9486 in the collection
Knowing what you teach and how to teach it
The governor proclaims: "If you get the right teachers in the classroom and you set high standards, you are about 80 percent of the way there." 80% where? 80% out of poverty?
The governor has made some good efforts for young children in Tennessee. It's too bad he lends his voice to the corporate notion of what teaching is all about.
Ask yourself why this blather went out on a conference call to business leaders.
By Staff Reports
Sunday, February 10, 2008
In a conference call with a group of Tennessee business leaders on Jan. 30, Gov. Phil Bredesen said that Tennessee needs to change the way it teaches educators.
Education colleges should focus less on pedagogy and more on content knowledge, the governor said.
"I want to make sure when we have a high school English teacher, that they do have a command of English literature in addition to the teaching skills," he said. "If you get the right teachers in the classroom and you set high standards, you are about 80 percent of the way there."
In a meeting with the editorial board of The Commercial Appeal last week, Bredesen was asked to elaborate on the theme. Here is an edited version of that conversation.
Q: Could you articulate what your ideas are about how we educate teachers in Tennessee, and what changes you would like to see and how you would bring about those changes?
There are as many ideas (about public education) as there are ideologues of any stripe. This year it's technology. Next year it's pay for performance. Next year it's charter schools. And next year it's something or other.
I'm convinced it comes down to the quality of teachers in the classroom. That quality is not defined by what tickets you have, it's defined by how well your students progress. There are people with lots of tickets who can't move the students forward, and there are teachers who are very primitive in that regard who are great teachers.
I think you do two things: You expand the tool of talent dramatically. Not everyone who teaches needs to be someone who decided when they were a freshman or sophomore in college (to) major in education and go through that. I also think the teachers colleges have got to get much more disciplined about getting teachers who want to teach, who know how to handle things in the classroom, and especially who have content knowledge. Even in middle school and grade school it's a little hard to get through to people that if all you know about math is what's in the textbook that's not going to cut it.
Specifically with teachers colleges, I think they ought to take a fresh look at their missions and what they're producing. We turn out teachers all the time, for example, who can't pass the practice exam. It takes them years, if ever, to pass the practice exam, which is not a difficult exam.
So my first question to teachers colleges, way back when, was why should you even give a ticket to and send to me to be hired somebody who can't pass the practice exam? Why don't you make it a prerequisite for graduation?
I'd like it to be more content based. If you come out as an English teacher I'd like you to have a legitimate degree in English from a university with a stamp on it that says you're qualified to teach as well, as opposed to you've got an education degree and you might or might not have gotten an English degree.
I'd like them to be professional schools in the sense that they really teach the tools of the trade. We have been using for 15 years and probably will for a long time to come this value-added assessment. I would like each teacher who comes out of one of our teachers colleges really knowing how to use that information in their classroom.
But also don't forget about this notion of trying to smooth the way to some nontraditional approaches to teaching, as well. We have this Teach Tennessee program, which has worked spectacularly well, and I just need to mainstream it now. Only 150 people have been through it so far. But there are lots of younger people, I think, who may not want to get an education degree and spend 35 years being a teacher and then retire, but for whom teaching would make perfectly good sense, as a career.
I'm just trying to do what any business would do. If the real problem is just getting the best possible people you can you start out by saying, "First of all, lets make sure the ones we're producing are the best possible."
And let's expand the pool. There are a lot of bright people out there who might well wish to spend 10 years of their life teaching. Let's figure out how to get them in and how to use them.
Q: Explain how you get an entrenched institution to change the way it teaches people.
You change higher education with great difficulty. I'll stipulate that. What I'm doing is going to the Board of Regents, and I've told them what I wanted. They can control some of the things through the policies that they adopt. I've tried to get it going at one school which is in the process of hiring a dean of education, and they're interested in finding somebody radically different.
When it comes to how do you train and mentor people from outside I would like to use the existing structure in higher education, which is the schools of education, instead of inventing a new governor's school for itinerant teachers over here on the side. So if I can get some changes made in the existing schools to get the standards up, to get the rigor up, to get a little more emphasis on the more workmanlike nature of some of the things you do in education, and start a little school on the side over here at one of these colleges that are doing things very, very differently, I think you start moving things in a different direction.
Q: What are your thoughts on getting quality pre-K teachers? Universal pre-K is where we need to go, but it's tough finding qualified teachers to serve the at-risk kids.
The pre-K program we have in the state has gotten really good reviews nationally. One of the reasons is that we have funded it to have pre-K certified teachers in each of the positions. If you'll remember, when we put that all together it caused some hard feelings among Head Start and some other organizations, specifically here in Shelby County, because they couldn't compete in that world. They didn't have the certified people. I think, from the communications I get, that has declined. When you talk about pre-K that's where I think four years with lots of emphasis on educational technique and so on probably has the most applicability.
Aside from the fact that we didn't have the money to do it all at once, part of the reason for doing it $25 million at a time, which is 250 classrooms at a time or something like that, is to give us a decent shot at getting the certified teachers coming out of our own schools and recruiting them. I think that part is working in the sense that people who want to teach pre-K are coming out with the appropriate certification out of the schools of education.
Memphis Commercial Appeal
2008-02-10
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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