I take issue with the Public Agenda report on the teachers of teachers and your Dec. 1 editorial about the alleged wide differences of opinion between professors of education and everybody else.
The report was built on lists of priorities presented to education professors, to which they responded on a scale of 1 to 5. For instance, one list consisted of 10 priorities related to qualities most essential to good teachers. The priorities ranged from “teachers who are themselves life-long learners and are constantly updating their skills” to “teachers who expect students to be neat, on time, and polite.”
No analysis was provided about how these professors structured their priorities in their work as teacher educators, yet the impression was given in the report and in your editorial that teacher educators are unconcerned about things like honesty, punctuality and neatness.
There is a consistent body of research since the 1930s that demonstrates that when teachers focus on helping students “learn how to learn” or become “active learners,” honesty, punctuality and neatness follow.
You questioned the meaningfulness of the term “active learner.” It may not be the most felicitous of terms, but I have yet to meet a “passive learner,” and the more teachers engage students in actively investigating their world through reading and writing and solving real problems with math with the full expectation that they will learn basic skills, the more they learn them.
Professors of education from St. Xavier University, in conjunction with IRI Skylight, have been working intensely with teachers throughout the metropolitan area in a Field Based Masters Program in Teaching and Leadership for the last seven years on precisely these issues. Hundreds of action research projects were aimed at various forms and approaches to engaging students in more active learning. Results have been little short of astonishing: Student work has improved, and teachers have become more committed and enthusiastic.
I know of no major complaint that the teacher educators’ ideas were profoundly out of sync with those of parents or teachers. There have been rough spots, of course, but teacher educators and teachers are working together in this and similar programs throughout the country for the same goals, adopting shared procedures. Success stories abound. Teachers and parents are delighted with the results.
