Week 3 Post: On Chapter 5 of ‘Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to do’
January 29, 2019
Reading this chapter ‘Educational Goals and Purposes: Developing a Curricular Vision for Teaching’, combined with my previous work experience as a college advisor, I have some thoughts on the professional development of new teachers..
Although I only took such simple courses such as career guidance and career planning for my students, I strongly agree with the author that ‘the real mysteries of teaching were hidden to them as children. They were never involved in the intensive planning that is required for even one day of teaching, much less several weeks and months. They never had to develop relationships with children and parents who did not speak their language. They never had to work with colleagues who had very different perspectives, opinions, and personalities.’(p169)
As a teacher, especially a new teacher, you spend several times more time preparing a lesson than you actually do. Even if you are familiar with the content of the lesson, how to organize the class, teach a vivid lesson and master knowledge is totally different. At the same time, you must have good adaptability to deal with all kinds of things happening in the class.
When I read page 183‘Teachers need to be able to ascertain what kind of learning is implied by different materials and recommendations for curriculum and determine whether the goals they and others hold are likely to be achieved if particular approaches or materials are adopted. Teachers also need to evaluate their own strategies: is a teacher satisfied only to have students learn to recall the ideas they have read or heard about, or does she want students to be able to evaluate ideas, weigh and use evidence, synthesize a variety of kinds of evidence, and produce arguments, ideas, and products such as research reports, critiques, and science experiments? Teachers need to understand how their goals for instruction should be related to the assignments and assessments they devise, the activities they plan, the materials they select, the feedback they give, and the ways in which they interact with students’
I think I can understand the meaning of this sentence more deeply, because the courses like career guidance that I once taught are very flexible. We need to combine the actual situation of China, employment situation and news to make students understand better. A news happened in China a few days ago: a hot pot shop recruits waiters, and the educational requirement is the graduate students of the top 50 universities in the country. If I continue to teach this career guidance course, I may have students discuss the news, their views on the news and what kind of job they think is the ideal job that matches their academic qualifications.
On the other hand, I think that teacher preparation is very important for schools, teachers and students. Only professional teachers can find satisfactory jobs, be employed by schools and be recognized by students. As mentioned in the article“Strong teacher education programs generally include at least three major kinds of learning experiences that prepare teachers to develop a curricular vision. These include:
• Consideration of educational goals and purposes in general and within content areas, including review of national or state learning and teaching standards and practice with how to embody them in curriculum;
• Learning about instructional design, including guided practice in developing, implementing, and reflecting on and revising curriculum plans; and
• Review and evaluation of curriculum plans and materials from the perspectives of instructional design, evaluation of the implementation of others’ curriculum efforts, and study of research on curriculum and its implementation.（P191）
There is an idiom in China which is called "教学相长（jiao xue xiang zhang）" It means that both teaching and learning can promote each other and improve together. As teachers, we should improve our professional level, and learn together with students in teaching, which is the charm of education.
Thank you for sharing. I totally agree with the idea that "teachers need to understand how their goals for instruction should be related to the assignments and assessments they devise, the activities they plan, the materials they select, the feedback they give, and the ways in which they interact with students". To be a teacher, it requires patience, dedication, and high sense of responsibility. Teachers sometimes act as the elders of a family for students. They need to quite understand students' personalities, strong points and weak points, inclinations, and so on. They need to deeply think about whether their teaching activities are accordance with the levels of students, and whether the teaching methodologies can improve the potentials of students. I cannot help myself thinking a famous saying: a good teacher is like a candle, it consumes itself to light the way for others.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post! I, too, thought about professional development as I read this chapter, so I'm so glad you brought that up.
ReplyDeleteBecause of how much importance Darling-Hammond et. al. put on assessment and continuous improvement based on a variety of factors, it's clear that teachers need to have the formal educational training to do this, as well as the time and space to do this once they are in the classroom/on the job. There are, of course, formal in-service days for teacher training each term, and I imagine that some of this is devoted to curriculum assessment and transformation; but is there *enough* time? How can administrators ensure that teachers have enough time to do this, both individually as well as with their peers?
That need to assess and reassess constantly needs to have formalized processes and procedures from the organization or it could either fall to the wayside or occur in a vacuum. Last semester I took a class on the organizational theory of education, and we learned about the importance of "deprivatizing" our teaching: allowing what we do [in the classroom] to be seen and assessed by others within the organization, and sharing information about improvements and where we need to learn more and grow. The information gained by this kind of sharing is invaluable. Sometimes this sharing happens through professional development, but is it enough?
Thank you for your blog, and for sharing the idiom about teaching and learning reinforcing each other. It really is a cycle. Reflecting on teaching is important to growing professionally and helping students learn better. You are very right about all of the time that goes into planning a lesson. I was also struck during the reading by the description of the two teachers classrooms, and all of the work that went into preparing the lessons, getting to know the students and the community, setting routines and expectations for the students, and then finally delivering the lessons and dealing with all of the various interruptions that inevitably accompany a lesson. It's a lot of work! It takes all the aspects of preparation working together to be able to appear in command and convey a clear purpose to students in the moment during a lesson. Thank you again for your blog!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing. I am glad that you brought up teachers being able to adapt to lessons and each individual classroom. I think being a teacher is a constant cycle or reviewing what you have done and what you can do next. " Education is an active process" and so is being a teacher and building instruction. I think to my own experience as an educator and how every class I have taught has been so incredibly different. Although I could plan the same lesson from year to year, I choose to alter the lessons based off of the interest of my students. There are so many different components that go into teacher preparation. As described in Chapter 5, in Educational Goals and Purposes, building curriculum, building a bond with your students and also relating cultural and societal experiences is something that all teachers need to be thinking about.
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