Re: [Phys-L] teaching credentials +- qualifications +-administration

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Here I will disagree with the first statement, but the rest is right on.
Teaching can be learned.  The Modeling program teaches teachers how to get
better results.  But to do this the teachers have to experience the program
in long term.  It takes about 6 to 8 weeks of training to complete the
program.  Shayer & Adey monitor their Thinking Science program and the
results are quite good.

As to classroom management, it too can be learned.  There is research that
shows what works and what doesn't, but of course nobody pays any attention
to it.  There are some programs which actually train teachers in management,
but this is never really done in teacher preparation programs.  They teach
teachers about management.

I will agree that teaching is currently practiced as an art, but it can be
practiced as a science, and people can be trained to do it well.  What
students learn is directly influenced by what is done in class, and there is
abundant evidence that changing what teachers do, has dramatic effects on
what students learn.  Sure, there are some people who have developed the
social and learning skills so that they seem to be natural teachers.  This
is a learned response.  And certainly there are people who will probably
have extreme difficulty with teaching because of specific brain differences.
Sociopaths would, I suspect, be poor teachers, and might not be trainable
because they lack empathy.  We now know that empathy is a learned response,
but a small percentage of people lack the necessary brain circuit which
helps promote empathy.

Having gone through teacher training, I can say it generally does not do
much to change the student's attitudes or improve their skills in teaching.
It needs a good dose of interactive engagement to change attitudes and
skills.  Part of the problem is also our society which thinks that "those
who can, do, and those who can't, teach".  The attitude that competence is
inborn is another big barrier.  Research shows that incompetent people think
they are very competent, but when trained to recognize competence, they
change.  They become more competent.  But this can't be done by just telling
people they are incompetent and need to improve.

And yes, a lot of the business of teaching credentials is skewed.  Schools
do assign classes to teachers who have no competence in the subject matter.
But what is worse is that many teachers who are competent in the subject
lack the necessary understanding of what they need to get the students to do
to understand the subject.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


>   Teaching is an art that not everyone has the talent to do.  
> The attitude that anyone with a top tier degree can enter a 
> high school and become the savior of a physics program is why 
> the teaching profession is filled with TFA people who do it 
> for 3 years and leave;  why the turnover rate for 5 year 
> teachers is approaching 50%;  why everyone who ever sat 
> behind a desk thinks they can teach kids;  why professors 
> with their huge lecture halls and myriads of TA's and a 
> captive audience think they can suddenly produce tons of 
> successful teachers better than the rest of us who made 
> careers of understanding the thousands of teenagers who 
> passed through our doors.