21st Century Teaching and Alternative Certification

The NSTA recently published a book on modern science education, and they've been taking bits and pieces of the book and putting them on their site as "WebNews Digests". The most recent Digest relates issues of modern practice with certification programs (both traditional and alternative), pointing out that there are difficulties with both routes to certification, but that educators with alternative certifications tend to leave the profession earlier and more frequently because the experience was not aligned with their expectations. Although the article is focused on science education, I think the core ideas in the article are applicable to all educators, and as such, I think this counts as a 'widget'. The underlying ideas in the article are a mental model for what it means to develop as a modern educator, and they are a powerful organizing tool for guiding our own development and the development of current and future education professionals.

The ideas, and therefore the mental model, are pretty straight-forward. First, teachers need pedagogical content knowledge that is specialized to their subject area(s). It is important here to distinguish between subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge; they are both important, but pedagogical content knowledge tends to be less emphasized in teacher preparation than subject content knowledge. This is important because we need to develop specialized skills to be able to facilitate subject content knowledge development in our students. Second, teachers need guided field experience in order to actually develop these specialized pedagogical skills. Too often the guidance is provided infrequently, if at all, and is not collaborative between the K-12 and University teachers who are supposed to be guiding the developing teacher. Also mentioned in the article is that early teacher field experience is too often focused on specific outcomes (both for the developing teacher and the K-12 students), and not on the processes of developing better skills for better student learning. Finally, developing teachers will tend to teach as they have been taught - after all, we humans are great apes, and tend to mimic the experiences we've had in the past. Development programs for teachers need to take on the "do as I do" approach, as opposed to the more traditional "do as I say". Further complexity is added by the time that it takes to accomplish all of these changes, but awareness of the importance of these issues for teachers of all subjects and at all levels is the first step in the process of ensuring great teachers for 21st century students.