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Article Excerpt
A reorganization of teacher training and certification
requirements along the lines here outlined would ... end the preposterous overemphasis upon pedagogy that produces teachers who can talk glibly about how to teach, but who know too little about any given subject to teach it satisfactorily. (Bestor, 1953/1985, p. 136) Barriers to entry are too high. Confusing and cumbersome procedures discourage many talented would-be teachers from entering the classroom. (The Teaching Commission, 2006) The most insidious hurdles involve lengthy training in pedagogy. Although some policymakers and parents view "certified" teachers as synonymous with qualified teachers, being certified generally means little more than having endured state-approved training at a school of education. Yet there's little evidence that this leads to effective teaching. (Finn, 2001, p. 138) Teacher educators do not offer programs based on data. Like schoolfolk, their programs reflect custom, tradition and the convenience of faculty. We in teacher education quack about the need for making policy based on evidence but we act in ways which are not only baseless but frequently in contradiction to the evidence. (Haberman, 2004) And now I come to a red-hot question: How about those terrible methods courses, which waste a student's time? (Conant, 1963, p. 137) Teacher education right now is the Dodge City of education: unruly and chaotic. (Levine, 2006)
Given comments like these, it's hard not to feel defensive as a teacher educator these days. Teacher educators are being blamed for the burdensome barriers of certification, even as states have created these barriers in the service of raising standards for prospective teachers. Courses in pedagogy are criticized as largely irrelevant compared to classes in the subject matter, consisting more of seat time than substance, even as teacher educators have struggled to incorporate more subject-matter learning into ever-briefer programs. A closer look at these critiques, however, reveals that these criticisms are not new. Some were written 50 years ago and others in the past year. Critics on the right wrote some of them and critics on the left, others. What has changed, perhaps, is the volume of these critiques. In his vice presidential address, Ken Zeichner (1999) claimed,
There is no more important responsibility for a school, college, department or faculty of education than to do the best job that it possibly can in preparing teachers to teach in the schools of our nation and to support the learning of teachers throughout their careers. If we are not prepared to take this responsibility more seriously and do all that we can to have the best possible teacher education programs, then we should let someone else do the job. (p. 13)
Zeichner was more prescient than he may have realized, because today many would like to take the job away from university-based teacher educators. Increasingly, school districts from Los Angeles to Boston are taking over the task of preparing teachers for their schools. My purpose in this article is to suggest a way of thinking about how teacher educators might shift from the defensive posture of defending the status quo to a more productive response.
A JURISDICTIONAL CHALLENGE TO UNIVERSITY-BASED TEACHER EDUCATION
University-based teacher educators, and the profession of education more broadly, are facing a sharp attack on their ability and their right to control the preparation of teachers. Although these attacks are not new, as the introductory quotations illustrate, the challenges to our professional jurisdiction have intensified during the past two decades. University-based teacher educators are dangerously close to losing their responsibility for overseeing the preparation of new teachers.
To understand this challenge, I borrow the concept of jurisdictional dispute from the sociologist Andrew Abbott. As Abbott (1988) elegantly illustrated in his book The System of Professions, professions can best be understood as interacting systems, in which professionals constantly compete for jurisdiction over professional work. In the book, he provides an extended example of how the fields of clergy, psychiatry, neurology, clinical psychology, and social work all vied for the right to help people manage their personal problems, particularly the diffuse set of problems associated with American's "general nervousness." First, the clergy established their role in helping their parishioners manage marital and emotional problems but lost their jurisdiction to neurologists who, according to Abbott, were not necessarily better at treating cases of nerves but possessed more esoteric and complicated names for classifying various maladies, including neurasthenia, psychathenia, milkmaid's spasm, trifacial neuralgia, and ovarian neuralgia. In their attempt to exert control of their profession, however, neurologists admitted very few students into a few elite schools; soon the number of patients far exceeded the ability of the neurologists to treat them all. Even more problematic from the standpoint of professional jurisdiction, the treatments that neurologists prescribed for their patients were not especially effective. However neurologists treated milkmaid's spasm once they named it, the milkmaids did not seem to improve. This lack of effectiveness opened the door for psychiatrists, who effectively won jurisdiction over the problem of general nervousness. Psychiatrists proclaimed new diagnoses, classifications, and treatments but also failed to show that their treatments were effective. Soon the psychiatrists, like the neurologists and clergy before them, proved unable to resist the challenges of another profession--clinical psychology--to treat patients through psychotherapy, although psychiatrists did manage to hold onto their singular right to prescribe drugs. With the current theories of biological origins of depression and other human problems providing a medical formulation of the problem, psychiatry and medicine in general seem poised to challenge the territory that they ceded to psychologists. In this sense, jurisdictional disputes among professions are a bit like negotiations in the Middle East; professions gain some ground, then lose some, all the time trying to negotiate more stable, if not permanent, borders.
Abbott argues that in order for a profession to maintain its professional jurisdiction, professionals in a field must demonstrate their effectiveness in three areas of professional practice: first, the ability to diagnosis or assess the client's situation; second, the ability to reason and infer, using professional knowledge, about a client's problem; and third, the ability effectively to treat the problem or to take action on the client's behalf. For a teacher, these areas might translate into the ability to draw on professional knowledge to assess an individual student's or a class of students' educational needs, the ability to reason about both the particular student or class when assessments are not clear-cut, as they so seldom are in education, and the ability to design and enact instruction in ways that supports student learning--the "treatment," to use Abbott's language.
As Abbott suggests, these three aspects of practice are not necessarily best understood as a linear sequence. Sometimes a doctor treats in order to diagnose. Diagnosing food allergies is a good example--to diagnose a food allergy, the doctor must first treat the patient as though she has one; if the treatment does not work, the doctor will consider other diagnostic possibilities. The need for professional judgment generally happens when either the diagnosis is complex or a prescribed treatment is ineffective; if all treatments follow automatically from the initial diagnosis, there is less demand for professional judgment, which in turn can weaken a profession. Abbott claims that a profession becomes vulnerable to jurisdictional challenges when diagnoses are so vague or general as to be unhelpful (general nervousness might serve as an excellent example!), when the public does not see the treatments offered by a profession as effective, and when both diagnoses and treatments are difficult to assess.
Abbott goes on to argue that academic knowledge, another hallmark of a profession, supports practitioners through providing new diagnoses, new forms of assessment or treatment, and knowledge that can inform the inferences and professional judgment of practitioners. If the academic knowledge base fails to provide knowledge useful for practitioners, or lacks credibility with the larger public, the profession is again more open to jurisdictional challenges.
Finally, professions generally take responsibility for the preparation of newcomers to the professions. Yet, as Abbott claims, "The instructional system, with its hyper-rationalization of professional knowledge provides yet another ground for professional attack" (p. 57). This hyper-rationalization of knowledge means that what we teach in the university may seem quite distant from the immediate problems of practitioners, resulting in the infamous gap between theory and practice. This gap, although familiar to all of us who work in teacher education, haunts most professional preparation programs as well, whether one is talking about law or the clergy, medicine or social work. Despite this vulnerability, Abbott goes on to say, "Few dominant professions lose the ability to instruct themselves" (p. 57).
If teaching is indeed to define itself as a profession, then university-based teacher educators are responsible both for the production...
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