Peter Greene eviscerates an article advocating competency based education for teacher education.
The claim for technology starts with the assertion that traditional teacher education is worthless, which explains why there are so many bad teachers. But you don’t have to be a fan of such programs to object to a technological fix.
Greene writes:
“Let me step aside for a moment to note that I am not the person you want to defend traditional teacher prep programs. I was trained in a non-traditional program with far fewer hours of education courses before student teaching and far more support and coursework while I was getting my classroom practice on. I happily await the day that some college education department calls me up and invites me to re-configure their system, because I have more than a few ideas.
“I should also note that debating study versus practice in teacher prep strikes me as just as useful as endlessly arguing about whether there should be more hugging or kissing with your romantic partner. If you are arguing violently for mostly one at the exclusion of the other, you’ve lost sight of the point.”
“I’m a little nervous that Riccards is dreaming of an EdTPA type of program, with videos and a set of standard behaviors that can be evaluated at a distance. That idea is a snare and a delusion. It does not work. It will never work.
“This also feels like one of those attempts to remove subjective personal judgment from the process. That is also a snare and a delusion.
“Teachers have to be educated by other teachers. That is why student teaching works– daily constant supervision and feedback by a master teacher who knows what she’s doing. That experience is best when it rests on a foundation of subject matter, child development, and pedagogical knowledge. It also works best when the student teacher is helped to find her own teacher voice; co-operating teachers who try to mold mini-me’s are not helpful.
“The computer era has led to the resurrection of CBE because computing capacities promise the capability of an enormously complicated Choose Your Own Adventure individualized approach to learning– but that capacity is still not enough for any sort of learning that goes beyond fairly simple, tightly focused tasks. Sure– creating a CBE teacher prep program would be super easy– all you have to do is write out a response for every possible combination of teacher, students and content in the world. And then link it all together in a tagged and sequenced program. And then come up with a clear, objective way to measure every conceivable competency, from “Teacher makes six year old who’s sad about his sick dog comfortable with solving a two-digit addition problem when he didn’t actually raise his hand” to “Teacher is able to engage two burly sixteen-year-old males who are close to having a fist fight over the one guy’s sister to discuss tonal implications of Shakespeare’s use of prose interludes in Romeo and Juliet.”
We count on Peter to be the voice of common sense and experience.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The breathless over-hyping of this stuff is ridiculous:
“No gymnasiums, no cafeterias and no administrators. That’s school policy at AltSchools, a chain of private, for-profit schools backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Mark Zuckerberg.
At the location I visited, the school schedule was written on a white board and could be changed in real time. Students flowed between grade levels and classes based upon what they wanted and needed from teachers.”
I get that they want to sell product to public schools – the “private/charter school market” probably is only 10% of what they could capture- but we’re not idiots. Name-dropping Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t knock me off my feet and I’m embarrassed it seems to knock our politicians off THEIR feet.
“AltSchools “has been anointed by the top minds in Silicon Valley as the best hope for the future of education,” according to WIRED.”
Dear God. The worshipful tone is just appalling- “all these rich and successful people say this is how public schools should be run- like Starbucks!”. They are ready to “dissolve” every public school in the country based on something Mark Zuckerberg said or didn’t say.
These are the people who lobby your government. They’re the “influencers” in ed reform.
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The amount of money, time, energy, effort, and opportunity, being wasted on the whims of a few, completely unqualified billionaires is breathtaking. How on God’s green Earth did we ever get down a road so irrational?
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I, too, am a non-traditional teacher. My pre-classroom education was excellent. The professors were not clueless politicians or ignorant CEOs, but mathematicians and experienced classroom teachers. While my student teaching stint was a disaster due to an inexperienced “coach” looking for a sub during his sports season, the mentors I worked with later were highly skilled and capable. Nowhere did a computer or standardized test contribute to my learning the teaching profession.
The mentor/apprenticeship model has worked in professions and trades for centuries. Why ignore success? Look at any successful doctor, lawyer, executive, electrician, artist, engineer, custodian, politician – and you will most likely find somewhere in their career a valued mentor standing behind them.
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CBE was tried in the 1970s and did not catch on…I am the first to agree that moving to this extreme for all teacher preparation would be dangerous. Teaching is not something that can be partitioned.
That being said I have a couple of issues with this post. Greene writes “I’m a little nervous that Riccards is dreaming of an EdTPA type of program, with videos and a set of standard behaviors that can be evaluated at a distance” edTPA is used as a summative assessment ALONG with student teaching and supervision. It is better than the current summative assessments such as Praxis in terms of measuring teacher preparation as it looks at actual teaching”
Second – I do think that there is a place and space for some courses to be done online/hybrid model…I do think somewhat agree that the current model in many teacher prep (mainly traditional TP) where you earn X number of credits to become a teacher is a bit outdated. technology needs to be embraced, but it needs to be done so in a responsible manner.
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The Praxis was ok for measuring basic content area knowledge, though it should just be a indicator, not a barrier. As a measure of pedagogical ability, it was useless. The Bar exam has never prevented bad lawyers, but it most certainly has eliminated some good lawyers. The problem is, that is near impossible to measure and confirm.
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A huge problem with technology as experienced by a long-term teacher inside low-income/reform-bashed schools was simply that what was so enthusiastically purchased and forced onto teachers one year, was seldom compatible with what had been put into place the year before. Changing software and hardware on a whim soon led us all to one big confusing mess where very little of our equipment either worked — or worked together. And then? Inexperienced “fixer” administrators jumped up to cut out all positions for technology support.
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“RageAgainstTheTestocracy
March 12, 2016 at 10:34 am
The amount of money, time, energy, effort, and opportunity, being wasted on the whims of a few, completely unqualified billionaires is breathtaking. How on God’s green Earth did we ever get down a road so irrational?”
I’m sick of it. I understand that the political appointees in these education departments have an agenda, but the career people should stop promoting expensive experiments that have no proven value for students when compared against cost. Promoting product is not their job. It’s not what people are paying them to do.
The private sector conducts trials on product. Let them pay for it. They can get back to us when they have some indication of whether this is worthwhile and has value for ordinary public schools. That’s how this “markets” thing works. They sell us something with proven value. We don’t volunteer to pay THEM to use our kids as an experimental population. Public schools SHOULD be late adopters. Public schools are not Starbucks or Facebook. They have a duty not to be reckless and foolish. Private school parents can afford expensive experiments. Public school parents can’t.
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I wish your outrage was shared by more parents. The media continues to misrepresent the truth, making it difficult for the “piratization” (as in pillaging and plundering) of the public schools to become more widely recognized. It’s our tax dollars getting re-directed away from the classrooms and into this endless stream of rather expensive snake oil solutions.
It astounds me that a reform movement that has monopolized the importance of “evidence based” learning, has completely ignored it when it is too inconvenient.
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Until people unfix their gaze from the claimed value of these schemes and grasp the one real aim that all these games have in common — the transfer of control away from the people who create the value — the con artists will continue to hypnotize and misdirect and continue to win.
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I;m not sure why we’re paying them for product trials in public schools. Shouldn’t they be paying us? I think 30k per student, per year, experimented upon is reasonable. Then if it’s a flop and we end up with a bunch of expensive garbage we’ll have a nice cushion to repair any damage.
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Chiara, great points! Pearson should be paying us. Sadly administrators don’t seem to care if the products are unproven. Guess they’re not such big fans of “critical thinking” after all.
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I have a BA, but I was able to take the minimum number of education credits and do student teaching as electives in order to be certified. I was fortunate to receive training from a great program that married theory and practice. Each semester we had to either tutor, work at a settlement house, or student teach. The whole focus of the program was for enable teachers to reflect on their practice while working under the guidance of a mentor from the education department. My training gave me a firm foundation that served me well in my career.
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Correction: …focus of the program was to
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Peter Greene is indeed a voice of sanity. What if that 6 year old wants to work through his emotions, mourn his/her dead doggie, and could care less about two-digit addition for the day? No software program in our known world could account for all the possibilities/probabilities of helpful teacher behavior — unless we want to keep upping corporate profits while they try? JVK
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Just follow the $$$$$. It’s always about $$$$$.
CBE is a worn-out idea from the 1970’s. Didn’t work then and with computers on the table, it won’t work at all. Duh!
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Patrick Riccards, author of the article that Peter demolishes, is the chief communications and strategy officer for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The Foundation might be called an operating arm of the Gates Foundation, having received over $13 million to promote “competency based” programs for higher education. The president of the WWNFF is Arthur Levine who earns about $475, 500. The WWNFF pays the Podesta Group in DC to help it get government grants. Patrick Riccards is a new hire, but an old hand in promoting other people’s ideas.
So, who provided the talking points for this promotional piece? My guess is that these came from any number of sources, including but not limited to Bellwether.
Peter’s comments are fairly glib, funny, but they fail to recognize that four Gates-funded teacher preparation “transformation centers” are set to “scale-up” district-based teacher education programs, with marginal connections to higher education. One “center “is Relay Graduate School of Education, with Doug Lemov views of teaching. These transformation centers are based on the idea that master/mentor teachers are hard to find, especially in low-income urban schools. And these centers are counting on replacing a large number of teachers who are reaching the golden years and finding other reasons to leave teaching.
The reasoning in the Gates Foundation (and other foundations) is that teacher prep programs should focus on developing a “pipeline” of teachers, especially for “high needs districts and high need subjects.” Therefore teacher prep should begin with recruiting people only after they have a bachelor’s degree in a content area (or life experience credentials). These recruits should have at least a 3 point GPA (or comparable), then enter a two–year induction period completing courses and passing “competency” tests while teaching under the guidance of a certified master teacher. During those two years, teaching responsibilities are gradually added. Some induction programs are residency programs with stipends paid to student teachers for increased responsibilities. Program completers earn a master’s degree, some with subtitles as in Masters Degree in Urban Education. They are on their own to meet state certification requirements.
Some of the new competency tests are being adapted from medical training where avatars are presented and the physician-in-training is expected to “perform” a series of fairly standard assessments of the patient, analyze the data, make a preliminary diagnosis, and offer a plan for treatment.
One version in education is a virtual classroom with student-avatars. You can see one example here, https://www.mursion.com. Mursion is one of the leading companies, founded by CEO Mark Atkinson, who previously was the founding CEO of Teachscape. Teachscape markets Danielson’s (infamous) Framework for Teaching, student surveys, and more.
In the next three years 70 teacher preparation “providers” in Massachusetts will be transformed, aided by $3,928,656 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (not counting a separate separate grant in October 2015, for $ 300,000 “to launch, execute, and utilize implementation data collection at the state-level.”)
Gates funds will support “data-driven analysis and continuous improvement,” provide “robust and direct support for new Candidate Assessment of Performance (CAP) process with nine reporting forms,” build “additional Edwin Analytics Reports,” develop “regulations for the Pre-Practicum experience,” embed “mixed-reality simulations in coursework” and coordinate “regional induction institutes.” That is an overview. Here are some details.
The Elevate Preparation: Impact Children (EPIC) program will:
1. Set rigorous expectations for pre-practicum studies.
2. Require candidates to practice high-value skills by using a technology embedded in course work. Candidates practice these skills in a low-risk virtual environment simulating a classroom, but with programmed interactions among five or six “students” (animated avatars) and the candidates.
3. Standardize expectations and tests for teacher performance.
4. Certify the ability of supervisors of field-based experiences to offer high-quality feedback to student teachers.
5. Refine data gathering for annual reports on each teacher preparation program including surveys of: candidates, program graduates one year after employment, supervisors of teachers, and hiring principals in addition to other state-managed outcome measures (e.g., educator evaluations, employment histories, student achievement).
6. Create a coordinated system to ensure: (a) that teachers are prepared for the anticipated labor market in the district where they do student teaching and (b) that candidates in the “pipeline” meet diversity requirements “for human capital in the PK-12 sector.”
“We are working toward an ambitious goal that by 2022, candidates prepared in Massachusetts will enter classrooms and demonstrate results on par with peers in their third year of teaching.” http://www.doe.mass.edu/edprep/
I would not want to be a “provider” of teacher preparation in Massachusetts. Student teachers who are on the threshold of taking a job will be evaluated for “fitness to teach” using the same criteria that Massachusetts uses for experienced teachers.
The new phrase for talking about the education of teachers is make them “classroom ready.” Everything else is superfluous and can be dropped. Scholarly knowledge and critical thinking about the work of teachers is unnecessary. This is also called “elevating” the profession.
Here is my take: The new view is that every teacher is a technician dealing with conventional content and conventional problems. The “new teacher education” is being tailored for robots and for avatar teachers, cheap after initial funding from USDE and philanthropies.
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Will these avatars be able to simulate real student behavior? I haven’t seen a computer that can throw things or bite and kick. I haven’t noticed that computers can bleed or cry and they do not require a teacher to clean and bandage their scraped knee. These are common occurrences in early childhood classrooms in urban areas. My experience shows that teachers must interact with 25 or more students at a time, not 5-6. How can a computer in real time match the reactions of the human teacher? The teacher’s reactions could lead to multiple out comes. And sometimes the most logical outcome doesn’t appear in real life. This need to dictate our emotions and responses is dehumanizing.
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Teacher training at Pace University:
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Teacher training at Pace University:
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This teacher’s classroom management issues aren’t the real problem. It goes to show you that a poorly planned lesson is often at the root of misbehaviors. The questions he ask are insulting to any student even remotely paying attention.
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