Fixing Teacher Education While Improving Teaching

Published: December 1, 2004
Letter

To the Editor:

The Commentaries published in your Nov. 10, 2004, issue go to the core of education reform in this country. "No More Silver Bullets" by Vartan Gregorian and "Creating a Culture of Attachment" by Milbrey McLaughlin and Martin Blank represent two convergent points of view about the importance of teacher quality and curriculum as the primary factors for student achievement. Both essays are powerful reminders of why learning and teaching have to remain the sine qua non of improving schooling, and they are as applicable to urban schools as they are to suburban, exurban, and rural ones.

Sadly, the concepts advocated are given short shrift in the education reform movement due to a relentlessness to search for panaceas, or, as Mr. Gregorian puts it, the “silver bullet.” All too often the proverbial cart is put before the horse. Testing and textbooks remain the primary educational driver, and in too many teacher education colleges, there is a disconnect between content, pedagogy, system-change theories, and the relentless, high-profile pull of research.

Education Week readers will recognize the theoretical framework behind the “community-as-text approach to learning.” These readers understand the need for real-world context for accelerated learning. Concurrently, they are cognizant of how one incorporates highly specific and broadly based strategies for students so that these strategies become skills that build relevance, integration, synthesis, and elaboration for the learner.

Readers also understand the importance of incorporating universal themes into classroom instruction, such as life and death, perseverance vs. surrender, hubris as opposed to humility, and love and hate. These themes play important roles in an instructional calculus that combines high standards and high content to open up communities and the world to students.

Allowing the activation of the personal and collective background knowledge of students enables them to apply what they know to what they do not know, ultimately teaching them how to “read the world.”

Our work together on the TRUST (Training and Retaining Urban Student Teachers) Initiative in Birmingham, Ala., applies this work to training teachers for urban settings and speaks to Mr. Gregorian’s charge to schools of education to be part of a larger picture. We are integrating teacher preparation with schools, the community, and national partners, and we are building a model in which the universal themes of teaching reflect the universal themes of learning.

The isolation traditionally felt in teacher education is being changed to a feeling of community, a partnership in which we all support the high achievement of our students. This joint effort is the only means we have of ensuring that new teachers will possess the skills and experience they need to be successful in the context of today’s schools.

Eric J. Cooper
President
National Urban Alliance for Effective Education
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Michael J. Froning
Dean
School of Education
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Birmingham, Ala.