Transforming Teacher Education: Part II

In the next few weeks, I'll be reading Transforming Teacher Education: What Went Wrong With Teacher Training, and How We Can Fix It, edited by Valerie Hill-Jackson and Chance W. Lewis.  I'll summarize the books points, and give my opinion.  Having recently completed teacher education, I believe that I it will be interesting to see how my program aligns with the book.

In this section of the book, a writer comments on her view that teacher education is at a crossroads, and the importance of philosophy in teaching.  To be honest, it was hard for me to concentrate on this chapter.  Some of her ideas were a little too much for me.  The chapter began with stressing the fact that current philosiphies of teaching and learning influence teacher education. As mentioned in my last post, that was absent in the book's history of teacher education.  The chapter then gives a brief description on Dewey's beliefs, the definition of education reform, finally a suggested approach to the matter.  Read after the jump for more (it's short, I promise!).


The author spent most of the chapter focusing on the fact that teacher education is formed through a capitalist society, and must yield to capitalists instead of following its ideals.  While it is a valid point, I think the author focused too much on something that cannot be controlled.  Politics is tricky, and since education is run by national, state and local governments, perhaps we should focus more on how to follow our ideals while being held to capitalism.  It would have been a more productive viewpoint.

Towards the end of the chapter, the author finally discusses the content of teacher education.  She states that content knowledge alone is not enough to create good teachers, just as pedagogy alone is not enough.  Duh.  It doesn't matter how smart a teacher is if he or she does not have the skills to pass that knowledge along.  Similarly, a teacher can be a master of pedagogy, but if he or she doesn't have the content knowledge to share with students, there is no point in knowing the pedagogy.  To me, this is just common sense.  She also mentions that within learning pedagogy and technique, one must learn more than one approach.  At this point, my graduate professors would be screaming "Differentiated learning!" Every child is different, and therefore every child learns differently.  Again, it seems like common sense that a teacher should have multiple approaches and techniques.

The chapter ends with the author suggesting a balanced and mixed curriculum in teacher education.  I definitely agree with this viewpoint, so let's move on to the next chapter!

Coming soon: Chapter 3 Advancing Habits of the Mind for Social Justice.