Leon Botstein has long believed that teachers' colleges have been getting it all wrong. Now he is doing something about it.
As the president of Bard College, Botstein is starting a master's degree program for prospective high school teachers that will address a widespread complaint: that teachers do not know enough about the subjects they teach.
"The education schools in the United States have had an unfortunate stranglehold on teacher training," he said, "and they have created a pseudoscience in pedagogy and wasted the time of future teachers by not deepening the knowledge that future teachers need."
In the Bard program, students will take as many courses in the subjects they are going to teach -- English, history, physics or math -- as they will in pedagogy. In most graduate education programs, students mostly take courses about how to teach and few, if any, graduate courses in their fields.
Botstein said he hoped the new Bard Master of Arts in Teaching program would serve as a model for reshaping teacher education. The program was approved by the New York State Education Department last month and will start in June.
David Imig, president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, in Washington, said he did not know of any program like Bard's. Supported by the Ford Foundation, a flurry of Master of Arts in Teaching programs were created about 40 years ago to try to emphasize subject knowledge. But the approach never caught on, said Alison Bernstein, a Ford Foundation vice president.
Imig said most teacher education programs now emphasize pedagogy and reflect the regulations of the states they are in.
Doris Garner, who oversees the evaluation of teacher education programs for New York State, said the state does not require a specific number of courses or credits in pedagogy, but looks at whether certain "competencies" are being taught, including knowledge about human development, how students learn and how to manage a classroom. "If a school of education had no pedagogy," she said, "it wouldn't fly."
Botstein said he would have liked even more training in subject knowledge and less pedagogy, but had to compromise to meet New York's regulations. But he said that many of the pedagogy courses, like Current Issues in Learning and Teaching: The Adolescent, would be taught by people trained in fields like sociology, history and neurosciences, rather than in pedagogy.
Bard is also asking that applicants have an undergraduate major in the subject they want to teach, or equivalent course work.
Diane Ravitch, an education historian and an advocate of stronger teacher preparation, said the course work described in Bard's catalog appeared "for the most part, substantive and rigorous."
But, she added, "much of the surrounding rhetoric about me-thods and goals" -- material on teacher reflection and critical thinking, for example -- "sounds very much like a typical ed school."
But some education deans, like Alfred Posamentier of the School of Education at the City College of New York, say understanding pedagogy is as important as mastering subject matter. "Teaching is not a pseudoscience; it is an art," he said. "Teachers need to be expert in their field, but they also need to know how to communicate that knowledge and how to excite their students."
Bard has arranged to work with some public schools nearby; their officials, including Jan Volpe, superintendent of the Red Hook Central School District, with 2,375 students, say they are excited by the program.
"We do need to challenge our high schoolers more than in the past," Volpe said, "so it is a good thing to have strong knowledge-based preparation. Kids are much more sophisticated today, and have a great deal of knowledge that they have learned in other places."
But, she added, subject knowledge has to be balanced with pedagogy, because "not everybody can teach."
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