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We celebrated the recording of our 50th Ed Tech Co-Op episode, talking about pre-service teacher education. Pre-service teacher education has been in the news lately, prompting prominent bloggers to share their respective views, emphasizing the skill sets our future teachers need.

Look at the Mindshift post on changes to teacher prep programs and Scott McLeod’s post on what teachers graduating from teacher prep programs should be able to do. 

From time to time, we talk about pre-service teacher education, with Mark sharing what he is seeing at William and Mary. The 50th show hopefully can add to the ongoing discussion about how we prepare our future educators.

Here are some rough notes that I put together before the show. We covered many of them but not all.

 

Notes for pre-service teacher podcast:

While I think we need to teach the instructional skills and methods needed to be a teacher, I think we need to approach our pre-service teachers much like we do our K-12 students. We want them to be independent and skilled at knowing how to learn, adapt, and design in a hopefully ever-changing educational landscape.

We want our young and second-career teachers to have the ICL skills that we want them to help develop in their students. If a new teacher has her ICL toolkit well constructed, she can adapt, develop and move towards the shifted practices we want in our schools. This also involves being flexible, wanting to constantly grow and learn, desiring collaboration, being willing to take risks, etc.

We also want the pre-service educators to think of learning goals for lessons/units in terms of concepts first supported by skills and content. The skills and content help one’s students gain an understanding of the concepts. The dissonance is that, in many cases, the new teachers will see standards and standardized tests that mainly focus on the content knowledge. The trick is helping the pre-service teachers learn how to design lessons that use the content to get to the concepts. This will take care of the testing while also developing the students as thinkers learning about ideas while making connections in their learning.

Another skill is how to design student-centered constructivist learning activities that are also scaffolded enough to really work. This takes time, lots of experience, and knowing what each group of students can and cannot handle. The design process needs a great deal of creativity and imagination.

It is essential to develop the mindset and skills to work as a designer engaging creativity while being willing to take risks. We also need to help future teachers become TPACKers with the knowledge that building a team of TPACKers, including the learning support specialists, is better. Mark and Judy’s recent TPACK paper covered how collaboration helps one TPACK. Thus it makes sense to train teachers to reach out to one another to connect to the distributed expertise in one’s building and in one’s PLN.

We also need to help pre-service teachers understand that they cannot design their units all at once and must use their research skills to find what others have already done. There are many repositories of lessons, units, and whole course curricula. We need to help future teachers live by the 80% rule to get a good chunk of new lessons created, but with the knowledge that it isn’t worth trying to get them totally complete. One learns so much in teaching them that the extra 20% isn’t worth the time and effort. Learn what works and doesn’t for next year’s iteration and improvement.

Help new educators start with sound analog teaching and assessment strategies to develop their “learning activities types (LAT)” matrices. They can then look to technology to replace, amplify or transform (RAT model) their solid pedagogy. And, of course, we should help our new teachers build their PLN and PLCs, if possible, to not have to reinvent lessons and to keep the personal learning going beyond school-provided PD opportunities.

Educators should have the skills and hopeful desire to teach in a blended virtual learning environment driven by student and teacher questions, with students needing to be independent and active– not passive. Suppose we will give our students more ownership and control over their learning. In that case, we need teachers willing to use WebQuests, learning management systems, social media tools, etc., to give students avenues to personalize their learning.

Yet, if we expect our students to be independent and active learners, we must help them develop the disposition to make intelligent choices when using Web-connected devices. We keep spending lots of money putting Internet-connected devices in front of students without doing the work of preparing them to be disciplined, focused, and dedicated to using the devices for learning and not being off task. We love constructivist individual and group learning, but our students must use the tools effectively while employing dispositions that guide them to be independent and active learners. This is another area where a strong ICL program needs to be in place, especially in our elementary skills.