The Problem of Teacher Education

Since time teacher emerged as an identifiable activity, there have been few periods when it was not being critiqued, studied, rethought, reformed, and, often, excoriated. The title of this editorial does not refer to of teacher education in a pejorative sense, however. Rather, phrase is intended to draw attention to teacher as a problem in three senses--the problem or challenge every nation faces in providing well-prepared and teachers for its children; teacher as a research problem, which involves a larger set of educational issues, questions, and conditions that define an important concern of scholarly community; and teacher as a problematic and contested enterprise, troubled by enduring and value-laden questions about purposes and goals of in a democratic society. This editorial concentrates on teacher over last 50 years. It suggests that during that time, as a society and an educational community, we have conceptualized and defined of teacher education in three quite different ways: as a training problem, a learning problem, and a policy problem. (1) The editorial concludes with concerns about current emphasis. TEACHER EDUCATION AS A TRAINING PROBLEM During period from roughly late 1950s to early 1980s, teacher was defined primarily as a training problem. The essence of this approach was conceptualizing teacher as a formal educational process intended to ensure that behaviors of prospective teachers matched those of effective teachers. To do this, teacher educators were charged with training teacher candidates to display those behaviors that had been empirically certified through research on teaching. Underlying this way of defining teacher was a technical view of teaching, a behavioral view of learning, and an understanding of science as solution to educational problems. In a symposium on teacher that helped to shape this emerging view, B. O. Smith (1971) made this clear: Generally speaking, ... teacher attempts to answer question of how behavior of an individual in preparation for can be made to conform to patterns (p. 2). What was acceptable had to do with research. When teacher was constructed as a training problem, point of research on teacher was identification or invention of transportable teacher-training procedures that produced desired behaviors in prospective teachers. This effort in teacher built on and paralleled process-product research on that was dominant during time. With process-product research, goal was to develop the scientific basis of art of teaching (Gage, 1978) by identifying and specifying teacher behaviors that were correlated with pupil learning and applying them as treatments to classroom situations (Gage, 1963). The version of this that became prominent in research on teacher was treating independent variables of process-product research on (i.e., observable teacher behaviors, such as question-asking strategies or clearly stated objectives, which were presumed correlated with Student achievement) as dependent variables in research on teacher preparation. Teacher-training procedures (e.g., microteaching, training prospective teachers to use interaction analysis or behavior modification, lecture, demonstration, and/or clusters of these procedures with and without different kinds of feedback) were independent variables. The training approach to teacher was not without its critics. Some questioned training approach at its very core by critiquing effectiveness research on which it was based. They argued that empirical research base for specific and generally applicable behaviors was thin and that competency-based, teacher-training programs that arose in late 1960s and early 1970s did not have a greater amount of empirical support than other teacher programs. …