Current teacher training is not working
Via elearnspace, a spot-on article by the Provost of The King’s College in New York City, Peter Wood, in MercatorNet. Money quote:
Generally schools of education recruit weak students. The average SAT scores for would-be teachers for decades have scraped along among the lowest of all enrolled college students. The schools of education then proceed to endow these well-meaning but dull folks with strangely mistaken ideas about how children learn. The wisdom on how to teach accumulated over several thousand years of civilisation is summarily set aside in favour of what some recent educational theorists have conjectured. The conjectures are typically backed by a form of social science “research” several notches less rigorous than the reader surveys in supermarket magazines.
Wood believes that we’re moving away from the current model and “we will move to a system in which a degree in education will mark a potential teacher as under-educated and mis-trained. Instead teachers will be recruited from the ranks of the liberally educated and will learn, as good teachers have always learned, by devotion to the task itself.”
Certainly “devotion to the task itself” is a great way to learn, but I think it may be a necessary but not sufficient condition. Individual teachers shouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel - they should be able to learn from what other have thought and have done. It would be better to embed teachers in a lifelong self-directed learning process, based on mentoring, collaboration and action research. The web application we’re working on has a simple (but kinda neat) action research functionality, one that I hope will help teachers connect theory and concept to empirical performance, and then share that experience.
Hey Cleve,
I totally agree with you. The old saying is true: You learn best by doing. I have never been “trained” as an ESL teacher. I learned as I went along. I learned by experience, and it was usually “just in time.” I learned, and still learn best when I have to do it to overcome a problem in class, or when I sense a gap in my teaching practice.
I also strongly agree with George Siemens’ Connectivism theory: it’s not what you know, it’s your ability to learn more that’s important in today’s world.
Comment by Aaron — August 7, 2006 @ 12:53 pm
Exactly - kind of an introspective, self-directed action research approach.
The certification issue is complicated. Many of the best teachers I know don’t have a TEFL cert (on the other hand, most of the native-speaker backpacker conversation class “teachers” don’t either…). At least if a teacher has certification you tend to think that they are more serious than those that don’t bother to get certified.
But, I sponsored a teacher of ours recently for a distance TEFL cert, from a accredited school in London, well over $1000, and the quality was utterly pathetic - and one of the “mentors” who reviewed our teacher’s work and gave feedback is a well-known ESL guy who contributes to a number of magazines…sigh. An expensive mistake.
So I’d guess it goes like this:
Worst: the newbie “I want to travel the world with my backpack and the easiest thing to do is “teach” English….whatever.”
Bad: recent TEFL certs, or experienced backpackers, who don’t learn on the job
Mediocre: experienced TEFL certs who don’t learn on the job
Better: Non-cert teachers who are self-aware and dedicated to improving (so their experience means something)
Best: self-aware, dedicated to improving AND with a solid understanding of ESL / SLA foundations from a decent T training course (or, self-taught with same).
Bestest: anyone with the “Gift” (that ephemeral communicative empathy thing that enables some people to be awe-inspiring teachers).
Caveat: This taxonomy is off-the-cuff and won’t withstand even minor scrutiny
And I don’t have a problem with “backpackers”…I’m using that as an abbreviation for half-assed teachers who are clueless and don’t know it.
Comment by Cleve — August 7, 2006 @ 2:39 pm