Via Joanne Jacobs, here's a doozy of a research paper that questions the "wisdom" being taught at graduate schools of education today. I'll skip right to the good stuff in the Conclusions section:
Based upon our sampling of the coursework requirements in some of the most highly regarded schools of education, we doubt that most schools of education are doing an adequate job conveying essential knowledge and skills to prospective teachers. The foundation and methods courses we reviewed suggested that faculty at most of these schools are too often trying to teach an ideology to teachers – that traditional knowledge is repressive in its very nature – without offering any substantial readings that question the educational implications of this view.
Instead of focusing on how teachers can best prepare students to learn in the current real world environment of performance-based assessment and content-rich curricula, many of the Schools of Education we reviewed teach a profound suspicion for that world. This surely presents the risk of producing only confusion, resentment, and, too often, an early exit from the teaching profession. At their best, there is important work being done in some of the programs that we reviewed. The presence of clear national standards in mathematics has clearly helped to shape the teaching of mathematics methods courses, although too often those courses lack rigor in their own assessments. To a lesser degree, the national movement towards the teaching of phonics in reading has had some impact on the reading preparation programs...
In particular, student teaching has to be much more rigorously focused on assessments of effectiveness: what did the children learn, and how can the teacher give evidence of that learning? Professors at Schools of Education are not watching their students teach in schools, even on videotape: how in such circumstances can they offer effective and useful instruction on how to teach better?...
The Schools of Education we reviewed are neither preparing teachers adequately to use the concrete findings of the best research in education, nor are they providing their students with a thoughtful and academically rich background in the fundamentals of what it means to be an outstanding educator...
All emphases mine. And don't miss the comments on Joanne's site. There's quite a lively debate going on there. In particular, one Andy Freeman seems to be fighting several people at once, using both hands and one of his feet - and he's doing quite well at it.
Posted by kswygert at November 3, 2003 05:25 PM