when universities took over teacher training and created the first real professors of education, what they did was they recruited people from other disciplines to do this job. So, they would recruit people who studied psychology, for example–that was one of the first major fields to be imported into schools of education. And then they would have these psychologists. .. You are studying learning, and teaching is very related to learning. But the professors of education, even in psychology, did not have any interest in teaching. In fact, the guy who is known as the father of Educational Psychology, Edward Thorndike, he told people that he thought schools were boring; that he didn’t like to visit them. And when he once was speaking to a group of educators and a principal asked him a real problem of practice–you know, this thing happened in my school today, what should I do, what would you do, Professor Thorndike? And Professor Thorndike told him: ‘Do? I’d resign.’ He had absolutely no interest in real problems of practice. And I think that’s carried through. Today we have, in education schools, we have people in the history of education, the psychology of education, the economics of education. But we have very few people who study teaching itself as a craft. And as a result, the folks who are left to train teachers in teaching methods are drawing on a very impoverished science. And they have very little to draw on. There’s been a little bit of a change in the last 20 years, and that’s what I write my book about. I think there are emerging ideas about what teachers should be able to do. But kind of no surprise that teachers don’t leave teacher training prepared for the classroom when we haven’t really put any resources into figuring out what we should be preparing them to do.
As a teacher, you need to know things like how to explain something to a student who is not getting it, or when to keep reinforcing a concept and when to move on to something else, or how to manage a classroom so you can accomplish what you intend to accomplish. Those are “craft” issues, as opposed to “theory” issues.
There is an analogy with business management. A business school can bring in economists to teach profit maximization using calculus, but that is of little practical value in the business world. Harvard and other business schools try to use case studies rather than rely on pure theory. And there are many books on management that are “craft” oriented with respect to handling people or improving sales.
I say that teaching equals feedback. That means that teachers need feedback in order to improve their teaching. I agree with Green that there are better ways to organize schools so that teachers get faster feedback and incorporate it more effectively. How rapidly that can improve teaching is less clear to me.
Listen to the whole thing.
UPDATE: Her book is also reviewed in the New Republic (pointer from Mark Thoma). The review, by Richard D. Kahlenberg, is tendentiously political and uninformative. He says that Green has “one big idea” and then fails to mention what it is, and in fact he seems to have missed it completely. Kahlenberg really likes the idea of raising teacher salaries a lot. But if Green is correct that good teaching is not just a talent you are born with, then you should not need to attract talented people into teaching by paying them more. Instead, you should put those resources into giving teachers better feedback and training.
I see Kahlenberg’s review as an illustration of the way that people look at education through biased political lenses (not that I claim to be innocent here). This only increases my skepticism about anyone’s solution.
What does it say that you possibly can’t teach education?
The biggest thing that helped me learn was figuring out a form of what you might call “Cowenesque” reading. That is, to just voraciously read and re-read as many sources on a subject (including podcasts and video courses) from as many angles as possible. Needless to say, I figured this out entirely on my own, and the constant barrage of disparate subjects in formal education even militates against it. It would not be far off to say that I have not been exposed to any education. The individual attention I received in school is far less than, say, the guitar lessons I took on my own my freshman year and may even be net negative (I taught my advisor several things, I’m not sure he really taught me anything, and all learning was 90% on my own and 10% transfer between peers). Nearly all individual attention prior to college was definitely not desired. I’m not even referring to direct practical applicability, which is almost definitely zero. This is very easy to see in a technical field. If you use any of the tools you taught yourself in the real world it is likely because you carry that hammer around looking for nails. If you are a liberal arts major it is probably harder to see this because you think you got the education. You might think you are educated because you know the things they taught. You judge yourself smart and educated because your standard is knowing the sum total of all the syllabi better than the other guy knows it. But maybe you are just delineated and are assuming an education is the limited subset of knowledge they presented to you.
I sat on this comment for a while, but the more I think about it the truer it gets. One professor put a photocopy of the research process on a bulletin board- results,, papers, grants, equipment, results, papers, grants, etc. They did this because money is good for them too. The sum total of instruction on the nuts and bolts was “keep a lab notebook, you will forget stuff.” John Wooden, they are not.
There seems to have been a shift in education “scholarship”, if we use that term loosely, around the mid-1920s. The field seems to have abandoned all the writings prior to then.
I found several books that are of more practical sense on education written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1900), Charles H. Ham
–a treatise on setting up schools to train both the purely academic as well as the useful arts. Not as vocational training as most think of it but using the useful arts to reinforce the purely academic topics.
How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
–written for teachers, this book offers factors of studying and a good discussion of how these traits are inherent in children but can be polished. Or as most schooling does, inhibited.
Teaching Boys and Girls How to Study’ (1919) by Peter Jeremiah Zimmers, Superintendent of City Schools, Manitowoc, Wisconsin
— Uses the McMurry’s book as the basis of changes in the schools of Manitowoc. The book is a report of what was discovered. Classrooms were conducted more as discussion with the teacher as coach rather than the now predominant ‘sage on the stage’ method.
Here is a student comment included in Zimmers:
“I think this is a good way of teaching because it gives the pupils initiative and self reliance It helped me to like school because now the class is more interesting. If I do not believe a thing I now ask the pupils questions about it.. This method is better than the old because when the teacher went out of the room the class would have to stop but now when she goes out the class goes on just as though she were present.”