Morning Shots

When I was teaching at Head Start, my colleagues and I used to grab a few moments to team plan during nap (not every child cooperated) and it was usually then that I became privy to some of my co –teacher’s valuable insights about the students.  Some commentary had definite implications for how we might prevent a particularly troubled student from explosively acting out; other remarks didn’t have the same ramifications but were interesting none-the-less. 

I remember discussing one day how certain meals would cause the students to fight because they wanted more than their serving and how other meals would be left at the table.  My co-teacher had been teaching a number of years and hypothesized that our students didn’t like Chicken Pot Pie because all the food was mixed together.  Yet, we found it fascinating that they liked to dip everything in their milk (including garlic bread).  She theorized that dipping must’ve been cultural.  And while I wasn’t really paying attention, the students had definitely figured out when we would be having spaghetti or pizza. 

Through trial and error, I became creative in the ways I could encourage the kids to utilize the provided serving utensils to serve themselves a normal sized portion -so that everyone at the table would have enough to eat.  I became more proactive in general, preventing situations that would inevitably devolve into one or more students challenging accepted rules of behavior.  Though we couldn’t prevent every melt down, we began to figure out how to meet the kids’ needs and let the learning process evolve.  We grabbed those teachable moments and gave the kids all we had. 

Teaching is an art and a science.  The art is when activities in the classroom are all running incredibly smoothly and kids are learning

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How effective is teacher training in Australia? The question is more than academic. After all, the quality and effectiveness of the classroom teacher is one of the most important determinants of successful learning. The commonwealth report on teacher training, Top of the Class, released yesterday, suggests that all is well and that there is no crisis.

Wrong. As University of Melbourne emeritus professor Brian Start points out, teacher training suffers from provider capture and there is little attempt to measure effectiveness. In 2005-06, Start contacted 38 teacher training institutions, asking whether there was any evidence of a link between teacher training – indicated by admission procedures and graduation scores for prospective teachers – and success, however defined, after teaching for three to six years. Not only did about half of the institutions fail to return the questionnaire but it appeared that none had undertaken any research investigating how effective their courses were in preparing teachers for the classroom.

According to Start in a paper given in Philadelphia last year: "Teacher education is a legal requirement for entering the teaching profession. Universities have a monopoly on this process (as) the providers. They select, train, qualify and certify graduates as competent to teach. Yet there does not appear to be any validity checks on the near billion-dollar enterprise."

Start argues that teacher training institutes are unaccountable. For evidence, consider a paper related to establishing the National Institute for Quality Teaching and School Leadership prepared by the Australian Council for Educational Research. "To our knowledge," the paper states, "no teacher education program or institution has ever been disaccredited, yet variation in quality is known to be considerable." It goes on: "Teacher education is arguably one of the least accountable and least examined areas of professional education in Australia."

It is easy to

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Not long ago, I ate dinner with a college friend who is now a public high-school teacher.

Eventually, our pleasant banter led to the topic of school choice. I said that school choice would quickly create conditions within Kentucky public schools that would improve education for all children. Not surprisingly, my friend – the teachers union representative at his school – found the whole idea of school choice appalling.

During our ensuing debate, my friend voiced his anti-choice arguments. I took on each one:

“School choice will erode teacher compensation and teacher quality,” my friend said.

“Hardly,” I said. “The competition for students would eliminate mediocre teachers and high-quality teachers would become hot commodities whose pay would increase to the level of their talent and effort.”

“School choice is unconstitutional and will be used to support religious schools of doubtful merit using public funds,” my friend said.

“Not so,” I said. “For years, our postsecondary education system has allowed using public money to pay for both secular- and nonsecular-based schools. America’s universities remain the envy of the world.”

“What about kids with disabilities?” my friend asked in exasperation. “Private schools would never be willing to take on this burden!”

“Burden?” I said. “It’s not true that school choice would leave students with disabilities behind, the insensitive signature inherent to such a statement notwithstanding.

“On the contrary, based on Kentucky’s experience in the delivery of community-based services to adults with severe disabilities, we have every reason to believe that a school-choice program would offer a tremendous benefit to special-needs students.”

Let me explain why I pointed that out to my friend. Beginning about 30 years ago, Kentucky – as did the rest of the United States – began to move people with developmental disabilities from large, congregate institutions to small,

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