Transforming Teacher Education: What Went Wrong with Teacher Training, and How We Can Fix it - Hardcover

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9781579224363: Transforming Teacher Education: What Went Wrong with Teacher Training, and How We Can Fix it

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1579224369 ISBN 13: 9781579224363

Publisher: Stylus Publishing, 2010

Why are fifteen million children and youth in poverty not achieving when we know that low-income students excel in the classrooms of 'star' teachers (who comprise approximately 8 percent of the teaching force)? Teachers who empathize with students and the life challenges they face soon realize that the dysfunctional bureaucracies will not permit them to meet the needs of their students. Half of the starry eyed beginners are gone in five years or less. Why does teacher education focus on the managerial, instrumental or delivery system aspects of the profession? The expert advice dispensed by schools of education regarding what future teachers should do is not connected to any theory of learning, or to any reality of life in school classrooms. Why has the recruitment process resulted in a cohort of teachers who are unable to connect with their students? Does a qualified teacher equate to a quality teacher? The best hope of getting more effective teachers from university teacher preparation programs is to base their budgets on the number of their graduates who serve in challenging schools and their effectiveness with children and youth. At the district level, the salaries of hiring officials should be based on how well these officials identity and retain quality teachers. In this book, twelve distinguished scholars provide a hard-hitting, thoroughly researched, historical and theoretical critique of our schools of education, offer a clear recommendations on what must be done to ensure all children can achieve their potential, and contribute to a vibrant democratic society.

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Review:

"We need the best research, theories, and practices to make the kind of changes needed in the field of teacher education. This volume helps us take a major step in this direction. Breaking down the barriers to inter-district integration and reducing residential segregation, strengthening social justice education through critical pedagogy, developing teacher accountability policies and ways that will make teacher education programs more accountable, improving teacher candidate recruitment and induction, working through the contradictions of high stakes accountability and teacher quality --all tasks designed to improve the skills of teachers and policy-makers and improve the lives of students--are just some of the topics covered in this volume. Teachers, prospective teachers, educational planners, and policy-makers will all benefit from engaging this book. Hopefully they will engage the chapters with open minds, and begin to challenge 'business as usual' approaches to teacher education."--Peter McLaren

"Transforming Teacher Education is provocative, insightful, precise, and vital to our profession. Those whose lives intersect with teacher education will understand that this 'must read' text does more than merely encourage a transformative moment--it insists that a critical transformation is essential for the very survival of teacher education. The editors have masterfully assembled the writings of preeminent scholars to crucially examine the profession while constructing a focused vision for the future of teacher education."-- (03/01/2010)

"This volume is the one of most comprehensive and deeply analytical works on teacher preparation to appear in decades. As a teacher educator, I deeply appreciate this thoughtful and critical examination of the issues, dilemmas, and trenchant problems of teaching and teacher education in America. This is a work well worth reading!"-- (03/01/2010)

"Just as teacher educators strive to develop reflectiveness in pre-service teachers, this book asks teacher education programs to be honest in examining and understanding their strengths, weaknesses, constraints, and potential so that they may move forward. [This book] provides a thorough and complex consideration of possibilities for reinventing teacher education. Diverse, research based chapters approach transformation in teacher education from a vast range of perspectives and ask the reader to analyze and question how to transform teacher education. What with issues of teacher preparation and quality on the forefront of public discourse, there is need for the teacher education community to reflect on their practices in order to begin a challenging and necessary action-based discussion about how to better prepare teachers. This volume does not provide a single vision or easy answer, but it is an essential step forward."-- (03/01/2011)

About the Author:

Valerie Hill-Jackson is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M University. Chance W. Lewis is the Houston Endowment, Inc. Endowed Chair in urban education and associate professor of urban education in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture in the College of Education at Texas A&M University.

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