Maggie's Farm

The best teachers aren't trained to teach. All the fancy private schools know that.
Not that simple.

Granted, ed schools are a disaster. The biggest collection of fools on college campuses is to be found on ed school faculties. Conjecture masquerading as fact: that is the ed school Ed school faculties are too concerned with finding the "next big thing" instead of teaching what works.

I went to teaching as a second career, and washed out. I had Ivy League caliber SAT and GRE scores, and corresponding knowledge of my subject. My failure as a teacher is first hand evidence that while native intelligence and knowledge of subject matter is necessary, it is not sufficient to be a competent teacher.

I view my failure as two fold. Most important, a teacher needs to be a persuader, and doing persuasion does not come easily to me.

Starting at a bad school with a bad principal was a wash, as my second year at a good school with a helpful principal also resulted in non-renewal. (Had I signed the petition against the principal that nearly half the faculty had signed, I couldn't have been non-renewed, but that's the way the ball bounces.)

From my two years as a teacher, I learned the importance of pedagogy. It is not always intuitively obvious how to present material to result in optimal learning. Ditto re classroom management, a subject covered in ed school courses, but on a too theoretical level.

This recent NYT article on new research on what makes a good teacher gives an example of what ed schools have been missing while they have gone about their politically correct nonsense. We need ed schools. Unfortunately, most of what goes on in ed schools does not prepare teachers to become effective teachers. We need alternate paths to teacher certification, but we also need to work on the ed schools.

Another point about getting bright people into teaching. After teaching for a while, many bright people will decide that 60+ hour work weeks are not their cup of tea, and will more easily find alternatives to teaching careers than will their less capable colleagues. If you want to keep bright people in teaching, you have to reconfigure schools and the obligations for teachers so that teachers can have lives outside the classroom.

I agree with Tom Francis that a lot of the Maggies Farm articles come up with some rather simplistic slogans regarding teaching.