Teaching people to teach is relatively easy. Industry figured it long ago.
1. Model the lesson to be taught to your teachers to be. Don't just talk
about the lesson. Teach it like you want them to. Have them pretend to be
kids. Get them actively involved. With any luck it will take less time to
teach adults with some background than kids, but if it doesn't it still was
time well spent.
2. Have them teach the lesson back to you. Not every teacher-to-be has to do
every part of the lesson, but everyone should do some part of the lesson.
Have everyone do the tricky bits, though. Pretend to be a kid. You know the
difficult parts, make sure they learn them too.
3. Be around when they are teaching. Stuff happens. Kids ask the darnedest
questions. The batteries will fail. A wire will get a kink in it and stop
conducting. (Happened to me today. Took 10 minutes to figure it out.) These
catastrophes don't phase you because you know what to do, but they won't
know what to do. After all, you have experience and they don't. Don't let
them panic. Be around for advice.
4. Debrief the teachers after each lesson. Have them keep notes on what
works and what doesn't work. Help them to develop a style.
5. Don't offer too many choices at the beginning. Novice teachers are in no
position to select, since they don't know the important criteria about
themselves and their students yet. Teaching is a craft. Craftsmen and women
tell their apprentices what to do. Once the apprentices are ready, they
start to make their own decisions and create their own styles.
I have used this technique successfully in the past, most recently in
Newman's Summerbridge program, a summer enrichment program for disadvantaged
middle school students. What makes Summerbridge special is that the teachers
are middle and high school students. "Kids teaching kids."
The program at Newman was largely successful in math and English, but
science was lagging, mostly because the students were teaching whatever
their last science class was, and rarely was organic chemistry useful to
middle school students. Instead, we wanted to teach typical middle school
science topics like density, food production in plants, and solubility to
teach typical middle school skills like graphing and classification.
The problem was that all these highly educated and high scoring
teachers-to-be didn't actually know this material any more than their future
students. So, I taught to them in the above format. Some of the teachers
were bummed, because they really wanted to teach something else, but overall
they were pretty happy because their classes went so much better than their
peers. Certainly their students had strong improvement in our admittedly
unevaluated standardized tests.
Call me relic, call me what you will. Say I'm old fashioned, say I'm over
the hill. You won't be the first. I know, Heck, I assign seats in class,
too. I change them every few weeks. I sometimes call my students by their
last names.
But I teach by inquiry. Get a copy of Powerful Ideas in Physical Science.
It's a great way to train new teachers.