Responding to Goodlad: The Primacy of Teacher Education in SCDEs

Abstract

In his article in this issue, John Goodlad comments that a school of education not preparing teachers is an anomaly that provokes mischief (p. 334). We believe that as well as provoking mischief, it promotes disbelief. We strongly believe that the primary mission of schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) is the preparation of teachers. Many SCDEs have, in the last several decades, occasionally lost sight of this primary mission as they have urged faculty and administrators to pursue grants leading them away from teacher preparation; developed graduate programs promoting research often having little or nothing to do with teacher education; sought faculty with a reputation for publishing in areas peripheral to teacher education; publicly blazoned the work of their doctoral graduates, rarely that of their teacher education undergraduates whose tuition fueled the enterprise; and silently acquiesced in disproportionately higher funding for advanced degree programs at the expense of initial and advanced teacher preparation programs. We do not counsel that SCDEs abandon these many directions that bring them both esteem and resources, but we believe that in the avid pursuit of these directions, many SCDEs have nearly totally shifted their emphasis away from teacher education. We assert the necessity of focus on teacher education. The nation's needs for teachers are extraordinarily large and demanding. SCDEs have a moral obligation to respond, a moral obligation to provide major support to the preparation of teachers. At root in each of Goodlad's seven suggestions is concern for better teachers, for their improved education. Teaching Is Easy, So They Say We live in an age that sometimes disparages the idea that there is anything special about the education of teachers. Hardly a week goes by without the description of an anecdote or an OpEd piece about how a school district could not hire a scientist who knows everything about nuclear physics because of bureaucratic rules about what teachers must have studied prior to teaching, how they must meet unnecessarily stringent and bureaucratic stipulation in terms of courses and experiences. The comments usually contain a series of muddleheaded remarks about how all one needs to teach is subject matter mastery. Sheehan and Fullan (1995) note, Despite the rhetoric about teacher education in today's society, there does not seem to be a real belief or confidence that investing in teacher education will yield results. Perhaps deep down many leaders believe that teaching is not all that difficult. After all, most leaders have spent thousands of hours in the classroom and are at least armchair experts. And they know that scores of unqualified teachers are placed in classrooms every year and required to learn on the job (p. 89). Although gifted teachers do appear to make teaching look easy, prospective teachers have much to learn prior to teaching that goes beyond, for example, elementary school teachers knowing the best of children's literature and secondary English teachers knowing their Shakespeare. Teacher education faculty in SCDEs must demonstrate the necessity and relevancy of pedagogical knowledge and skill, the aptness of child and adolescent studies, the pointedness of knowledge of the history of education. Development of Moral Purpose Teachers require understanding of diversity, ability to work with varied groups, ability to make careful judgments, ease in varied cultural groups, good self-concepts, eagerness to grow in pedagogy, willingness to accept and learn about others different from oneself. But most of all, they must have a sense of moral purpose; they must have had the opportunity to learn and grow in the processes of developing this sense of moral purpose and understanding the necessity of having a goal and vision of what teaching and learning are. It ill becomes a nation to have a cadre of teachers versed in pedagogical tricks and ruses but lacking a sense of why they do what they do. …