Teachers’ is a “learner’s learner” who will always have critics regardless of their passion for teaching. The apathy among educators and administrators between policy makers, pundits, businesses and parents are arguably part of the reason why our educational system is a “Nation at Risk.” Educators have agreed that one of the challenges is the lack of preparation programs for teachers, and are placed in a precariously systemically failing schools. Some policy makers with their quasi reformation bills at Congress are repeatedly contemplating an emergence of intelligence, (i.e., technology) and try to articulate the implementation idea throughout the U.S schools again; another new pseudo reform for the 21st century. Our technology savvy society is convinced and tirelessly tries to persuade educators that they have world class achievement levels; of technical know how, of mastery of the new technologies that would improve our nation’s educational system.
Teaching for a Practical Change
Rethinking preparation of TeachersBy Don G. JasminAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2012 Dr. Don G. Jasmin
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4670-2612-3Contents
Dedication......................................................................viiPreface.........................................................................xiiiChapter - 1 Teaching Teachers...................................................1Chapter - 2 Teachers' Teaching Students.........................................43Chapter - 3 Unknown Challenges in Education.....................................58Chapter - 4 Teachers' Reinforcing Subject Matter................................85Chapter - 5 Prevention Efforts to Improve Students Learning.....................115Chapter - 6 School Curriculum...................................................133Chapter - 7 Teachers and Administrators.........................................162Chapter - 8 Administering Affairs and Issues of Power...........................191Chapter - 9 Resourceful, Collegial and Governance...............................213Chapter - 10 Fundamental Academic Crisis........................................229Chapter - 11 College/University for the School of Education.....................248References......................................................................259
Chapter One
Teaching Teachers
Teaching teachers is unlike teaching students, which may not be a morally neutral affair. It is the releasing and instilling of obligations of a primary antidote, which is the sense of discovery and growth in what may be termed the learning process. It is not a focus only for students. It is also one for the teacher for whom, no less than for students, that sense is the sole antidote to mindless routinization of thought and action. What we owe students, we owe teachers. No one will say that teachers are the only primary conduits for information and of abstract principles. We expect more from teachers and they have identified in their own experience the nature and context of productive learning. Teachers are encouraged to take on the obligation to create similar conditions for students. This ideal holds for the teacher of teachers and the teacher of students. Even though it is an ideal impossible to attain, or if attained impossible to sustain, it is one by which we should not judge any and all teachers. The realities of classrooms and schools are obstacles to approximating the ideal, but that is no excuse for forgetting it. We know that "love thy neighbor" is a statement of an ideal our world and our frailties seem intent to subvert, but we also know that it is a statement by which we should judge others and ourselves. In the quiet of the night, we know we should expect more of others and ourselves. Ideals are double-edged swords: they tell us what we should be even though we know at best we will be only partially successful in attaining them.
I have said that the primary focus of education is fostering the sense of discovery and growth in the learning process of teachers and students. The learning process in the world of real classrooms involves more than what we conventionally call subject matter. In the course of any one day things happen in a classroom for which that focus is as relevant as it is for learning to read or write; it requires an understanding and a course of action consistent with the primary focus. For example, a teacher discovers that a student has lied or cheated. How would we want the teacher to understand and respond to that knowledge? We would, I assume, not be satisfied if the teacher only punished the student: break the law, pay the penalty. That would bother us for the same reason that we feel if a student got all or mostly wrong answers on an arithmetic test, the teacher should go well beyond merely indicating that the answers are wrong. We expect the teacher to seek to discover why the student performed so poorly. Of course, the student has "a problem" but so does the teacher. Indeed, the teacher has two problems: to reexamine his/her way of teaching that student and to determine what other factors may be at work. For any untoward event in a classroom, the teacher, consistent with the primary focus, has to look both inward and outward, a stance that makes discovery and growth possible. In addition, a stance makes discovery and growth possible for the student. In the case of the student who lied or cheated, I am not one who believes punishment is unnecessary or undesirable. However, before punishment is pronounced is it not the obligation of the teacher to try to understand the lying and cheating and to help the student in ways that might prevent such occurrences in the future?
We have heard much about twentieth century teaching quality is diminishing in academic effectiveness as compared to countries across the pond. What we do not hear is that in the course of one day a teacher inevitably faces and has to deal with value issues arising from or affecting the learning process. Is it not likely that our dissatisfaction with educational outcomes, deriving as those outcomes do from teaching subject matter and not students are what makes the "clarification of values" a matter of chance in the model classroom? I cannot refrain from saying that we need a curriculum for values, like we need a hole in our heads. If you think that statement is unwarranted, then I suggest that you sit in any classroom for a day and note the number of times moral and ethical issues, implicit or explicit, arise and are ignored, glossed over, superficially discussed or handled in counter-productive ways.
Years ago, I had several colleagues who observed every day for a month in middle and high school classrooms and noted each time something occurred that was relevant to and illuminated the "constitution" of that classroom. That is, the "values" without which what went on in the classroom was inexplicable, and who "wrote" that constitution which said, so to speak, what the rights, duties, and obligations of students and teacher were – what the "laws" were. The occurrences were many; in each classroom, however, the constitution was "written," proclaimed and enforced by the one adult. If some of the laws you will note lack the specificity of the Ten Commandments, from the standpoint of the student and the teacher were, like Moses, who was confronted by pagans who did not know right from wrong, but who needed to be subdued. I am not an advocate for participatory democracy in which everyone's opinion should have equal weight, but if you are to be consistent with the primary focus, then how the constitution of a classroom is forged has a pervasive effect on learning subject matter and assimilating values. To set the teaching of values apart from the teaching of subject matter, would make as much sense as separating the teaching of subject matter from the teaching of students. It makes less sense in that it disguise ignorance or insensitivity to what life is like in the classroom.
The lack preparation of educational personnel inadequately prepares them for what life is like in real classrooms, in real schools and leaves them unable to benefit on opportunities to be consistent with the primary focus. The preparation of such personnel should begin not with theory or history or research findings or pedagogical technique but with concrete issues of classroom life; the practical, inevitable, action requiring issues based on which the would-be teacher can judge and utilize theory and research.
It apparently is easy for the teacher of teachers to forget that the would-be teacher is not without experience or assets. That individual has been a student for years and can identify with those contexts in which he or she experienced in discovery and growth. However, the difference between values espoused and values practiced are the teachers whom he or she trusted. The ones who were feared and the difference between having one's feelings sought and understood; instead having them ignored can be misunderstood and having them ignored or misunderstood is the query. Far from being without assets, the would-be teacher has loads of assets that the teacher or teachers should help the student recognize, mine, articulate and apply.
It is not only the teacher of teachers who sees the student as having no assets, but that is the way most students see themselves: empty vessels possessing the understandable "deficit" of ignorance and inexperience, waiting to be filled with facts, knowledge, wisdom, and technical skills. Having students see themselves otherwise is, will, and should be no easy task, and that holds for the teachers of teachers who have to change their attitudes about the assets of the would-be teacher. None of this can be accomplished quickly and none of this can be learned in a "once and for all way." It is something we have to learn repeatedly in relation to the myriad happenings in the classroom life. It is not a stance or habit you can learn in a single course or in regard to a particular subject matter. A stance should be the object of inquiry and use throughout the preparatory process.
The primary focus of education is to nurture the sense of discovery and growth in students and teachers. If educational personnel are not committed to that ideal (or to a similar one couched in different language), if for whatever reason they forget or ignore that ideal, their role is robbed of moral justification. The arena of classrooms and schools contains mammoth obstacles to actions consistent with the primary focus. That, today, is a given, a glimpse of the obvious, that has numerous sources one of which (and only one of which) is how educational personnel are inadequately prepared for what they will confront – conceptually, personally, interpersonally, morally – as interdependent practitioners. Unless and until the preparation of educational personnel deals directly with those confrontations and enables candidates to see that there are ways of thinking and acting consistent with the primary focus, those personnel will remain one of the sources of inadequacies in our schools.
Those who seek to become educators have a major asset: They have spent years as "learners" in classrooms. The asset consists not in sheer experience, or the validity or invalidity of whatever conclusions they may have come to, but in the potential that asset has for intellectually and personally grasping the nature and practical consequences of the primary focus.
I anticipate several critical reactions to these assertions and others that will follow. Let me deal with them here, so as not to have to repeat them later. The first is this: "What you state as the ideal, the primary focus, sounds like the musings of a university professor who believes that each student is capable of becoming an intellectual, a devotee of the life of the mind." My critic will be surprised to learn that he is partly right in that I believe Piaget and Freud were absolutely correct that from its earliest days each student is a question-asking, answer-seeking organism trying to make sense of self and the world, a budding "intellectual" already containing the seeds of complex thinking: asking questions, arriving at answers (more often than not invalid), experimenting in the sense of trying things out, and knowing in inchoate ways the sense of and the satisfactions from discovery and growth. When I state the primary focus I am saying that our task as educators is to recognize and nurture features already characteristic of the student.
If you think that I regard preschool, elementary and middle school students in narrow intellectual or cognitive terms; I must refer you to my book A Root Cause To Why Our Students Cannot Read (2008). That book dealt with this question: the visual and research evidence is overwhelming that young students everywhere seek and need to engage in creative, artistic act and communication reinforcement. So why in our society does that activity virtually disappear as a self-initiated activity when they begin formal schooling? No, my primary focus in no way implies or assumes that all students are capable of becoming committed intellectuals, let alone university professors. It does imply that our obligation is to foster the sense of discovery and growth about self and the world in whatever ways we can (subject matter being but one), knowing that the outcomes of our efforts are far from predictable. Regardless of what a student appears to be, the primary focus dictates that you begin by giving the student the benefit of any doubt you may have.
The second critical response is in principle similar to the first, except now it concerns my expectations of teachers: "You, like many others, have commented on the number of different roles society asks teachers to adopt, for example, parent, social worker, policeman, psychiatrist. You now seem to be adding the role of psychologist, and a very sensitive and astute one at that. Not any kind of psychologist but one who can identify and understand and appropriately react to a wide variety of behaviors, feelings, and events. Apart from what that role requires in terms of classroom time, why do you assume that most of those who seek careers in education are capable of becoming effective in the that role?"
My answer is in several parts. The first is that teachers have always performed like psychologists. They, like the rest of us, have a "psychology" that informs their thinking and actions. What we are dissatisfied with is that their psychology is inadequate in regard to recognizing and preventing problems. Put in another way, their thinking and actions violate the maxim that you teach student, not subject matter, that there are myriad non-subject matter opportunities to further discovery and growth. Once you take the maxim seriously you are, so to speak, hoist with your own petard: the psychology of the teacher takes center stage in regard to subject matter and other things. Better not to take it seriously than to mouth it and then ignore it, to reinforce the charade in which the utterance of truths remains on the level of cliché.
The second part of my answer is that if my critic does not view favorably the capabilities of those who seek a career in education, then my critic is raising two very important questions: how do we get to the point where preparatory programs can select appropriate candidates rather than having to take whoever comes through the doors? And what do we know on the basis of systematic experience or research about the criteria for selection we should employ? The second question is, unfortunately, easy to answer: we know precious little, and that may be an overstatement. Implied in my critic's reaction is the assumption that because those who seek a career in education have, on average, discernibly lower scores on intelligence and aptitude tests than those in the more prestigious professions, it is asking too much of them to expect them to become psychologically sophisticated.
Researches on this point are very few but they confirm the conclusion from my own experience that the correlation between intelligence test scores and the grasp and application of psychological principles is not far from zero. Future research – assuming that an important problem like this gets the attention and study it deserves, an unlikely assumption – may demonstrate other-wise. So I have to say to my critic that in redesigning preparatory programs we have no alternative but to assume that teachers are capable of becoming better psychologists. To assume other-wise is to indulge the self-fulfilling prophecy, which is what too many teachers indulge with their students.
The third critical reaction goes like this: "If teachers become better psychologists and appropriately take advantage of the many opportunities in the classroom to nurture the sense of discovery and growth in students. Would that not cut into the time teachers allot to learning subject matter? Given the brute fact that teachers are under increasing pressure to complete the curriculum in ways that get reflected in achievement test scores, how much time could or should a teacher devote to other aspects of a student's development?" My critic is getting at the important aspect, which is how long we will continue to require teachers and students to adhere to and meet criteria in ways that are ultimately self-defeating of the productive development of both teachers and students. The issue is not subject matter! The issue is the assimilation of subject matter in ways that capitalize on, stimulate, and reinforce the sense of discovery and growth in regard to self and the world. Subject matter, any formal subject matter, is taught in a social context in which diverse factors have consequences for how that subject matter will be approached, judged and learned. Subject matter is crucial, so crucial for life that we cannot be other than aghast that most students experience learning of subject matter as a form of harassment and student abuse. Implied in the primary focus is that students should want to learn subject matter, not to feel that it is an exercise of an uncomprehending adult world foists on them. You should then have an exercise that is quickly forgotten when the curriculum has been completed.
Of course what I am suggesting may well cut into the time allotted of formal subject matter. But should we not realize that increasing the time devoted (in the most narrow ways) to subject matter has been either fruitless and/or has raised test scores to a minuscule degree. Thus, has had the counterproductive effect of guaranteeing that in the development of student's subject matter has no personal or intellectual significance for them. Subject matter is too important to be learned but not assimilated, and to suffer the fate of enthusiastically motivated memory loss. Yes, I expect a lot from and for teachers and students. In addition, if those expectations require changes in classrooms and schools, the preparation of educational personnel cannot remain what it is.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Teaching for a Practical Changeby Don G. Jasmin Copyright © 2012 by Dr. Don G. Jasmin. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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