... resources >> colloquia >> MDG Institute

MayDay Group Institute: June 10 - 14, 2002:
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
"Re-forming Music Teacher Education: Recent Trends and New Directions for Foundations"


Schooling a Pedagogical Perspective:
The Next Frontier in Teacher Education

J Terry Gates
Hoenny Center for Research and Development in Teaching
St Louis, MO, USA

My purpose today is to promote the notion that the next frontier in pre-service teacher education lies outside of the overpopulated, frustrating, political pursuit of conventional teacher education. We find ourselves in a classic syndrome in all of teacher education, one from which it will be difficult to escape in our generation but for which I intend to lay out a solution. This syndrome has five steps: (a) There are influential critics of the educational bureaucracy who think pedagogical knowledge is nothing more than common sense adorned with quasi-academic trappings. They advocate the least time in preparation, only if necessary in schools of education. (b) Most university presidents and provosts are in sympathy with these critics and place other professional schools ahead of education in local budget priorities and in the culture of the university. They talk to each other and reinforce these biases. (c) This last issue makes it necessary for teacher education programs in most places to make their case for resources on the basis of student credit hours and course demand rather than educational values. This has led us historically to recruit down to the bottom of the barrel for students, something we do less and less. Unfortunately, the culture of a university changes slowly. (d) Because of the widely-assumed (but fictional) crisis in the supply of teachers, and because too many people devalue pedagogical knowledge, teacher education has gained the public status of a distasteful entitlement, a "sure thing" for high school graduates and career changers when something else isn't working for them. So then, (e) the teachers who enter the profession are the survivors of programs that, themselves, have self-survival as a hidden purpose. For this reason, such programs have an amorphous shape (because they need to fit everyone's expectations) and are too accepting of wannabes (because they need to be big). This creates data (high program dropout rates, failed beginning teachers) that reinforce the biases noted above and give energy to the syndrome.

The principal result of this syndrome has been the second-class status of most teacher education programs, in and out of music. We are easy targets for education reformers and critics who confine nearly every remedy for poor beginning teacher quality and low numbers to tinkering with college-based teacher education programs. The churning of teacher tests and new program standards, fueled by a consistent outcry from political leaders, purport to protect the public from unqualified teacher education candidates or certified teachers who can't handle the job. Unfortunately, the internal economics of higher education works against change, especially in our field.

The escape from any syndrome, including this one, involves either leapfrogging over the conventional patterns or escaping by a side door to get where one can find a "zone of proximal comfort" or "zoh-peck" -- remember, you heard it here first.

I propose to leapfrog. Escape to comfort is not an option if one values teaching as a profession. By confining our students in departments of music and keeping them away from schools of education, we are escaping change through the side door. In the fast-moving, jargonistic world of professional teaching that our graduates will have to negotiate, the side-door escape is not a healthy option. I don't intend to argue that view now because it is not important to this presentation.

... top

Teacher education program and curriculum archetypes

Two program delivery archetypes dominate the field: those that socialize a person into teaching using an apprenticeship paradigm and those that professionalize a student using a kind of engineering paradigm of theory and application. In pre-service teacher preparation programs of three years or longer, the attempt is to gradually socialize the student into full-time teaching. Such programs are characterized by insistence on early field experiences, practicums during methods courses, volunteer service, integration of pedagogical content with subject field learning, intense and frequent journaling and other reflective practice techniques, and a gradual ramping up of time spent with K-12 students over a three- to five-year period. "Too much theorizing!" say our students.

By contrast, there are short programs such as in Canada and in Holmes Group schools of education. These rely on concentrated methods and foundations classes, and brief, intensive practicums to prepare their students, usually encompassing a year or less. The assumption is that anyone qualified to be in one of these programs can apply educational theory in practice without much socialization. As noted, the Holmes Group and the short programs in Canada's Colleges of Teachers are attempts to institutionalize this engineering approach to teacher preparation. There are even starker examples of this: "Six-week wonder" emergency certificate programs and those for NGOs like Teach for America fit into this category but usually subsume internship teaching for pay into the program. These professionalize the student; there is too little time to socialize them.

Unfortunately, nearly all programs today are a mix of these approaches; and that is why most students, nearly all beginning teachers, and a growing number of college faculty find the status quo unacceptable at worst and annoyingly bureaucratic at best. The trouble with mixing these types is that programs that socialize and programs that professionalize are different in kind. To succeed, they require that curriculum designers adopt assumptions about teacher preparation that are appropriate to each type and, because of that, assume that different clienteles and different program designs would be appropriate. The Holmes Group approach and that of Canada's Colleges of Teachers come closest to avoiding these difficulties merely by shortening the time and restricting access.(1) Because both public and regulatory assumptions demand it, however, they make a weak attempt to borrow enough of the apprenticeship strategy from the socialization approach to mollify their critics. "Not enough practice!" say the students and their cooperating teachers.

Most accrediting bodies, including state and provincial governments that don't restrict the maximum number of hours credit for a bachelor degree by law, leave the overall length of the program to the providers. This, of course, means that program policy concerning length and course content become driven not by curriculum delivery logic but by the economics of higher education -- competition with other schools for students, credit hour generation, confining students to music schools because of that, etc.

So -- two program delivery archetypes: professionalization and socialization. Most programs currently mix the two even though they are based on different assumptions and therefore should differ in their delivery systems.

Next -- briefly and without much explanation -- a curriculum archetype. The curriculum experience (the content) and the program (delivery system) of most teacher education schemes accommodate the following:

(1) examined personal experience: Personal experience, left unexamined, reduces the likelihood that a teacher can teach deliberately to individual and cultural differences.

(2) a pedagogical perspective: Teachers' pedagogical intuition, what Elliott Eisner calls educational imagination, guides events in the thick of teaching.(2) Veteran teachers use responses shaped by experience, what Donald A. Schön calls reflection-in-action.(3) A pedagogical perspective enables teachers to bring imagination and experience naturally and productively into the current learning situation of their students. More importantly, people who have it place their long-term rewards in the growth of students. I will come back to this important feature later.

(3) general knowledge: All preK-12 teachers earn their pay by interpreting their specialties in terms of the requirement that their students complete a broad, general education. A tiny percentage of any teacher's students will go on to higher education in their field and, though motivating, the myth that all middle school students will remain as musically active throughout secondary school and beyond is untenable.

(4) content knowledge: Teachers increasingly collaborate within and across disciplines, requiring that their specialized knowledge and skills are both thorough and current.

(5) pedagogical knowledge: Pedagogical knowledge is grounded in research in learning and human development, society and culture, and curriculum and instructional methodology. Professional teachers use a wide range of valid and reliable measures to assess learning. They are expected to interpret the results and use the information to improve learning and teaching. They are aware of various education stakeholders and involve them constructively in the educational process.

So, five curriculum dimensions -- examined personal experience, a pedagogical perspective, general knowledge, content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. I'll focus on the first two today, not because I don't have opinions about the other three, but because neither the next frontier nor a leap-frog strategy in teacher education lies in general, content or pedagogical knowledge. We cannot ignore them, however, and this whole week is devoted to general, special and pedagogical knowledge. We'll need to keep on tinkering with our curriculum and making it better, moving it in directions such as those that guide the MayDay Group action ideals, and as Keith Swanwick outlined in ISME Edmonton in 2000(4) and elaborated in his 1999 book:

There are certain important pedagogical implications in this view of articulating, interpreting and regenerating heritage. For teaching too is an art, a 'techne', in the generic sense of the word. And in any art so much depends, not so much upon 'what' is done, but upon how and why it is done. I offer three simple principles based on the concept of music as discourse. It seems to me that these can inform teaching in any setting. These are: care for music as discourse, care for the musical discourse of students, and fluency first and last.

... top

Teachers as expert people

Here's the crux of the matter: Swanwick's general point above, and Eisner's in his vision of the educational imagination, remind us that teachers are expert people, not merely bundles of listed skills or tested knowledge. Every teacher has a professional autobiography that begins before -- yes, before -- the teacher's memory of it begins. This view is ancient, but in modern educational times it goes back to William James and his Talks to Teachers(5) in which he warns against constructing pedagogy solely on the findings of science in teaching.

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality.

The typical followup to such statements is to "play the music teacher card" - to extol the virtues and celebrate the obvious about music and about the art of teaching. Instead, I shall show how specific actions within the two program archetypes -- professionalization and socialization -- can define the next frontier, and can break into the syndrome noted above using the leapfrog strategy. I shall show how "Stage Five Teachers" can screen for a pedagogical perspective in the first instance and develop it in the second. The next frontier lies in two creative, deliberate strategies that use examined personal experience to screen for, and build upon, a pedagogical perspective.


Screening for a pedagogical perspective in the professionalization paradigm

When we audition music majors for degree programs, we assess their prior learning very quickly. We also make quick judgments about the extent to which applicants can finish their preferred programs in a reasonable length of time. It takes about five minutes to make these judgments of a candidate's musicality. We've become pretty good at this, and we trust our judgment most of the time.

The pedagogical parallel to musicality -- what my wife has dubbed "teachicality" -- is surprisingly as easy to observe and judge as is musicality. What grounds this judgment is a sense that another person possesses a pedagogical perspective -- a focus on and interest in the learning of others, not merely a focus on the display of teacher-like skills. We can construct situations in which applicants to our programs will examine personal experience during an interview and, as we do for musicality in an interview, we can screen for a pedagogical perspective. Here's how:

The reason that the teacher education culture has not validated this judgment about a pedagogical perspective as we have musicality is not because it can't be observed intuitively. Rather, this is largely due to the practical and ethical difficulties of providing applicants to a teacher education program reasonable opportunities to teach during an interview. The line of questioning reflected in the "interview map" reveals much about a relatively mature person's pedagogical perspective, and it introduces the applicant to the notion that examined personal experience will be part of the program. But a "teaching audition" would be better. The proper application of this interview protocol is to professionalization-type programs, but more and more of our 18-year-olds have some sort of teaching experience before they get to college. It can be used for most applicants to our conventional undergraduate programs, too.

Research might validate and hone this tool before it is widely used to accept or reject candidates for professionalization-type programs. But, in music schools, wide-spread professional acceptance grounded in the experience-based intuition of applied music teachers have validated the entrance audition. In music schools, we did not wait for the research. The motivation to do predictive validity studies on music entrance auditions is weak because the validation in practice was established long before it occurred to anyone to research it. The subversive thing to do with an interview protocol such as this is just to use it as if everyone knows it's a good idea.

In practice, the interview has to be accompanied by other measures such as writing samples, autobiographical sketches, transcripts, purpose statements, etc. But these conventional measures and the conventional interview screen more for political correctness and academic savvy rather than for a pedagogical perspective. In a thoroughly triangulated application procedure, the phrase for rejectees on the basis of the interview shown here is: "The interview verified that this program does not fit your experiential profile. There are programs at other colleges that will get you to the same certification goal." -- or, if they demand entrance -- "To complete this program well you will need the support of the kind of people who interviewed you, and the support is not there." I've found that these communicate well enough to most teacher education applicants who cannot frame themselves pedagogically.

... top

Developing pedagogical expertise earlier in the socialization paradigm

Over the last ten years or so, I've been increasingly affected (as you surely have) by the intense interest in teacher education on the part of education's critics, in and out of the profession. (As Abraham Lincoln was reported to say about being ridden out of town on a rail, "If it weren't for the honor of the thing, I'd rather walk.") Virtually all of this attention has been focussed on making professional teachers out of young adults and career changers, and on making better teachers out of those already in the profession. Almost no one is looking systematically at improving the pre-college development of teachers. I am now engaged in building a professional research and development program around this issue.

What gives structure to this interest is a five-stage model of teacher development, a personal journey in which the first two stages predate the beginning of conventional teacher education at college. The model has lots of good uses, but germane for today is its structure. That is, it gives an enactive vision of the professional development of those who become socialized to teaching and who establish careers in education, including those who oversee and contribute to this process -- teacher educators, cooperating teachers, mentor teachers, K-12 program supervisors, etc. -- the Stage Five teachers in the model.


Five Stage "Journey" of Teacher Development

For more on the chart below, see J T Gates, Arts teacher education reform: recruiting a new profession, in Arts Education Policy Review, 96(3) (Jan/Feb 1995), 34-39.

What to do:	What to look for:
Stage One - Elementary School
look for pedagogical perspective	"spirals"
assign coaching, confer w/teaching child	willingness to coach peers, discuss after
confer with parents	support for long term development
develop discipline base beyond minimums	high aptitude in one or two disciplines
Stage Two - Middle and High School
expand peer coaching, teaching	rewards, plans, reflection
assign routine teacher "duties"	acceptance, efficiency
deepen, expand musical study	thoroughness, consistency, interest
multiply musical opportunities	curiosity, preparation, self-ratings
plan college study, teacher input	discernment, focus, interest
Stage Three - College or University
expand musicianship, pedagogical knowledge	continuity of pedagogical perspective
challenge pedagogical motivations, actions	growing insight, knowledge, skill
"get out more," go beyond assignments	expanded professional network, etc
Stage Four - Situated Career
find a mentor	self-reflection, experimentation
become integrated in school's community	tenure; master's degree
continue music and pedagogical study	mature musicianship, teaching
expand professional networks	conference attendance, volunteering
Stage Five - Career Professional Developer
advocate for music education, students, peers	mentoring opportunities
deepen professional knowledge, networks	leadership opportunities
accept student teachers; prep as teacher educator	curiosity; critiques of alternatives

The model is grounded in the stance that a teacher is not merely a collection of skills and knowledge "components" but is a real person with special skills and values and with a teaching life before college. People's pre-college teaching lives have been largely ignored in our efforts to improve teaching, at least in America, except by a growing number of large-city high school faculties and at least three states: South Carolina, Ohio and California. I am motivated by the belief that pre-college teacher development is the next frontier in teacher education. The next leaps forward will be on that frontier.

This model presumes that Stage Five teachers can use their professional judgment to identify extraordinary teaching abilities early. When I discuss this with elementary classroom teachers, they easily name students and share examples. If they are at Stage Five, they know what I mean when I bring up the idea that we can begin to develop people's pedagogical characters in elementary schools. What remains is a more systematic investigation of this recognition along with some strategizing about professional change.

The short of it is this: We currently and systematically use our professional judgment about talent or aptitude in math, science, the arts, and a long list of other pursuits, and we develop it through schooling. It is a paradox that we who are teachers do not use these same strategies for the early schooling of pedagogical abilities. Because there is no such thing as preK-12 education in pedagogy as there is in mathematics, for example, we'll have to start from scratch.

There are some daunting difficulties in this, not the least of which is the desire of most parents and teachers to encourage their children/students to pursue more lucrative careers than teaching. They fear that early development of pedagogical abilities will be an attempt to track students into teaching. They don't have that fear of mathematics or science. In addition, early teacher development presupposes that children will be teaching other children, and taxpayers have objected on the grounds that they hired the children's teachers to do this. There are other objections, as our early research reveals 6.

To those who don't want elementary children tracked to teaching early I say that pedagogy is a "transportable" skill, applicable to most leadership situations including parenting. It would be better if all our people were better at teaching, regardless of where in the society one finds them. In the future, parents can be better collaborators with professional teachers if they know more about teaching as a set of deliberate actions. Learning to teach is good general education.

There is some research on peer teaching and collaborative learning, but there is much research to be done on the learning value of teaching something -- the "value added" to one's learning when one teaches what one has learned. I have reframed this as a result of my conversations and presentations under a program title that I found communicates the idea quickly -- "Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach." A research review on "teaching to learn" has been completed and is available from the Hoenny Center(6).

There are some people in high schools who have been working on pre-college teacher education programs for almost a decade. They are linked together largely by Recruiting New Teachers, Inc., and there are such programs in most major American cities. I have not yet investigated the Canadian situation in this regard. One state (South Carolina) has a statewide program of pre-college teacher recruitment and development; California and Ohio have extensive statewide networks of such programs. These programs, however, attempt to replicate the typical early undergraduate courses in teacher education, and they have high drop out rates. They do, however, provide high school students some guided practice in tutoring and teaching classes, and some provide introductory information about educational history and psychology. These experiences present opportunities for improving on the research and plugging some of the gaps in our knowledge of pre-college teacher development, and that is what the Hoenny Center is all about.

But to really leapfrog the syndrome, and confront the issues of developing better teachers and taking back our profession, we must learn how to start pedagogical development in children even earlier than high school. We at the Hoenny Center intend to explore the presence and observability of a pedagogical perspective and learn how to develop it in people as young as seven years old, an age when cooperative and collaborative learning strategies begin to be systematic parts of the school experience.

... top

Strategizing change

But research is not everything. What's next, in addition to initiating research projects:

* Sell the idea to teachers and parents that learning to teach well transfers to other careers and to parenting. It's good general education.

* Start identifying, recruiting and educating promising new teachers when they are still in elementary school.

* Build career ladders that motivate teachers and unify professionals at all schooling levels.

* Honor and use expertise. Reward teachers who share it with others, not those who hide it.

* Start to re-build our profession stage by stage, restore our unity with our own graduates, and present a united front for teacher quality.

What's in the way?

* Competition at all levels of schooling for space, time, kids, money, access to practicum sites, etc.

* BWAME factors (self-identity issues; BWAME = "But What About Me?")

* Assessment that stratifies

* Old teacher education paradigms in new times

* Little levers for big loads (such as most reform recommendations)

To these impediments, I agree with Roseanne Rosannadanna: "It's always something." There will always be excuses. The practical fact is this: Professional teachers begin their development and finish their careers somewhere in K-20 schools. As teachers, we can define the profession by the kind of people we recruit and educate together. We do not need to let others define good teaching. If we look for it and expect it, we know what a pedagogical perspective is as surely as we know what musicality is. Once we have confidence in our own judgments about these matters, we can learn how to develop pedagogical and musical expertise together, right from the beginning.

***

1. An aside: The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) reports that, as of April 2, 2002, only 33% of applicants to teacher education were accepted. The Holmes-type program I directed accepted a similar percentage. Private colleges in the Buffalo area do a good business among the 67% who can't get in at UT or the other Ontario teacher education schools. They get jobs in Ontario because the demand for teachers exceeds the places in Ontario teacher education programs supported by provincial grants.

2. Elliott Eisner, The Educational Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1979). See especially, ch9

3. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Several books followed, including critiques and Vygotskian analyses by others.

4. Keith Swanwick, "Musical technology and the interpretation of heritage," keynote address to the International Society for Music Education, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, July 18, 2000. See also his Teaching music musically (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

5. William James, Talks to Teachers (New York: Norton, 1958), 23-24.

6. For a brief summary and bibliography of this research, email JTGates@aol.com or write Hoenny Center for Teaching; 9053 Saranac Drive; St. Louis, MO 63117; USA.