As I am about to start my 15th year of high school chemistry teaching, I have an increasing interest in helping train and develop future science teachers. I have colleagues who have worked as adjunct teaching methods professors in the evenings, so I started looking into how I could go about getting a job like this. There are SO MANY things I know now that I wish I had learned in my science teaching methods grad school course.
So I’ve been looking at CVs of education grad school professors, particularly those who teach methods courses, so I can figure out what I need to do to become one of them. I’m finding that they have shockingly low amounts of K-12 teaching experience. I’m not sure if this is because they actually have never taught K-12, or if they are just leaving it off their resume (maybe to avoid criticism for only teaching K-12 for a few years, or teaching at a ritzy private school, or something else of that sort). In any case, this apparent lack of K-12 teaching experience definitely explains some of the criticism I have of my own grad school of education experience.
I enrolled in a master’s program at a “top-ten” graduate school of education because I wanted to do things the right way. Having just finished 2 years of teaching through an alternative-certification program, I knew that chemistry teaching was going to be my career. However, I had significant issues with and criticisms of the hasty teacher training I received through my alternative program, and I felt that my relatively smooth first 2 years of teaching were in spite of, not because of, the training I received. So, like I said, I set out to get my teacher training in the way that most people would call “the right way.”
My grad school secondary ed program was a 10-month program that cost about $55,000 at the time. Luckily, I won a full-tuition award; otherwise, loans were the only option. My cohort was about 50 students, a good mix of future English, social studies, science, and math teachers. It was an “urban education” focused program in a major US city; however, there were no Black members of my cohort, and only one Latino student. There were no BIPOC professors either, except for the one elective I got to choose (The Psychoeducational Development of Black Males, taught by 4 Black males – I learned 1000x more in this class than all my other grad school classes combined).
I’d say the program overall (not just my elective class) did a fairly good job of educating us in the realms of race, power, and privilege, considering the demographics of our program (although the one Latino student had to bear an outrageously unfair amount of emotional and educational labor during our class discussions). I can say with confidence that some members of our cohort, myself included, have a more developed understanding of race, power, and privilege than they did before the program. I think they found our readings, discussions, and workshops on the subject both uncomfortable and enlightening (words only white people would use to describe those types of discussions). Considering our “urban focused” program was essentially a white space there were limits to how much everyone actually learned, but I can say that most people at least learned something. The student teaching was also good, because it was year-long, rather than just a semester or just a quarter like many other programs, and I liked the way they had us gradually take on classes–at first zero (just observing our cooperating teacher), then one, then two, then three.
What was painfully missing from my grad school program, however, was any practical, actionable information on how to teach or how students learn. While we learned a ton about justice, race, power, privilege, and identity (which is super-important and something that most teacher-prep programs aren’t doing well enough), we never really learned much about effective teaching, which I’d say is also a pretty important component of preparing future educators for racial justice in a city where the majority of kids don’t have access to quality education.
We did read about and talk about education pedagogy theories, mostly constructivist theories about student-directed learning. Setting up a classroom where this type of learning is actually taking place is EXTREMELY difficult, but I never got any practical information on how to make this work in the classroom. Now, at the time, I figured this was because the professors were practicing the constructivist approach that they were preaching, meaning our grad school classes looked like this: a bunch of grad students with maybe a few weeks or few months of student teaching experience sitting around discussing their thoughts on how to create a “student-centered” classroom. Needless to say, because we barely had any experience, we did not really have any good ideas. It was weird to read all these books and articles about the importance of a “student-centered” classroom, and then actually be a part of a “student-centered” classroom, run by a professor who was an expert on “student-centered” classrooms, and feel like I wasn’t learning or contributing anything useful or meaningful. While I wasn’t getting much out of these grad school classes, I figured that the professors were doing the right thing by trying to be the “guide on the side” instead of the “sage on the stage.” Since this was the type of teaching method that all of our assigned readings were supporting, I figured there was something I was doing wrong as a grad student which led to me not being able to link the constructivist theories that we were reading about with any practical classroom implementation methods.
But now, 15 years into my teaching career, as I peruse these education professor CVs, I’m realizing that maybe the professors were using this “constructivist” approach because they just didn’t have anything practical to share with us due to them having very little, if any, actual K-12 teaching experience. Now, I know this might not be the professors’ fault, and maybe the problem is that things are set up where education professors, in order to get tenure or whatever, need to devote their entire career to “academia” stuff, and can’t spend much time actually teaching in a K-12 classroom. The problem with this, however, is that they are getting their ideas for their future research and publications from existing research and publications. And they are deciding what to have their grad students read and discuss based on the research and publications they themselves are reading and discussing. This has created a self-referential academic realm that seems, to me, to be completely separated from the on-the-ground reality of K-12 education. Even worse, when new, more grounded education research comes out that may call into question some of their educational theories and research findings, some education academics double down with a shocking amount of fury. Now that I’m looking at their CVs, I can see why. They have little to no K-12 teaching experience, but they have pages and pages and pages of publications about K-12 education theory that took years and years and years of work. When your entire career and academic status is based on your publications, it’s much easier to double down than to admit that your research and publishing might need to change direction.
Now I know this problem of academia being divorced from reality (and the related “publish or perish” nature of professorship) is a problem within many fields, not just education academia. I think we could fix this problem, at least in education academia, if the people who were doing the K-12 research, publishing, and teacher training were also practicing K-12 teachers. I know this would take some re-structuring, but look at the medical field as an example. Physicians who publish journal articles are also practicing physicians. This ensures the content they are putting out into the world is not only research-based, but also do-able and practical. My friends who are physicians regularly read medical journal articles to improve their practice. (I have tried to do this with education, but practical, useful articles in education journals are VERY few and far between, and besides, even if a teacher found education research useful, due to paywalls they would probably have to pay out of their own pocket to access it.) Additionally, these practicing physicians who are also publishing are also teaching and training residents and fellows, and allowing their trainees to observe them as they work. Imagine if K-12 education professors also had a K-12 class they were teaching that their grad students could pop in and observe! With this type of transparency and accountability, I think we’d see a drastic re-orientation of ivory tower education research towards theories and practices that are actually effective in the classroom. And, let’s say someone publishes an education journal article that is later disproven or called into question by new research. I think, because the professor who published it is also a practicing teacher and teacher-trainer, they might be more willing to change course (rather than double down) because their past research publications are not the only thing their career and prestige is based on. And because they are practicing educators, they themselves, along with everyone else, reap the benefits of altering course based on improved research. This creates an excellent, healthy cycle of improved research -> improved practice -> improved research -> improved practice, rather than the self-referential research -> research -> research thing we have going on now in education academia that, in my opinion, is sending American education into a downward spiral.
Medicine is so important to our society that it CANNOT afford to be divorced from reality, which is why the medical education system, medical research, and current medical practice are all tightly interwoven. I’d say K-12 public education is just as important as medicine, and looking at the abysmal state of the current K-12 education landscape we desperately need some new solutions. K-12 education academia: get your act together.
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