Teachers Are Made, Not Born

Recent article in the New York Times Magazine examines the training that teachers receive before they are employed. Lately, there seems to be a lot of stories in the media about teachers. My latest Newsweek has a cover story about bad teaching. I'll have something to say about that article once I read it. The article in the Times Magazine focused on teacher-training programs. I was disappointed to read that those that were examined are designed for teachers in charter schools and Teach for America. The author mentions that university training programs are lacking, and that most first-year teachers do not feel ready to teach once they enter the classroom, but there wasn't a lot of info in the article about how universities are working to improve their education programs. One of the researchers, Deborah Loewenberg Ball, created a curriculum for teaching teachers called Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. M.K.T. gets teachers to consider how others think about math, not what they themselves know about math. If you can understand how someone can think and misunderstand math, then you can teach it effectively. That makes so much sense. The one takeaway for me in the article was the idea of cold-calling: instead of having students raise their hands, whenever I ask a question anyone can be called upon, therefore everyone has to pay attention and think of the answer. I like that one. I think I'll use it next time I do a Second Step lesson.

BBC