Ed School Innovations: School of NCLB
Amazing how many establishment figures (ed school deans) come out against what SMU is doing to revamp teacher education in this NYT article (A Bush-Style Education School in Texas), even though there's widespread evidence that teacher preparation needs some big changes in order to meet the needs of kids.
The SMU experiment is just the tip of the iceberg.
In all likelihood, this is just one of many alternative types of teacher preparation that will be coming down the pike, much like alternative certification for teachers spread over the past decade. Others include charter schools of ed (being tried in Ohio), district-run teacher certification programs (someone told me Boston has a version of this), teacher prep without an ed school (as at the University of Chicago), and -- run for your lives -- for-profit teacher training programs operating outside traditional colleges and universities.
The SMU experiment is just the tip of the iceberg.
In all likelihood, this is just one of many alternative types of teacher preparation that will be coming down the pike, much like alternative certification for teachers spread over the past decade. Others include charter schools of ed (being tried in Ohio), district-run teacher certification programs (someone told me Boston has a version of this), teacher prep without an ed school (as at the University of Chicago), and -- run for your lives -- for-profit teacher training programs operating outside traditional colleges and universities.
posted by Alexander Russo at 11/03/2005 08:59:00 AM
1 Comments:
How can we not support what SMU is trying to do? They are trying to build a teacher preparation around the needs of the students in chronically under-performing schools. Most schools of education rely on classes taught by professors who have not spent any significant time in an urban classroom in the last 20 years, if they ever spent time any time in a classroom at all. When I earned my teaching credential at Cal State Dominguez Hills, I learned how to teach an integrated unit on inventions, the names of 100 multi-cultural pieces of children's literature, and that it is important to bring in artifacts (ie: bring in an abalone shell when you are teaching about the ocean) when you are teaching social studies. I can tell you my students benefited not at all from 100 + hours I spent in education classes. Go SMU!
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