Teacher Education, Teacher Practice

After a year of being in the trenches, and after a lot of reading the blogs and books of other teachers, I’ve got a question.

How often do good teachers go against what they’ve been taught in their college teacher education classes?

Mr. Bees is a constitutional law nut, and he’s tried to teach me the difference between “conservative/liberal” in political terms versus “conservative/liberal” in constitutional/Supreme Court terms. I’m going to attempt to use the latter definitions of the words to refer to teacher-ed classes.

It seems to me that my graduate coursework in teacher education was very liberal, very progressive. We’re taught to be very student-centered, to avoid tests (especially multiple-choice tests), to focus on multiple intelligences, to arrange desks in staggered horseshoes and never in straight rows. We’re taught simultaneously to join our teacher union – for CYA purposes – and that unions are undesirable as one of the primary reasons that teachers lack professional respect. We’re taught that reading a book to your class is equivalent to having them read it themselves, that students should have as many opportunities as they wish to redo assignments or tests, and – especially – that teachers who differ from this methodology are not good teachers.

“Taught” is, at times, too mild a word – in retrospect, I recognize that we were often being indoctrinated.

I bought into it whole-heartedly. It’s appealing stuff, and the passionate rhetoric wrought up in the buzzwords sounds as good to administrators as it does to the young, idealistic teacher.

Now, however, I begin to wonder…

Have I contracted the dreaded “teacher digging in heels to remain in the good ole ways” disease? Or is additional experience and perspective showing me that conservative educational methodology isn’t necessarily bad?

What really works? What’s really the best? Is it really as loosey-goosey as “different things work for different teachers”?

I don’t have any deep thoughts or profound conclusions. Just hoping to start a conversation. Let me know what you think.