Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts

by Marilyn Cochran-Smith (editor), D. John McIntyre (Editor), Sharon Feiman-Nemser (Editor)

Co-Published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group and the Association of Teacher Educators.

The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education was initiated to ferment change in education based on solid evidence. The publication of the First Edition was a signal event in 1990. While the preparation of educators was then - and continues to be - the topic of substantial discussion, there did not exist a codification of the best that was known at the time about teacher education. Reflecting the needs of educators today, the Third Edition takes a new approach to achieving the same purpose. Beyond simply conceptualizing the broad landscape of teacher education and providing comprehensive reviews of the latest research for major domains of practice, this edition:



stimulates a broad conversation about foundational issues



brings multiple perspectives to bear



provides new specificity to topics that have been undifferentiated in the past



includes diverse voices in the conversation.



The Editors, with an Advisory Board, identified nine foundational issues and translated them into a set of focal questions:



What's the Point?: The Purposes of Teacher Education



What Should Teachers Know? Teacher Capacities: Knowledge, Beliefs, Skills, and Commitments



Where Should Teachers Be Taught? Settings and Roles in Teacher Education



Who Teaches? Who Should Teach? Teacher Recruitment, Selection, and Retention



Does Difference Make a Difference? Diversity and Teacher Education



How Do People Learn to Teach?



Who's in Charge? Authority in Teacher Education

How Do We Know What We Know? Research and Teacher Education

What Good is Teacher Education? The Place of Teacher Education in Teachers' Education.
The Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) is an individual membership organization devoted solely to the improvement of teacher education both for school-based and post secondary teacher educators. For more information on our organization and publications, please visit: www.ate1.org

Genres: Education, Reference

1354 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Marilyn Cochran-Smith is the John E. Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College, where she served as Director of the PhD Program in Curriculum & Instruction from 1996-2017. Cochran-Smith is widely known for her work about teacher education research, practice and policy and for her sustained commitment to teacher education for social justice with inquiry as the centerpiece. She is a frequent presenter nationally and internationally.

Dr. Cochran-Smith and the BC research group, Project TEER (Teacher Education and Education Reform), will publish Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education (Teachers College Press) in April, 2018. Cochran-Smith has written nine other books, five of which have won national awards, and more than 200 articles, chapters, and editorials related to teacher education. She is a founding co-editor of the Teachers College Press book series on Practitioner Inquiry, which has published more than 50 books about practitioner inquiry or by teachers and other education practitioners.

Dr. Cochran-Smith is the Principal Investigator for a Spencer Foundation-funded study of teacher education at new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) in the U.S. She is co-founder of Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity), a two-country research project at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is also the Chair of the International Advisory Panel on Teacher Education for NOKUT, Norway’s government agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.

Cochran-Smith is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, an inaugural AERA fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Education. She has received many awards, including AERA’s Research to Practice Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Literacy Research Association, the Carl Grant Research Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education, and all of the major awards from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), including the David G. Imig Award for Achievement in Teacher Education, the Margaret B. Lindsey Award for Research in Teacher Education, and the Edward C. Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first thing to say about this book is that it is very long. It has 64 chapters and then another 40-odd ‘artefacts’ which are often as long as the chapters – there are over 1300 pages of text here. And although this might seem like a fairly narrow subject and possibly one of limited interest to people outside of the world of teaching (and even for a lot of people inside that world), I believe this ought to be something more people should become interested in. 

This book is very much about the education of pre-service teachers in the United States. Now, I’m from Australia, and so this book has done as much to teach me about the US education system as any other I’ve ever read. The US education system is much more complicated than I could have guessed and, interestingly enough, is becoming even more so. Education and teaching have always been topics that produce a lot of controversy, and this book is particularly good in that it presents articles from the many different sides of the various ‘arguments’ concerning how we should go about teaching teachers how to teach or even if we ought to bother at all.

The problem is that people don’t agree what teaching is or what it means to teach or to learn – these are anything but settled issues. What is necessary to know or do so as to be a good teacher? Or does that question even makes sense? Is it possible that there isn’t a single set of skills that define ‘a good teacher’? – in fact, it could well be that the skills you need to become a good maths teacher might be nothing remotely like the skills you need to become a good art or English or Latin teacher – that is, that classes in ‘general pedagogy’ are a waste of time. And if teaching can’t be broken down into a set of recognisable and duplicable ‘skills and competencies’, what does it mean to have a ‘teacher certification’? And if there is no agreement about this, is teaching something that we should be learning to do in universities? Should it rather be something like an apprenticeship that one picks up through the act of teaching itself, safe from the ivory towers and foolish ideas of university professors? Is it more like a craft that can only be learnt in a community of practice? Or perhaps something impossible to learn at all and that you are born with? Is it something impossible to define at all – like being a good ‘mother’ – or perhaps good teaching is something so fundamentally human it needs to be understood as something that ‘just comes’ when you ‘know stuff’ – a view that can’t be shrugged off, since people have been teaching other people since the dawn of time and have been doing so without needing a ‘teaching qualification’.

This might sound like I’m being overly annoying just for the sake of complicating matters, but the fact is that each of the positions alluded in the previous paragraph are held by people – often powerful people – who are connected with the training of teachers. And what is very clear is that each of these ideas imply very different ways to go about training teachers to teach.

For instance, if all you need so as to be an effective teacher is the ability to help your students pass multiple-choice tests, then perhaps your ‘being a human’ isn’t even necessary. Perhaps the job would be done better if you were a computer programmed to assess current knowledge, follow an algorithm to structures drills and then assesses how well these drills have been retained before moving on to the next learning task. 

If effective teaching only occurs when the teacher is able to convince student that they have empathetic devotion (unconditional positive regard) toward their students, then perhaps we should worry less about a teacher’s subject content knowledge, and more about their abilities to show care, attention and affection towards others.

If all you need to be able to teach is to be able to show you are a good learner – then perhaps we can do away with university degrees that teach ‘pedagogy’ and rather simply test potential teachers’ content knowledge before placing them in classrooms. 

While I would find it hard to accept some of these skill sets as central to what a ‘good teacher’ ought to be – the complication is that all of them add to the picture of what a good teacher is. This really brings us back to the question, ‘what is the purpose of education?’ Because if education means stuffing people’s heads with ‘the basics’ – that implies a particular kind of teaching – and that in turn implies a particular kind of teacher. And if teaching is meant to produce someone who can act as a moral agent in our society, well, that implies a different kind of teacher with a different set of skills. And again, if teaching implies producing democratic citizens, people able to assess an argument and then choose between the pathways available, well, again that implies yet another set of teaching skills. And if the purpose of education is either of these latter two outcomes, then the skills such teachers will need to teach will also be harder to standardise and to assess than if teaching merely implies stuffing kids heads with lists of spelling words or their times tables, for instance.

It is important to notice that much of what we are currently doing as a society encourages one of these kinds of teachers over the others. That is, we are focused on ensuring that teachers meet ‘minimum standards’ that we can assess to ensure compliance. As such, teachers (if they want to go on teaching) must ‘teach to the test’. That this also means that teachers might one day also be replaced by more efficient and effective machines that can reinforce ‘knowledge’ better and more patiently than the most saintly human so that we will finally have the fabled ‘teacher proof’ education governments seem determined to find.

Some of us think that teaching ought to do more than this – that is, education ought to be about improving society in some way. And this becomes a problem too, because to what extent should (can) education work to overcome disadvantage? Lots of people believe education is almost the only way that disadvantage can be overcome and that the continued existence of disadvantage is, in fact, proof that education has failed. There are a number of problems with this idea – not least that education itself didn’t create social disadvantage, and so it isn’t immediately obvious that it is able to fix it – despite people being convinced that this is education’s primary role. But this redemptive vision of the role of education confronts two inconvenient facts. The first is that young people today are much more educated than any previous generation – today in Australia, for instance, over 80% of children now finish high school. When I went to high school in the 1970/80s only about 30% did – that is, the proportion of children today finishing 13 years of schooling has more than doubled in living memory. However, all measures of social inequality have risen over that same period of time – with society dividing increasingly between the haves and have nots. You could, if correlation was seen as the same as causation, mount a pretty strong argument that raising levels of education cause social inequality, rather than reducing it.

It is common to hear people argue that education ought to help reduce social evils, such as racism, homophobia, sexism, ageism and so on. However, others are just as opposed to this being a role for education – with them seeing the spread of such ideas as left-wing social engineering. However, both sides of even this debate see raising levels of education as being key to overcoming social evils, they just disagree about how education should be taught to reach those ends or even what those ends ought to be.

If one of the clear aims of education is raising the standard of what people know, then to what extent ought we blame teachers if their students leave school unable to read and write? Is this merely due to the teachers not setting their students high enough standards? It is generally accepted that teachers are the largest ‘in class’ factor determining student achievement (something which isn’t actually true, by the way, but something that is accepted as being self-evidently true nonetheless), so, if students fail should we punish their teachers in some way?

And what about the fact that in the US school funding is decided by property taxes and so that in poor areas funds for schools are so scarce that children are often taught in classrooms that are falling apart, with snow coming in through the roof (if you think I’m exaggerating, read ‘Stop High Stakes Testing’ or ‘The Flat World and Education’). Is it really reasonable to blame teachers in these schools for the stagnating results of their students when these same students are freezing in their classrooms, probably haven’t eaten in the last 24 hours and perhaps have no one in their family that is even literate? Is it anything other than a sick joke to talk about ‘no excuses’ for teachers trying to engage children in such classrooms?

Or what about the education policies of various US states that force Spanish speaking children to be taught in English only, even though we know that this will mean these children will be unlikely to become literate in either English or Spanish – and thus condemning them to a life disenfranchised by racist government decree?

This runs parallel to the question of whether or not it is a good idea to have students taught by people from their own ‘communities’ – something that is less and less the case in the US as the teaching workforce becomes increasingly (in fact, overwhelmingly) white, middle class and female. However, we have known for years that having adults of colour teaching children of colour isn’t just good for those children because it gives them a role model or because it shows them there is a pathway that education might lead to – but also because people of colour are less likely to have unconscious and stereotypical views that define children of colour as naughty, stupid, wilful and violent – something that repeated research has shown that too many white teachers consciously or unconsciously hold. As such, the only hope these children are likely to have of receiving an education that will provide them with opportunity rather than immediately denying that opportunity is if their teacher has first learnt how to respect them.

If education is about preparing children to live in a democracy – how does placing them in a hyper-authoritarian environment for 12 years prepare them exactly? You know, children don’t get a choice about attending school, they rarely get a say in what they are taught, or how they will be taught, and they are constantly judged along the way. To what extent is that a good way to prepare democratic citizens?

One of the chapters here mentioned that allowing student voice in measuring teacher effectiveness was one of the best ways to actually judge how effective a teacher was. That is, students proved better at deciding how good a novice teacher was than, say, a government appointed assessor or even the novice teachers mentor teacher. And yet, students are rarely asked to give feedback on their teacher’s performance and if they are asked it is often via a summative assessment (right at the end) when the teacher can’t change their teaching to take this feedback into account for this particular group of students. And the thing that you learn almost immediately about teaching is that different classes under the same teacher can be as different as night and day – so, saying the feedback a teacher receives from one class might help them with their next class isn’t necessarily as true as non-teachers might think.

To improve in any skill requires deliberative practice – but deliberative practice often involves some form of feedback from someone you can trust who ‘knows how’ – a coach, for instance. But teaching is often a very lonely occupation – with one’s students often the only source of feedback available – but the ‘I’m the teacher/you’re the learners’ dichotomy works against using students as the source of feedback. Teaching and learning is too often seen as a power relationship and this can effectively work against the teacher learning from those best placed to teach them how to teach more effectively.

I’m going to mention a couple of what I thought were the best articles in this book and then finish.

The first was Samuel Ethridge’s, “Impact of the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of
Education decision on Black educators”. Jesus, this was a devastating read. I hadn’t realised the impact that the de-segregation of schools in the US had on black teachers. There are a couple of French philosophers called Deleuze and Guattari who talk about social resistance being made up of ‘lines of flight’ – but that these lines of flight (the only way to escape from a situation) look like they allow you to escape, but really they are built into the very structure of situation itself and so, rather than them allowing you any real ‘escape’ they are always ‘captured’. Rather than them letting you get out of a particular situation, you end up stuck deeper and in ways you never anticipated. For the black community in the US that could well be the motto of de-segregation. Closing black schools, particularly in the South, meant the sacking of hundreds of thousands of black teachers who were then replaced by white teachers – the estimates of what this ‘cost’ the black communities (something like a quarter of a billion dollars in wages alone) is terrifying. The other costs are incalculable. The black children who so rarely were able to see a black face teaching them had reinforced the racist narrative that only white people are smart enough to be teachers. I found this chapter both frustrating and tragically painful to read. Particularly when you think back to the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll experiments that showed black children had internalised that white dolls were good, clean, clever, friendly and the very opposite of black dolls and had been a central part of the effort to convince Brown v. Board of Education of the need to de-segregate schools in the first place.

The other chapter I would strongly recommend getting hold of if you possibly can is David Berliner’s, “The nature of expertise in teaching”. I was hoping this one would be available online, but it seems not. I was reminded of Blink by Gladwell reading this. He starts by saying that they asked a series of ‘expert’ teachers to go into a classroom and teach. They did this so as to see what it was that these teachers did that made them experts. The really interesting thing that happened was that the expert teachers often refused to go into the classrooms. Sometimes the ones who did go in to these classrooms left crying. You see, they didn’t know any of the students and they were outside of their usual ‘situated’ school location – that is, they couldn’t be ‘expert teachers’ in this clinical, laboratory situation. The point is that what an expert teacher does is not general, but particular – what they do is to know how to teach people, and central to teaching people is to know them, know them as people and how they learn – what an expert teacher does is ‘know their students’. By taking expert teachers out of this system of relationships, these experts were being denied the very tools they use in their expertise. Novice teachers had no such problems. They had their lesson plans and so they could go ahead regardless.

The next thing the researchers did was to show photographs, or short snippets from videos, of actual classroom interactions to various groups of teachers and ask the teachers what they saw. This was seriously interesting, as what the novice and expert teachers saw were completely different. The novices saw classrooms full of children, but they rarely mentioned what point in the lesson the images had been taken from. They rarely noticed the emotional state of any of the students in the images – something expert teachers where much more likely to register and to do so almost unconsciously. The expert teachers would look at a series of photos of a class and say things like, “why hasn’t that girl opened her books yet – she must be really upset about something – why hasn’t her teacher gone over to see what’s wrong?”

But I thought one of the most interesting bits of this was how the various teachers went about learning about their students and their needs. The novice teachers relied heavily on notes from previous teachers. They also made sure that they put the kids into ability groupings and ranked them right from the beginning. The expert teachers rarely paid any attention to the notes that came with a new class of students. As they said, too often these notes told them nothing anyway, saying things like, “a real cutie” or “should pay more attention in class” – which might have been true in the previous class, but might not be at all in this one. Experts delayed making judgements about the kids, were less likely to have fixed ideas about what students can and can’t do, and were more interested in figuring out what the kids liked, something they could then use in their teaching. Expert teachers know that teaching is about relationships – novices tended to think it as being about ‘subject content’ or ‘teaching tricks’ that are meant to fool students into learning.

I’ve only scratched the surface of this one – like I said, people sit on a spectrum that runs from those who believe it is essential that teachers be introduced to the profession and must learn pedagogy and pedagogical content knowledge if they are to have any hope of teaching young people, while others believe this is all more or less a waste of time. Both groups are well represented here and the arguments from neither side are easy to brush aside. This book ends with a commentary by Hess who argues that teacher education is more or less a waste of time. In the last sentence of this book he says: “In the meantime, teacher education remains a nonessential but potentially useful exercise that can contribute to the education of some teachers, at some times, and for some purposes.” Whether or not this is how teacher education should be characterised, it is likely to remain true in the US – teacher education in the US is often optional due to ‘alternative pathways’ into teaching, and while that remains the case it is unlikely that teaching will become a profession in any real sense. While the need for teachers remains ‘mass’ and while the turnover of teachers is at levels that would make any profession struggle (half of all teachers leave the profession in the first five years) and while the pay and esteem of teachers is diminishing – it just isn’t clear how teaching can become a career option of choice for the ‘best and brightest’.

How we should go about teaching teachers isn’t at all obvious or clear either. The irony is that too often those who have hardly ever thought through the complexities of these questions are too often in charge of deciding how they will be resolved – this includes politicians, business men, and technologists. One of the things this book makes painfully clear, and does so repeatedly, is just how rarely teachers’ voices are heard in this discussion – teaching is one of the few professions where those who ‘do’ the work are considered the least qualified to discuss the work that they do. It is as if we all know – there are those who can and they do – while those who can’t, teach.

[Selila · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book of research in teacher education. The chapter on art education is incredibly useful for teachers.