RON WOLK
I recently read the 153-page report of the Rhode Island Department of Education’s critical review of Rhode Island College’s teacher-preparation programs. Despite 30 years of reading such reports, I lost my way in a thicket of jargon, acronyms, and generalities. But by the end, I had to agree with the findings of a half-dozen national reports on teacher preparation over the past three decades: Namely, that we still don’t know how to prepare college students for one of the most demanding jobs in modern society.
Think about it. Today’s teachers are expected to be experts in an academic field; understand deeply the content standards set by the state in virtually every subject for every grade; be skilled in the most effective teaching methods; keep up with the latest reforms; be able to teach students who have physical and intellectual disabilities or whose primary language is not English; be as proficient in the latest technology as the digital natives they teach; be effective managers in classrooms of 20 or more diverse students; get to know closely the 130 or so students they teach every day and motivate them to want to learn stuff that many students find boring and irrelevant.
It is appropriate to expect teachers to be able to meet those challenges, and RIDE’s review touches on RIC’s shortcomings in preparing their students for all of them and more.
But it is unrealistic to believe that adopting RIDE’s recommendations will ensure that RIC’s future graduates will be better prepared for public school classrooms than they are now.
The fact is, the way traditional programs like RIC’s prepare teacher candidates for their careers is exactly the way our public schools prepare K-12 students for college and careers. And both systems produce mediocre results. Both require students to take years of courses in a curriculum that spans the full range of academic subjects and then pass a written test to demonstrate that they’ve learned the knowledge and skills necessary for success.
Hard as it may be to believe, we are relying on outmoded theories of how people learn best to prepare teachers for schools that rely on the same outmoded theories of how people learn best.
Research and experience should have convinced us by now that people learn best when they want to learn and when they confront problems and questions out in the real world.
Teacher-prep programs give a nod of recognition to this reality by requiring candidates to participate in “field work” and an internship of sorts practicing in a real classroom under the supervision of an experienced teacher (60 hours and 12 weeks, respectively, at RIC). Why not shift the bulk of a teacher candidate’s learning to neighborhood schools working with K-12 students under the tutelage of teams of veteran teachers, the way medical students spend years in hospitals doing rounds with physicians treating real patients?
Rhode Island would never dream of letting physicians practice medicine after 30 hours of courses in the medical field in which they intend to specialize and fewer than 70 days in clinical practice. Yes, medicine is a matter of life and death. But so is education, in a way. A poor or mediocre education is like a debilitating disease that takes a high toll on the individual and the society as a whole.
There are hundreds of innovative K-12 schools around the country and at least a handful of teacher prep programs that are using nontraditional practices to improve teaching and learning. Why doesn’t RIDE search out these successful models, bring them back to Rhode Island, and help incorporate them into local educational institutions?
We’ve been trying to improve public schools and teacher-prep programs since the mid 1980s without actually changing them much. Surely it’s time to try something different if we want different results.
—Ron Wolk, of Warwick, an occasional contributor, is the founding editor of Education Week, a former vice president of Brown, and former chairman of Big Picture Learning. He is retired.