Reimagining Professional Preparation

Having been in teacher education for almost three decades, I confess to a level of cynicism when it comes to university-based professional prep programs. Publicly, we’re challenged keep improving the quality of the next generation of teachers, yet simultaneously handicapped with expectations to meet rules and regulations almost guaranteed to ensure failure. It’s sort of a “we want you to do a better job, but you have to do it this way rather than a different way that would make more sense.”

Not long ago, I read about a state legislator’s effort to address the growing teacher shortage by creating alternative pathways to certification. I scowled. Even assuming admirable intentions, for those of us who’ve spent years actually struggling to prepare teachers, it’s a dumb idea. Sure, we can solve the teacher shortage problem this way. What could be easier? Just lower the standards for becoming a teacher. Set the bar at perhaps graduating from high school and teaching’s going to attract those otherwise destined for minimum wage jobs. There’ll be no teacher shortage. Problem solved. What’s next? Maybe it’s time to run for Congress or become a Presidential candidate?

Just as obesity is merely a symptom of inactivity and poor lifestyle choices, the teacher shortage has a lot more to do with unattractive salaries, stressful work conditions, little support, and frustrating bureaucratic interference. There’s no shortage of people interested in teaching careers. The problem is that we lose most of them in the first few years of their careers when they discover teaching’s a lot harder than it looks, support isn’t there when it’s needed, and too frequently our professional programs haven’t done a good job preparing new teachers with the skills they need to succeed and flourish.

Although university bureaucracy is a huge starting handicap, there’s plenty more blame to go around. And certainly those of us in PETE/HETE preparation must plead guilty. Far too often what we choose to do makes no sense. Here’s just one of many examples.

Why on earth do we force novice future teachers to create and write lesson plans? On the surface it sounds reasonable. Planning’s a good thing. But think about it. We expect young people lacking movement understanding and performance skills, who know little about teaching pedagogy, and who for the most part did not choose PE or health education teaching because of their love or talent in writing, to create effective lessons! Are we crazy? Why the surprise when they don’t perform well? Why not just give them well-written pedagogically sound lesson plans, and focus on getting them to follow directions and teach well? Nope. Instead, we replicate the experience over and over and devote countless hours of precious training time to practicing the wrong skills.

So you can imagine my delight at a couple of recent events. At the PETE/HETE conference in Atlanta a theme ran through the event trying to get teacher preparers to think differently about the skills their future graduates will need. It’s been a slow process but at last in higher education we’re talking more about Comprehensive School Physical Activity Programs (CSPAPS) as being vital to the success of our professional future. No one’s suggesting we abandon quality health and physical education teaching, but if that’s all we do we will truly justify the moniker of “gym” teachers because that’s about the only place in schools where we’ll exist. And physical-activity promoting groups ready and anxious to replace us will threaten even that presence. I fully realize not all teacher educators are convinced that CSPAPS are a “good” change in professional preparation, but ask the Kodak executives who ignored the rise of digital photography how that line of thinking worked out.

My second ah-ha moment about teacher education came at the recent Pennsylvania State AHPERD convention. And I confess the moment was even better because of a personal connection. Several years ago, I was invited by Department Chair Randy Nichols to spend a day with his faculty and share what I’d learned from NASPE’s PE2020 initiative. Randy wasn’t satisfied with the way professional preparation was going at Slippery Rock University (SRU). After a daylong faculty discussion, I departed wondering what if anything, the SRU faculty would do next.

You can imagine my surprise to walk into a PS AHPERD conference session and hear Randy recount the journey the SRU faculty had taken to reimagine the programs and program content they’re now offering. Unlike most departments, instead of making “adjustments” and “fine-tuning” what already existed, they started from scratch. They challenged their own thinking by asking outsiders – successful business entrepreneurs – if what they were doing made sense. It proved revealing. It quickly became clear the department focus and programs were wrong. Others didn’t see them the way they saw themselves. Like door-to-door salesman hawking World Book encyclopedias, they discovered themselves out of touch with today’s customer needs.

Most importantly, the SRU faculty listened, and stopped defending outdated but almost certainly ingrained beliefs and habits. Today, by Randy’s admission there remains work to be done, but listening, it struck me as a bold journey that many more professional programs nationwide need to begin.