Teacher Preparation

People often debate whether it’s the preparation of the teacher or the amount of money a school receives that makes a better education. I think both help in advancing an education but in the end I believe it’s the preparation of the teacher that will have the greatest impact. Even if a teacher has the best tools (i.e. active boards, lab rooms, lab equipment, computers, and more) the students will not receive a good education if the teacher is not properly trained to use such tools or prepared to teach the subject matter. Money can help advance the teachings of a good teacher but can’t on its own create an enriched education.
So what is the best way to prepare our future teachers? I think no matter how much education a person gets to become a teacher, his/her real education will start once he/she enters a real classroom to begin teaching real students. Ohio Governor Strickland is considering changes to a teacher’s education where the first few years in a classroom are treated more like an internship. I believe this could be effective if done correctly. Right now first year teachers do have a mandated mentor but often the mentors are too busy themselves to help out a lot and often they only help out by getting their teachers prepared for the Praxis III. I actually like the idea of the first year being more like a paid internship rather than first year on the job. To make this work though I think the teacher needs to be equipped with a mentor that would check on them every week to help answer questions about paperwork, lesson planning, grading, what they should or could do with certain rule violations and so on. I feel it would be well worth the cost to hire one mentor in each school district to guide teachers that could get quite lost during their first year of teaching.
Robert Holland discusses how beneficial value added can be for the classroom and in improving a teacher’s ability and willingness to teach. Value added is when they rate a child’s growth in the classroom and often can affect how much a teacher earns based on their growth. I do believe this can be beneficial in seeing how much a student is learning. At the same time, however, it will determine how well the teacher can “teach to the test” and not necessarily develop better all-round teachers. With the value added concept we are again using one test to determine how much a childs had learned. I think we need to stop focusing on teaching for a test and start focusing on teaching to help make the child want to learn and grow as an individual.
Teachers should be more prepared for the subject area they are going to teach or for the actual process of teaching. I feel like it’s important to be well educated in both areas of the spectrum. Even if you are a master in a given subject, if you do not know how to convey this knowledge to the level of students you are teaching the student will never understand the information. Instead, the student will lose interest and give up. This is where we have to get rid of the idea that anyone can teach. I believe a lot of people have the ability to teach but need to be properly trained just like any other occupation. In both the Darling-Hammond article and in class we discussed the idea of Teach for America. The program takes well educated people and trains them for two weeks before they enter a classroom to teach in more challenging areas. In the article it mentioned how many of these teachers felt ill prepared and were frustrated because they couldn’t pass on the knowledge they had to their students. I think this shows that despite how knowledgeable the teacher is, the teacher has to be able to break down the information and represent the information in many ways and levels so everyone can understand. Other than classroom management I think this is one of the hardest skills a teacher has to learn. Colleges and universities need to prepare teachers with a variety of skills and ways to convey information. They also need require teachers to practice these skills before entering the work field to make sure they are comfortable with presenting information in various ways. Also, it’s important to learn and understand the pros and cons of each teaching style and method to better determine what is going to work best for the type of students they are working with.
In the end I believe money can help advance a child’s education, but without a good educator leading the advancement money will have no effect. No matter how much technology is involved younger kids still need well-trained teachers to guide them through the knowledge and challenge them to think more in-depth.