I have been a teacher educator for 18 years now. I am a strong proponent of Education as a major and a field, but I very much reject certification (the primary mechanism for when pre-service education degrees are ineffective). So here is a thread about a report from @ILAToday 1/x
@ILAToday The ILA report claims 60% of respondents say teacher prep did not prepare them to teach reading literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-s… 2/x
@ILAToday Let's be clear about survey data of this kind. How often do the more disgruntled respond at higher rates than those who are satisfied? What assures us that this is representative of a field of teachers but also of how reading is taught in teacher prep programs? 3/x
@ILAToday Now, if we accept that those 60% are accurate, we must also confront the realities of teaching in K-12 classrooms and the course work provided pre-service teachers who become teachers of reading 4/x
@ILAToday For the last 40 years, teachers and teacher educators have been controlled by accountability—prescribed standards and systems that hold teachers and teacher educators accountable . 5/x
@ILAToday Teacher education has been governed by NCATE/CAEP as an umbrella organization that monitors how well teacher ed conforms to their assigned SPAs; for literacy programs, teacher education has been guided by @ILAToday and @ncte_elate @ncte 6/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte K-12 teachers and teacher educators over those four decades have had their professionalism and autonomy replaced by accountability standards and accreditation. 7/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte The current movement to attack teacher education is yet another shifting effort to lay blame at PEOPLE in the system and not the system itself. Accountability started in the 80s by focusing on students and schools; next were K-12 teachers, and now teacher educators 8/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte The accountability structure driven by prescriptive standards and high-stakes assessment is the real source of failures in K-12 education and teacher ed. The bureaucracy of these processes over-run scholarship and professionalism and students suffer the consequences 9/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte While I am skeptical of survey data such as that from @ILAToday and @educationweek I want to end with an anecdote of my own 10/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte @educationweek While talking to a former certified in my secondary ELA program, a couple years into classroom teaching, the candidate said to me, "I wish we had done X in our methods class." I calmly replied, "We did X," adding the assignment the candidate had completed in the course 11/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte @educationweek The candidate responded well, saying that in the moment of that methods course, the assignment didn't resonate as her need does while in the classroom full time. LESSON: Teacher education is necessarily incomplete and only a start to teaching. 12/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte @educationweek This same candidate also pulled out our main ELA methods text and re-read it while teaching, noting that this time around it was much better than in the methods setting. 13/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte @educationweek I am not arguing that *all* students are being served well in their literacy classes in K-12 education; I am not arguing that teacher ed is excelling (again, certification is a cancer on education as a discipline). 14/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte @educationweek I am arguing that shifting the scapegoating to teacher ed in order to blame another set of PEOPLE so we do not have to confront our failed system guiding K-12 teacher and teacher ed is Fool's Gold. 15/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte @educationweek Finally this sudden interest in survey data is being paired with the "science of reading" movement, which is a contradictory use of data—the former honoring less "objective" qualitative feedback with the latter demanding only narrow types of quantitative data count. 16/x
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte @educationweek Education reform has dug this hole, has found that we are all standing together in an ever-growing well to nowhere, but does not have the ability to quit digging.
We need to quick digging, climb out into the sunshine, and make better decisions about teaching and learning 17/17
We need to quick digging, climb out into the sunshine, and make better decisions about teaching and learning 17/17
@ILAToday @ncte_elate @ncte @educationweek PS - The Fatal Flaw of Teacher Education: "We have met the enemy and he is us." radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/the…
