Teaching and Learning

Key Concepts .

Prepared and Well-Educated Teachers Commonly-held "Myths" Concerning Effective Teacher Preparation Findings on Learning to Teach. Findings from the Teacher Education and Learning to Teach (TELT) longitudinal study of teacher learning, conducted between 1986 and 1990 by the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning, contradict some of our assumptions concerning teacher preparation. The study involved more than 700 teachers in eleven programs encompassing preservice and induction, alternative routes and inservice programs in the subject areas of mathematics and writing. The study focused on finding out what teachers learned from participating in these various programs. The full text of An Annotated Bibliography: Findings on Learning to Teach is available on the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning, College of Education, Michigan State University web site. The information that follows is taken from this document.

Common Myths in Teacher Education

Myth #1: Majoring in an academic subject satisfies the requirement for subject matter knowledge needed for teaching. Myth #2: Giving teachers information about the cultures of various groups enables teachers to teach children from these groups. Myth #3: Mentors improve novice teachers' classroom performance. Myth #4: We can produce good teachers if we start with people who are smart and who have subject matter degrees, and then give them classroom management skills. Myth #5: Different program structures in teacher education will lead to different knowledge and skills in teachers. Myth #6: Short-term inservice workshops are effective device to improve teaching practice. Findings #1: Researchers from NCRTL asked teacher candidates to use their understanding of the content area as a teacher would. In other words, rather than asking candidates how they might solve a particular mathematics problem, they asked them how they would help a student understand a mathematics concept or to provide an example that would illustrate a concept. Interestingly, they found that teachers who majored in the subjects they were teaching could perform these critical instructional tasks only slightly better than those majoring in other subjects. Thus majoring in an academic subject in college does not necessarily provide teachers with the specific kind of subject matter knowledge needed for teaching. Findings #2: The majority of the teacher preparation programs studied offered courses that provided information on racial, social, and ethnic groups to help teachers better understand the children from these groups. However despite various attempts to prepare teachers and teacher candidates to teach children from diverse backgrounds, few of the participating teachers could move beyond the two contradictory moral imperatives of teaching--to treat all children equally and to respond to each child as an individual. Some teachers even became more convinced after taking such courses that some children cannot learn certain content. Findings #3: Through interviews and observations of novice and mentor teachers and through observing and interviewing both after they had conferred with one another, researchers concluded that simply having a mentor teacher does not ensure that beginning teachers will become more skilled or thoughtful teachers. However, mentors do help novices adjust to various teaching situations and may contribute to reducing the drop-out rate for first-year teachers. Findings #4: Many alternate route programs are based on this premise. Two such programs in the TELT study required participants to have bachelor's degrees with subject matter majors and to meet certain other criteria. Classroom management skills were taught through intensive summer workshops, workshops during the school year, and through assigning mentor teachers to each participant. The goal of these two programs, as with many other alternate route programs, is to bring different people (minorities and others from varying demographic backgrounds) into teaching, not to improve the quality of teaching. Thus, these programs do little more that to help novice teachers learn to survive in the classroom and fit into a school environment. They did not improve teachers' abilities to engage students with meaningful and substantive ideas in their classrooms and did not give teachers the skills to examine their own instructional practices. Findings #5: Some of the preservice teacher education programs in the TELT study were structured as four-year programs; others were five-year programs with teacher education integrated throughout; and some were fifth-year programs that began after the completion of a bachelor's degree. These programs differed with respect to the extensiveness of professional course requirements and in the combination of field experiences and required courses. They also varied in terms of the type of teachers they intended to produce and in their tacit theories of how novices learn to teach. Thus, though debates in teacher education center on the structure of teacher education programs, findings from this research indicate that the content and orientation of the program will have more influence on teacher learning. Differences in beliefs and knowledge of the conceptual orientation of the program on the part of teachers entering the program influenced differences in teachers' beliefs and knowledge about teaching practice, diverse learners, and subject matter at the end of the program. Differences across program structures did not produce significant differences in teacher candidates' beliefs. Findings #6: The TELT study involved examining two extensive, highly focused, carefully-thought-out inservice programs. Both included intensive summer workshops and continuing in-class assistance. Yet, even with this support it was difficult for teachers to change their practices. Both programs required that teachers enhance subject-matter knowledge, change their thinking about their role as a teacher, and learn to manage substantially different teaching techniques. Emotional adjustment also needed to occur.