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Some Folk Believe if you Know a Verb When You See It You Can Teach English
This past week in Washington, DC, at the first annual Teacher Quality Conference, I heard U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige report on America's public school teachers. He presented a familiar lament: our public school system is "broken," and poor teachers are largely to blame.

According to Paige and the subsequent speakers, good teachers in America's classrooms are scarce -- and it's not because of low salaries or inadequate school funding or overcrowded classrooms or even the shockingly high drop-out rate of early career teachers (it has been estimated that 40 percent leave teaching after their first five years). Paige maintains America's current teachers are "bad" because they don't know their subject matter -- and they don't know their subject matter because of one major factor. They have taken far too many useless courses in pedagogy, the science of knowing how to teach.
As a teacher and as president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), I can't see Secretary Paige's logic.
Let me explain.
When I entered the secondary classroom as a new English teacher I was told that knowing my subject was all I needed. And because I began my teaching with no pedagogical background but with a bachelor's and master's degree in English, I assumed I was fairly well qualified to teach the high school students who sat before me.
I knew all about literature and literary theory; I could scan a poem, ferret out a metaphor, and follow an image for pages and pages into a novel. I knew literary history, and I could craft an argument orally and in writing. But that simply wasn't enough. What didn't I know? I knew nothing of how people learn, especially people who, unlike myself, might find reading and writing difficult. I also did not know why people learn, especially people, unlike myself, who were not motivated to gain the teacher's approval or get an A or even get a passing grade. I had never considered how I myself had become a successful student, and, as an extension, I was not prepared to teach anyone who wasn't pretty much like me.
I did not know how to run a class discussion or how to set up a small group. I had never created a test of any kind or considered how to grade and evaluate and respond to student writing. How to time and sequence instruction was pretty much a mystery to me. Until I began teaching, I thought these things just happened.
In short, I didn't know pedagogy. I was a good student who was expected to make an automatic transfer to being an effective teacher. And that did not happen for many years.
Despite Secretary Paige's scorn, the study of pedagogy is indispensable to teacher success. In pedagogical courses, in professional development, in professional conferences, the act of teaching, the consideration of teaching -- and thus the consideration of learning -- is utterly at center stage. In fact, one of the findings just revealed in "A National Priority: Americans Speak on Teacher Quality," a study conducted by Democratic pollster Peter Hart and Republican pollster Robert Teeter and commissioned by the Educational Testing Service, relates directly to this point. Of those polled on the nature of quality teaching, more than twice the number of people valued teachers' "having skills to design learning experiences that inspire/interest children" (42 percent) compared to those who valued teachers' "having a thorough understanding of their subject" (19 percent). . . .

— Leila Christenbury
Knowing How to Teach
NCTE website
June 18, 2002
http:;/www.ncte.org/action/op-ed/quality.shtml

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