A New Look for the Teaching Profession

Abstract

THERE IS NO more creative urge among those of us who attended public schools than the impulse to redesign the schools as we wished they had been. All of us have ideas about how our experience might have been better, more interesting, or more inspiring. And now some adults are getting to play out their visions: some, by organizing charter schools; others, by issuing pronouncements about the kinds of schools we should have. Most current scenarios for education in the future build on the use of digital technologies. They envision schools in which learning is individualized, independent, or--in many cases--not even classroom-based at all. We'd better have grander ideas to propose, though, because young people are already there. While policy makers fuss over extending choice to parents, they seem to have forgotten about giving choices to students, so the younger generation is taking off with cell phones and iPods and Web-based sharing, leaving behind as much as possible the traditional modes of learning. According to Milton Chen, head of the George Lucas Foundation, the second-most-popular use for cell phones among teenagers today is getting help on homework or talking about teachers. (Socializing is number one.) Moreover, almost one million students now experience classes. Once, such online education was seen as an academic resource reserved mostly for students in isolated, rural areas. But today, some state and district virtual classrooms are accessible to any state resident student. Now that some of the most prestigious universities, such as M.I.T., are putting course syllabi suitable for high school students on the Web, the resources for learning are wide open. At a recent Education Writers Association seminar, Tim Waters, head of McREL (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning) in Denver, discussed some of the research on future scenarios that his organization is conducting. He pointed out the attention-getting prospect that today's generation of tech-savvy young people probably will not tolerate traditional settings for education for their own children. What is mostly being left behind in such discussions, however, is what the teaching profession will look like in the future. Teacher education institutions and teacher unions seem willing to make incremental changes. But are they moving too slowly for the times? Many who call for radical reforms in the preparation of teachers liken that need to what Abraham Flexner found in the preparation of doctors almost 100 years ago. Researchers from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who co-authored the first article of a 2006 series on medical education in the New England Journal of Medicine, noted that Flexner criticized the mediocre quality and profit motive of many schools and teachers, the inadequate curricula ..., and the nonscientific approach to educating doctors. Sound familiar? While the reforms instituted after the Flexner Report were significant, medical education came to rely too much on theoretical, scientific knowledge formulated in context-free and value-neutral terms and to overlook the variance among patients, according to the article. Looking at the current state of medical training, the authors point out that messy, real-world issues are hard to teach but that medical practitioners need to understand how these affect their patients. Furthermore, learners at all levels must have opportunities to compare their performance with a standard and to practice it until an acceptable level of proficiency is obtained (through simulations, one hopes). …