lower value on students knowing and understanding the accumulated wisdom of past generations. Instead, it emphasizes individuals forming their own ideas and assessing the worth of these insights from their immediate life experiences, that is, from the school of hard knocks. It is an approach that claims to equip students with thinking skills instead of knowledge. The public, by contrast, disagrees that thinking skills are sufficient even if it were possible to produce them in isolation.

I could go further in discussing the various ways in which the education community’s ideal process is at odds with consumer expectations, but an example might be more helpful. Think of teaching tennis or golf. You could introduce children to either sport by just giving them a club or racquet and letting them have at it. Or you could start them with lessons in the basics. The former is more or less the approach that the education community idealizes, and the latter is more or less what the public wants.

Kids might find the unstructured approach more fun and might consider the organized lessons boring, bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: What Works in Teaching
• Introduction
• Teacher Quality
• Teacher Quality and Equity in Educational Opportunity: Findings and Policy Implications
• Teacher Quality Accountability Systems: The View From Pennsylvania
• Teacher Training and Pedagogical Methods
• Teaching Methods
• Appendix: Conference Agenda
• Editors and Contributors