How many of you were well-prepared to enter the classroom when you graduated from your School of Education? I wasn’t! It didn’t take me long to learn that if I wanted to succeed as an educator, I would have to learn on the job.
So I wasn’t surprised at the report from the National Council on Teaching Quality headed by Arthur Levine, the former President of Teachers College at Columbia University which concluded that a majority of colleges and universities do a poor job of preparing their students to teach. “We don’t know how to prepared teachers. We can’t decide whether it is a craft or a profession.”
My college professors seemed uninterested in teaching me anything practical. So that when I graduated I had no more practical knowledge than when I started. Why don’t Schools of Education adopt the Medical School approach. Medical students spend the first two years learning the fundamentals and theories of medicine and then proceed to the practical application of patient care an guided practice.