What About Teacher Education?

The schools and not the ed schools are the real training ground for teachers who would be generalists, says Theodore Sizer, who heads Brown University’s education department and the Coalition of Essential Schools. That “tough and realistic” assessment, he says, comes from a sense that the problems involved; are so immediate that “we can’t wait for them to be solved at the university level.”

Sizer is sharply critical of colleges and universities that reward future teachers for being narrow specialists. “In Europe, teachers expect to expand their scholarship throughout their careers,” he says. “Only in America do we think that a teacher is supposed to endlessly repeat what he specialized in at the age of 21 in college.”

Many teachers are bound by a cultural stereotype, he argues, that assumes that teachers are not scholars. This is directly contradicted, he points out, by the growing number of inquiring teachers who may even have chosen to teach in high school precisely so they can think and teach more broadly than at a higher level.

Efforts to put a generalist philosophy in place must start, Sizer says, at the in-service rather than the pre-service level. Schools should encourage their teachers, with money and time, to investigate fields related to their specialties, he says. “If I’m a math teacher, I should be able to work up some physics or astronomy.”

Many programs, such as the Holmes Group (based at Michigan State University) and the Carnegie Forum’s Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, aimed to address this problem by reforming both teacher education and the professional system in which they work. And some programs do exist that spur teachers to develop interdisciplinary approaches. At Framingham State College in Massachusetts, for example, the Schweitzer International Resource Center brings teachers together to develop cross-cultural perspectives in a variety of courses. And Brown’s own teacher education program sends M.A.T. candidates and undergraduates into Rhode Island public schools with support from “clinical professors” in various academic disciplines. This is only part of a larger Brown institute offering programs to teachers and administrators throughout the state.

“The incentive is that it’s great fun to teach broadly,” Ted Sizer says. The Coalition’s job, as he sees it, is to make that possible from the front lines of teaching first, and let the education schools follow as they will.