SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Great teachers are made, not born

There’s a great article in the fall Education Next on transforming teacher education. If you’re wondering where THE PROBLEM starts - it starts at ed school. Most faculties of education use faulty criteria in selecting their students, inculcate flawed philosophies of education, and - worst of all - fail to teach prospective teachers practical and effective pedagogical techniques. This article shows it doesn’t have to be this way.

New York’s Relay School of Education breaks the mold. I excerpt a couple of paragraphs from the Education Next article to give you an idea, but it’s really worth reading the whole thing to see what’s possible. 

“Relay’s method flips the classroom, with an online lesson at the start of every module or teaching unit (about 40 percent of instruction is online) and in-class discussions and exercises afterward. Twice-monthly night classes, once-monthly Saturday classes, and two summer terms are taught by master teachers and charter school heavyweights….

“Modules vary in duration and range from the nitty-gritty of classroom management - how to arrange furniture, how to grade papers, how to deal with families, how to open and close a lesson - to big-picture subjects, including literacy instruction, writing development, learning disabilities, unit planning, and character development. For a class called Benchmarking and Tracking Progress, scheduled to last 11 hours, the catalog says Relay students will create a spreadsheet to track their own students’ progress against year-end goals, and use the data to customize their teaching. In a class called Behavior Management Plans, Relay students will write a set of classroom rules and learn ‘how to engage in the very necessary practice of correcting students when they misbehave’.

“I logged onto an online lesson for a module titled Engaging Everybody, taught by Doug Lemov, managing director of Uncommon Schools. In the 4-hour lesson, Lemov lectured for three or four minutes on each of the four techniques that he promotes to keep youngsters involved in class, techniques he labels ‘wait time’, ‘everybody writes’, ‘cold call’, and ‘call and response’. Each of Lemov’s minilectures was followed by a few pages of online reading from his book Teach Like a Champion, and an essay question or two that students answer online…Then came several short videos showing teachers using each technique in the classroom, with Lemov noting the teachers’ use of an apt pause of effective gesture.”