Rejecting Michigan’s teacher licensing rules, Hillsdale College reinvented teacher education, writes Daniel Coupland. Since the program is now unaccredited, Hillsdale-trained teachers can work only at charter or private schools.
Future teachers “need a broad liberal arts education” and “deep understanding” of an academic discipline, Coupland writes. All would-be teachers, including elementary teachers, major in an academic field. All learn how to teach by working in “a real classroom with real students under the tutelage of a master teacher.”
We decided to eliminate methods classes and courses in educational psychology and technology. Because the state had such a heavy hand in dictating these classes (enforcing their “standards”), much of the content was irrelevant or antithetical to the mission of both the college and the department.
Philosophy of Education, Explicit Phonics Reading Instruction and Children’s Literature were made “much more content-driven and more demanding in terms of reading, discussion, and writing” to match the rigor of the college’s other courses.
The Education Department worked with the English Department to design an English grammar course for future teachers. “Language is the most important tool of the teacher’s trade.”
Instead of passing a paper-and-pencil test, would-be teachers are submitting lesson plans, homework assignments and videos of their teaching to earn a license, reports the New York Times.
New York and up to 25 other states are moving to the Stanford-designed Teacher Performance Assessment model.
“It is very analogous to authentic assessments in other professions, in nursing, in medical residencies, in architecture,” said Raymond L. Pecheone, a professor of practice at Stanford who leads the center that developed the new assessment.
. . . a teacher’s daily lesson plans, handouts and assignments will be reviewed, in addition to their logs about what works, what does not and why. Videos of student teachers will be scrutinized for moments when critical topics — ratios and proportions in math, for instance — are discussed. Teachers will also be judged on their ability to deepen reasoning and problem-solving skills, to gauge how students are learning and to coax their class to cooperate in tackling learning challenges.
In New York, prospective teachers’ work will be graded by “trained evaluators who have been recruited by the education company Pearson.” That’s spurred resistance from education professors, who complain their role is being undermined and “outsourced.”
At the University of Massachusetts, 67 of 68 students training to be secondary school teachers refused to submit videos of their teaching and a take-home test to Pearson evaluators.