I have spent all morning reading and thinking about a very long but excellent article in the current (October 2005) edition of Educational Researcher. In “The New Teacher Education: For Better or For Worse?” (PDF) Dr. Marilyn Cochran-Smith provides an outstanding overview of the evolutionary changes taking place in teacher education in the United States.
I am reading this article as part of my work on a new article relating to Digital Literacy and the New Teacher Education. The following is a list of new vocabulary words I have learned in reading this article– and more importantly, a list of questions and ideas this article inspired me to reflect about. Eventually (more specifically, this weekend and in the week to come) I will be writing an article which addresses some of these questions.
Vocabulary (all definitions are from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition 2000):
- sine qua non: An essential element or condition
- isomorphic: Having a similar structure or appearance but being of different ancestry
- protean: Readily taking on varied shapes, forms, or meanings. Exhibiting considerable variety or diversity
Here are the contexts for these words as used in the aforementioned article:
sine qua non:
The new teacher education is frontally about outcomes, and it is now widely assumed that the sine qua non of good teacher preparation policies and practices is that they ensure that teachers can ensure pupils’ achievement. In fact, the language of outcomes has become so much a part of the contemporary teacher education lexicon as to be completely normalized.
isomorphic:
Further, because teacher quality is isomorphic with pupil achievement— achievement, too, is a black box, and we know nothing about what and how high-performing pupils learn, what resources they bring to school with them, or how they build on what they know.
protean:
The first, and perhaps most important, piece of the new teacher education is that it is being constructed as a public policy problem. I refer to teacher education as a “problem” here not in the pejorative sense, but in the sense that all developing and developed countries must deal with certain challenges or problems, such as providing teachers for the nation’s schoolchildren. As Deborah Stone (1997) suggests, however, there are no “universal, scientific, or objective methods of problem definition” (p. 134) in a political society, and goals are competing and protean rather than fixed.
Here are the questions and reflections I have after spending several hours reading and thinking about Marilyn Cochran-Smith’s article (which incidentally was the Presidential Address topic at AERA 2005, an event I unfortunately did not attend):
- How do conceptions of and goals related to digital literacy interface with “The New Teacher Education?”
- We must pay greater attention to the primacy of analysis about the tasks and complexity of cognitive activities in which students and teachers engage in the classroom at all levels.
- What is digital literacy and information fluency?
- What impact do the characteristics, identified desires and asserted “needs” of digital natives in our classrooms have for teacher education? (Refer to ECAR 2005)
- What impact should the changing face of digital curriculum have on the new teacher education? (refer to my article to be published soon in Interactive Educator magazine)
- Key question: How can teachers learn, acquire and refine their knowledge, skills and dispositions to effectively engage and challenge learners to extend their own digital literacy abilities?
- We need greater focus on the importance of more broadly conceptualizing and framing “outcomes” for education beyond simple test scores.
- Some of the public policy focus on teacher education has shifted from pedagogy to content area knowledge for teacher candidates and in-service teachers. Why does this shift not also include digital literacy knowledge and skills?
- Conceptions of digital literacy must be wed to conceptions of teacher quality.
- Critical thinking and performance based assessment, along with task analysis framed with Bloom’s Taxonomy, must be part of the outcomes analysis in education.
- The current paradigm of outcomes based educational evaluation principally serves the interests of policymakers, rather than the interests of students, teachers, and other educational community stakeholders.
- We must focus on fundamental questions here. How do we not only increase teacher expectations of student achievement, but also extend and expand the complexity and depth of expected student levels of performance, understanding, and critical thinking? (We need to expand both the type and scope of proverbial “eggs” in the measurement basket.)
- If a market model applied to educational reform does not best serve the interests of social justice and equity for low SES populations (as Cochran-Smith argues), what ARE the effective levers of change which can promote the goals of both enhancing teacher quality and retention, and improving student performance for all constituents?
- If the current state and national level accountability focus is tangibly counter-productive, how can educational entities and individual educators be encouraged to have a much more local focus on authentic literacy and learning opportunities? (Which are admittedly much more complex and difficult to neatly measure with data tables, charts and graphs than standardized test results.)
- What constructive role can disruptive classroom technologies (blogging, podcasting, videoconferencing, audioconferencing, 1:1 technology immersion initiatives) play in advancing an educational reform agenda more wholistic and supportive of the sustained development of authentic literacy skills?
Lots of good questions here I think. I am not posting possible answers yet, but some should be forthcoming! At least some ideas and attempts at answers! 🙂 I also plan to podcast this weekend on the topic, “Education That Matters,” which relates directly to many of these issues. If you have feedback, ideas or thoughts on these topics, I would love to hear them either via comments to this post, or email/attached audio comments. If you send the latter, please indicate if I can have permission to reuse your comments in a future podcast.