What Master Teachers are Saying!

Let's ask some master teachers -- individuals who practice their profession with great success every day in America's public school classrooms -- what they think about high-quality teacher preparation.

Members of the Teacher Leaders Network -- a virtual community of 340 experienced, highly accomplished educators who teach in more than twenty states -- voluntarily participate in daily online discussions where they explore and debate what works in education and what doesn't. These experts, many of whom are state and local educators of the year, teachers with National Board Certification, Milken Award winners, and recipients of other teaching honors, have wisdom and insights to share that seldom surface in national education-policy debates.

Gail Richardson, a board-certified teacher at North Forsyth High School, in Cumming, Georgia, began teaching in a private school after earning degrees in English and French and maintaining a 4.0 grade point average throughout her undergraduate career.

"I was a train wreck as a teacher," she says. "I understood French very well, but I had no idea how to teach it. I also had no idea how to relate to teenagers from a position of authority. Needless to say, my classroom was completely out of control. They ran all over me. I was a terrible teacher. I look back at it now and realize what a deep disservice I did to those kids, and I am ashamed. But at the time I was doing my best, with no training and no mentor. I was so naive about school politics and how to work with parents. The only reason they didn't fire me was because they couldn't find anyone else to do my job."

Carol Midgett, leadership-program coordinator at the North Carolina Partnership for Improving Mathematics and Science and also a board-certified teacher who entered teaching through alternative certification, says she learned that "without focused, formal preparation, the challenge to succeed is much greater and the chances for survival are limited."

Even when teachers benefit from high-quality preservice teacher education, more preparation is needed. Brenda Dyck, a middle school teacher in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, offers some ideas.

"I needed to know a lot more about how to pace myself through curriculum and deal with dicey parental issues in my school," she says. "I also needed to learn how to design instruction to meet the needs of all the different students in my classroom and develop more real assessments -- not just pen-and-paper tests -- for my students that capture what they know but also how they know it."

Higher standards and greater expectations are driving reforms in teacher education across the United States, and more of the 1,200 plus colleges and universities that prepare teachers are doing a better job than they have in the past. But most education schools are not sufficiently funded to deeply prepare teachers in clinical settings such as those engineering, nursing, and pharmacy programs utilize.

Even when new teachers are well prepared, they are often assigned to the most challenging schools and classes and given the more demanding extracurricular duties. Many novices have considerable difficulty in on-the-job learning, especially in settings where students have challenging academic, social, and emotional needs, or where novices have no time to watch or learn from seasoned, expert colleagues. Subsequently, many of our nation's most challenging schools are rife with teacher turnover; half of all novices leave the profession within the first five years.

Often, school districts and teacher unions claim to offer on-the-job support for novice teachers, but these support programs are often superficial and unhelpful, as two Oregon teachers attest.

"I felt like I was thrown into teaching without any contact with other teachers or supervisors for my first year of teaching," says one teacher. "I have still never had anyone observe me teach."

Another teacher asserts, "I think our school could definitely be more helpful to their new teachers by giving more feedback on classroom management and how to deal with a host of cultural concerns and all the diverse students that most of us haven't dealt with our entire lives."

Some critics of teacher education argue that mid-career switchers often have other teaching experiences in their personal or professional lives that reduce the need for formal pedagogical training. Linda Kelly, a board-certified teacher who changed careers and entered high school teaching in Virginia, says she values her experiences teaching young people in Sunday school, in youth organizations, and as a private piano teacher. But working with students who typically had few problems and were from advantaged families, she adds, "did not prepare me for public school teaching and the need to reach every student and to work with students whose daily lives sound like a soap opera."