Having taught at both the college level and at the high school level, I can tell you there is an immense difference. That couple extra years is a vast change in maturity, plus wanting to be there makes a big difference.
Different states have different rules on their certification requirements. Talking to a school of education is probably the best way of going about getting those met. I do not have an education degree but there were some classes I had to take. Educational Psycology, Assessment, a class on diversity, one on mainstreaming a couple of computer classes. Depending on scheduling nothing that cant be done in a year of evening classes.
I have no real problem with that, but at the moment the ones they instituted in Wisconsin are problematic for a bunch of reasons.
My friend was an education minor. Here iscourse list for the education minor at University of California Santa Cruz.
The courses begin with a history of education. Education hasn’t always been a bunch of kids in desks looking at the blackboard. They discuss various movements and their success and failures. They also look critically at the goals of education in society. Teachers must be able to do more than teach- they must know why they are teaching what they are teaching how they are teaching it. If teaching never critically examined itself and changed, we’d still be doing little more in school that learning Latin myths by heart.
The rest of the courses fall in to a few catagories:
Content courses where they study things like children’s literature and physical education activities and classroom managment. These are useful for developing lesson plans and broadening your horizons about what to teach. Nobody is born with an innate knowledge of what books are good for fourth graders or physical activities that everyone- even the fat kid that never gets picked on a team- will do.
Issue courses where they look at things like education reform movements (charter schools, vouchers, desegragation), teaching students not proficient in English (what methods work, what does the law say about it, etc.), dealing with learning disabilities and gifted students…that sort of thing. My friend took a course on billingual education which he said really changed his understanding of the issue. Teaching in a public school- with a classroom full of very diverse and often difficult students, isn’t easy. You have to make sure that you can address every student’s needs, not just the easy ones. For example, gifted kids often do poorly in school because they get bored. This isn’t something that is easy or intuitive to address. Gifted children need to be treated differently and these classes can teach teachers how to figure out the learning needs of their students and how to fulfill them.
Then there are theory course where they look at stuff like the science of how kids learn how to read. There don’t seem to be too many of these- most of the courses are based on practicallities.
Finally, there is lots and lots of fieldwork and student teaching. This is how you actually learn all that stuff you can “learn in two weeks on the job” without experiementing on a whole classroom full of kids. You watch teachers in action, see what works and what doesn’t, and develop the confidence and skills to deal with your own classroom. In fact, it seems like most the education in this minor is hands on training.
Besides, if education was so easy, don’t you think people would have an easier time of it? In my high school (one of the rougher ones) we regularly sent new teachers and substitutes home in tears. Subs refused to come to our school. Few teachers lasted longer than a year- only the toughest, most experienced, most persistant ones could handle it. They knew how to handle dicipline problems (the teachers that got madder and madder and eventually started yelling were always the first to go. Once they yell, they are days away from tears. This is common among new teachers). They knew how to write lesson plans that would engage us. They knew how to make sure that the quiet kids and the gifted kids and the pregnant kids and the slow kids didn’t fall through the cracks.
Students are vicious. They know how to probe and find weaknessess. They will destroy teachers for fun. And there are thirty of them versus one of you. I’ve seen it happen. A degree in math doesn’t even get you close to being able to handle this.
I have difficulty believing that anyone who would think education degrees are useless has ever gone to university. All my university professors were subject matter experts, but lacked education degrees, and they were generally DREADFUL teachers. Some were good, but most were bad. Suggesting that subject matter experience makes you a good teacher is like saying that a really good mechanic would be an excellent Formula 1 driver.
For the most part the quality of teaching in elementary and high school, that I saw, was vastly superior to what I saw in university. And, in an ironic but absolutely true twist, the WORST teacher I had in high school was, by far, the most educated subject matter expert, my Grade 12 chemistry teacher and the only teacher in my school with a Ph.D. (I’ll avoid using her name because she’s a nice lady and her husband just died so I feel bad for her.) She knew more about chemistry than any other teacher in my school knew about anything, but she couldn’t teach for shit. Guess what? No education degree; she’d gotten the job solely with her Ph.D. She taught there for YEARS and simply didn’t know how to teach.
Thankyou RickJay and even sven These were points I tried to make earlier, but clearly I didn’t explain them well enough.
Obviously an education degree isn’t the fix- all either. There are bad teachers with masters in education as well. There are some damn peculiar ideas that are floated about in some schools of education. Perhaps not as peculiar as politician’s ideas of how to fix the system, but pretty odd.
These are things that a person can figure out for themselves and focus on, oh I don’t know, actually knowing something about the subject matter?
The first two matter fuck-all if you’re teaching programming to a bunch of 16 year olds, and as far as what the ‘education schools’ have said for classroom management, most of their tips have turned out to be less than useless.
You mean a classroom where your students range in age from 18 to 65 and have varying levels of prior education from masters degree to barely passing the GED exams?
Every student teacher I’ve ever seen was actually up there practicing whatever bullshit they learned in college on us, and we knew it, and we took advantage of the fact that it was bullshit. Had they actually known the material they were teaching and kept us remotely busy, there would’ve been a lot less time to tear apart their ‘classroom management’ tactics.
New teachers? You mean the ones who had recently been taught all those wonderful things about how to manage a class while they were in college not learning about the subject material they teach?
The biggest weakness any teacher has is not knowing the material.
And my college professors with rare exception were excellent, but those teachers in high school and below who had education degrees and didn’t know the first thing about the material they taught were horrid. There were a couple of good ones: an ex-chemist with a masters in chemical engineering, the physics teacher who had a degree in industrial engineering, and the calculus teacher who had a degree in mathematics.
I don’t consider an ‘education degree’ to be worth nearly as much as knowing something about the subject matter, and in a lot of cases it appears to be a detriment, especially when teachers are out there teaching ‘facts’ that are flat out wrong purely because it was in their instructor’s manual.
For one example, I don’t know whether two weeks of sitting in a classroom would tell you much about neurological development. Part of good teaching, as I understand it, is knowing what your pupils are capable of developmentally and intellectually. Kids aren’t just “smart” or “not smart.” Your average smart 3rd grader is different from your average smart 5th grader, in ways that aren’t just about height and the amount of material covered. Their brains are different. They simply cannot learn the same things. I’m just using that for illustration; the real issue is that there is significant variation within an individual classroom. You need to be able to sort out, for example, whether a learning problem is related to discipline, lack of effort, or simply an inability to absorb material the way it is being taught. Or, flip side of the same problem, being intellectually beyond the material or the way it is being taught. If either of the latter is true, the teacher needs to know to change the material, or the method, so that it is more compatible with the child’s current ability, and how to accommodate classmates who are in a different place developmentally. That’s a pretty important distinction, one I’d hope my child’s teachers understand. Also not one I’d expect them to pick up on the fly.
I don’t have the sort of education degree required for teachers. I do recall being staggered by what I learned in a developmental psychology class in grad school, however. Just a few readings we did on moral reasoning and how people’s minds develop during adolesence and beyond were pretty interesting. Not something I could have grasped from hanging out on campus for a few weeks.
catsix I have no idea why you think this is an either or thing. OF COURSE teachers should know the material. I only know the program I went through, so I am not sure what other programs there are, but the system here pretty much looks like a double major. Students were required to have the number of credits in their major area that a person majoring in that area had to take, along with the education classes, or at least that was how the high school program worked. It probably is not the case for all states. I also can not immagine ever being in a position on anything that I do not have room to improve.
They can’t huh? This attitude was almost my undoing in grade school, with teachers who insisted to my mother that a six year old can’t learn algebra and physics.
And I was astounded by the utter lack of scientific merit in the required psychology course I had to take. Can’t say I ‘learned’ anything of use there.
I would’ve given my eye teeth for a teacher who actually knew something about biology or history or even English literature in my schooling, but no, they were all experts on how to read the teacher’s edition.
Well, no ,catsix. You can continue believing all you want that any job can just be picked up in a couple of weeks, but in my experience
A) No professional job is that easy, and
B) People who say “Oh, that job is easy, I could pick it up in a couple of weeks” doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
And you base this statement on what, exactly?
In what alternate universe do teachers not learn the subject matter?
I’m sorry, catsix, but that’s total nonsense, and I daresay most anyone who has ever gone to school will say it’s total nonsense. I’ve had dozens and dozens of teachers and I don’t recall them being ignorant of the subject matter ever being a serious problem, but I DO recall some of them not being able to teach because they didn’t know how to prepare lessons, didn’t know how to lecture, didn’t know how to write tests (a trickier skill than you probably realize) etc. etc. My wife had a professor who simply did not understand how to plan and compose handouts and course notes - he knew the material forwards and backwards but had no teaching skills to communicate it.
And quite frankly, for most of a student’s scholastic career s/he doesn’t need subject matter experts. You do not need to be a subject matter expert to know that eight times six is 48, or how to spell “volume,” or to understand basic history or geography. It’s absurd to claim that a third grade teacher needs to be a “subject matter expert.” They need to understand how to teach third graders. The subject matter is simple enough for an (adult) moron to understand. You can claim to have been digging into the algebra at age six, but 99% of six year olds are struggling to learn how to add two-digit numbers. I sincerely doubt your average math Ph.D. who hasn’t stepped inside an elementary school classroom would be better at explaining to a frustrated six-year-old how to add 25 and 14 than a professional teacher.
Your teacher was apparently unable to recognize your advanced development and remarkable capability for learning. You were exceptional, and you suffered for that, and I am sorry. Your example does not change the fact that children do not learn alike. In fact, I daresay it lends some support for it. Not all children are ready to learn the same things at the same time. Surely it is to the student’s benefit when teachers learn that, can recognize it in their pupils, and can do something about it. Not just slog through the material which is on the curriculum for that year
I am sorry your psych class was so useless. Not unlike you, I didn’t enjoy the basic psych class I took as a distribution requirement as a freshman. I fear I don’t remember much of it. It was the more specialized class I had to slog through, much later, relating to student development, that provided some interesting insights. Actually, it was my most hated class, but a few of the things I learned stood out and helped reframe how I think about students on campus.
Maybe we ought to be lambasting those teachers you had who were responsible for teaching quantitative reasoning, statistics, and scientific literacy. You seem to have come away from their classrooms with the idea that one person’s individual experience is sufficient evidence to draw sweeping conclusions about other children, other teachers, other schools, the state of pedagogy in American teacher education programs, and so on. Those dolts seem to be rather too fond of the Teacher’s Edition, too.
catsix, I do owe you this: you are right, I think, in identifying some pretty serious problems with the teaching profession. I don’t think as a profession it attracts enough of the brightest candidates. I don’t think education programs always focus on the right things. I’m not sure certification tests do, either. There is a lot of disagreement on this stuff–heck, some of the most esteemed teaching programs in the country eschew NCATE accreditation, while others embrace it.
But what I reject is the notion that the problems can be solved simply by throwing smart people with good subject matter knowledge at the problem. Or that a well-meaning, bright person could teach more effectively than a teaching-program graduate after two weeks.
The one where the future teachers learn ‘education’ instead of what they’ll be teaching, as in having an education major.
You missed the part where I got an engineering degree and then later on started teaching courses, didn’t you? I know how ‘hard’ it is to prepare a lesson or an exam. Not that hard.
No wonder our kids are so far behind those in other countries. They’re taught like they’re incapable of learning.
Which doesn’t say much for those who have ‘education degrees’ recognizing it. It would’ve taken some common sense and paying attention. But Mrs. Education Degree was too wrapped up in her child development courses to consider that maybe they were wrong about the mind of a six year old.
The more I go through this, and the more teachers I see who have degrees in education (and I work with a few who have their masters in education) the more I think the entire field of study is a joke and that nothing of any value is taught to these people. They read the instructor’s manual, and they certainly can’t correct it when the book is wrong.
The problem is that they learn all about how to help self-esteem but virtually nothing about what they teach, and it’s getting worse.
I think that there should be no such thing as a degree in education. You want to teach? Master a field first. Then you can teach other people about it. No more of this 4 years in college to learn about self-esteem and how to make bulletin boards. These are some of the wonderful things that my mom and my cousin got to learn in order to get their ‘education degrees.’ Neither one of them could adequately answer a serious question about the subject matter they teach, either.
catsix Am I correct in the assumption that it is college that you teach?
If so, you really have to understand that teaching at a university level is different. I do not know what program your cousin and mother went through but getting away without knowing the material has not been my experience.
I don’t have any problem with testing for specific licences. At the moment the Social Studies test they released for Wisconsin tests on all social studies with one test. Unfortunatly people are supposed to certify individualy in Psycology, Sociolgy, Geography, Anthropology, History, Economics, and Political Science. It makes no sense if the licenses are seperate and the coursework required is different to test. Either that or the test has to be so basic as to be meaningless. Also, within a year there will be some company selling Pass the Test* books, so the whole thing seems pointless.
They had to know the material for the classes they took in college. They did not have to do any kind of advanced study of any subject they might teach in order to get a degree in education.
If someone had to have a degree in psychology or political science or history in order to teach that subject, at least you’d have three years of testing to ascertain that they know more about the subject than what’s in the teachers’ annotated edition of the student textbook.
Oh and by the way, it may be different for elementry teachers, but no one ever taught me about bulletin boards. Self esteem didn’t come up much either. Those of us who have arguing this with you have kept this on a respectful level, but clearly you were not taught how to do that, and there in is another failing of your elementary teachers.
Where is it that you can teach psychology or political science, in a real school, without having taken university-level instruction in those subjects? It sounds like you’re arguing against an imaginary problem.
However, teaching third grade is not an issue here. I’m looking at high school, grades 9-12, where there are no “general” classes like in the elementary schools. And I do agree with Catsix that the first and foremost requirement should be knowledge of the subject matter. I want a biology teacher with a degree in biology (I prefer a major, but will look at someone with at least a minor), not someone whose degree is in fuzzy concepts of teaching.
When I went to high school, I went to private school the first three years and public school the last. The private school instructors were all degreed in their subject area and very few of them had even taken an education course of any kind. I learned a ton from them. I learned so much that I was bored out my ass in the public school with the teachers who had education degrees teaching subjects that I knew more about than they apparently did. And I had learned about the subjects while doing research in other areas in previous grades. For example, I took civics my senior year. I think the class was supposed to teach us about government structure, the Constitution, etc. I say think, because to this day, I still haven’t got the vaguest idea what the teacher was trying to do in that class. But I knew about government because of the reading that I had to do in my American History class the year before.
Granted, that is a single case, empirical example that I gave. But it applied to the English class as well, the math class and the economics class. The only teacher that seemed to know what the hell he was doing was the PE teacher. Turns out that was his degree, with a minor in education. Made all the difference in the world.
What we are telling you is that you can not get a teaching certificate in secondary education without having some classes in the area you are getting the certification. In the major area of certification it is the amount of classes that would be required for a major in the area. It would probably be better to have people actually do the double major or just deal with the state required education classes.
Oh. By the way, good luck on getting those teachers with biology degrees. You will probably have no problem getting teachers with english and social studies degrees, even the odd masters, but people coming out of school with science degrees are not going into teaching. You can not pay them enough to compete with the market. CrankyAsAnOldMan has talked in another thread about that very problem. It takes an exceptionaly strong calling to go into a job at 29k a year and walk away from the 90k a year jobs available, either that or you get people who graduate so far down in their class rankings as to be unhireable by the other jobs.
One final note. Your teachers will not be certified to teach without some of those hated education classes. One of the things the NCLB act is trying to do is to make sure no teacher teaches a class without certification in that area. I do not think that the NCLB act ties you the same way it does public schools, but i suspect that you might have funding problems if you don’t follow those guidlines.
