NPR on Teacher Expectations
Posted: September 26th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 2 Comments »
Laura M steered me to this NPR story by Alix Spiegel. She profiled one of my favorite scholars, UVa’s Bob Pianta. Interesting twist: Spiegel covers health, not K-12.
So since expectations can change the performance of kids, how do we get teachers to have the right expectations? Is it possible to change bad expectations? That was the question that brought me to the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, where I met Robert Pianta.
Pianta, dean of the Curry School, has studied teachers for years, and one of the first things he told me when we sat down together was that it is truly hard for teachers to control their expectations.
“It’s really tough for anybody to police their own beliefs,” he said.
People often ask us: What is different about the courses at the Charles Sposato Graduate School of Education, compared to more traditional schools?
There are many. One is that our whole program aligns with Pianta’s beliefs: don’t tell future teachers what to believe by hammering away with theory; instead, get them to practice specific behaviors that, if done the right way, show kids you believe they can succeed. He puts it this way:
The traditional way, Pianta says, has been to sit teachers down and try to change their expectations through talking to them.
“For the most part, we’ve tried to convince them that the beliefs they have are wrong,” he says. “And we’ve done most of that convincing using information.”
But Pianta has a different idea of how to go about changing teachers’ expectations. He says it’s not effective to try to change their thoughts; the key is to train teachers in an entirely new set of behaviors.
There’s a fierce debate in teacher prep, among Ed Schools and alternative pathways alike.
a. Some: It (teacher prep) mostly works. Just tinker a bit.
b. Some: It doesn’t work. Need different raw material — different people to enter the profession.
c. Some: It doesn’t work. Teachers get certain knowledge from their classes, but those concepts are often wrong. Fix that.
d. Some: It doesn’t work. So stop doing it. Let many people try to teach, without pretending to train them. Evaluate them. Only keep the good ones.
e. Some: It doesn’t work. The ratio of time and money invested in gaining “knowledge” (loosely defined as what you get from classes, readings, writing, etc), compared to time and money invested in future teachers “practicing” (actually doing specific teacher-like behaviors, in various contexts, with a tight feedback loop) is off kilter. I’d file the NPR story under this last heading.
And of course “f” — obviously some folks have a combo platter set of beliefs.
I generally agree with this post, but I would make a distinction between beliefs/expectations and knowledge/theory. Pianta is talking about beliefs, which I agree are hard to change. And the way to change them is not by talking at people. I agree that a better way to change expectations is to train teachers in certain behaviors. It’s through using powerful techniques that work, and getting results with students, that teachers begin to change their expectations. I totally agree that many academics place too much faith in the power of beliefs to shape action and fail to consider the converse—that action often shapes belief.
I see knowledge and theory as distinct from belief. Mike, you seem to be defining knowledge in terms of book knowledge. But there is also practical knowledge and theories that are important that I bet you stress at MATCH. Theories are important because they give you organizing frameworks for making sense of practice and understanding the why behind certain phenomena. It’s one thing to know how to carry out a practice with fidelity. It’s another to know how and why it actually works, what the essential components are and what are less essential, etc. Without frameworks, teachers may be limited to their particular narrow set of tools or they may only know how to carry out a certain technique in a specific context. They may not be able to extend or adapt the practice to new conditions.
Overall, I generally agree that teacher prep should focus on a narrower set of really powerful theories and instructional practices, that these should as much as possible be learned in practice contexts, and that much more time should be spent practicing. But I still think theory is really important for the long-term development of teachers and educators over a lifetime.
It’s all just brainwashing. The theory people want to fill new teacher heads with bogus ideas, the “practice” people want to indoctrinate net teachers with bogus behavior tips. They all believe that there’s just one way to teach, and they’re all wrong.
I prefer the theory people, who at least aren’t demanding robots.
And yes, teacher prep mostly works. The people who think otherwise are obsessively focused on low ability kids with a serious case of tunnel vision. No one has cracked that nut, including all the people who say they have.