Re “Pedagogical Puzzle” (Education Life supplement, July 24):
There is clearly an urgent need for change in teacher education. To shift to a training model with so little theoretical basis, particularly for teachers in underserved schools and communities, though, is to invite further vitriol against the profession by implying that it is one without intellectual rigor or serious emotional investment.
It is true that in my first year teaching in a New York City public school after graduating from the Bank Street College of Education, I rarely reopened my texts on the cognitive development theorist Lev Vygotsky. I’m quite certain it is the rare physician who consults a gross anatomy text during the first years of residency, too.
Yet a profession encouraging longevity and dedication, not to mention lasting and significant human relationships, must have a basis in theory; we simply need more opportunities and support in seeing the connections between theory and practice.
Training institutes like the Relay Graduate School of Education are a Band-Aid solution, and it is a horrible injustice to underserved children that their teachers will lack the gravitas that an educator deserves.
CLIO STEARNS
Cambridge, Mass., July 24, 2011
To the Editor:
The best that the Relay Graduate School of Education will be able to do is to produce teachers who are minimally effective. That’s because inspired teaching is a virtuosic act that cannot be taught, any more than music conservatories can teach their students to be Mozarts and Beethovens.
Equally daunting is the unavoidable disconnect between quality and quantity. Finland, which is widely acknowledged to have the world’s best schools, admits only 10 percent of those who apply to become teachers. But Finland has a population of only five million. As a result, it can maintain a highly competitive selection process.
Teaching preparation is in dire need of an overhaul, but we have to get real about what can be accomplished in a country as large and diverse as the United States.
WALT GARDNER
Los Angeles, July 24, 2011
The writer, a former teacher, writes the Reality Check blog for Education Week.
To the Editor:
Relay Graduate School of Education is a misnomer. Relay is a vocational school. A graduate school does not just add on to the undergraduate credential. Graduate teacher education requires application, inquiry and development of research-based concepts in classroom practice.
While Relay may prepare teachers who plan lessons and manage children’s behavior, it eschews the theoretical foundations and academic rigor and engagement that define graduate work.
Students forgo intellectual curiosity in pursuit of prescriptions. “I can study Vygotsky later,” comments one Relay student, who may never see that studying Lev Vygotsky, the cognitive development theorist, among others, opens the door to understanding how students learn language and optimizing educative experiences toward language development.
Her statement illustrates Relay’s substituting routines for pedagogy, which requires both practice and conscientious study. Hiring a director “to oversee faculty research” cannot create a “graduate school” if scholarship is not valued and performed.
FRANCINE PETERMAN
Flushing, Queens, July 24, 2011
The writer is dean of education at Queens College, CUNY.