Practice Makes Perfect

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 There is an old adage that my mom used to use "practice makes perfect."    I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago and I heard a documentary from American Radio Works called Teaching Teachers.  I have included a link below.  The recording is a little less than a hour but well worth listening to. It speaks to the future of teacher education in and out of the university, and the choices that those in the academy, and those in leadership, will have to make.  What are the 19 high leverage teaching practices that all teachers need to have?  Should teacher education be focused more in the field than in the classroom?  And what is the most effective method of continuing an educator's training once they are in the field?

I felt a lot of differing emotions as I listened to this documentary.  To say that it was impactful is an understatement.  Here are a few salient quotes from the documentary;

Teaching Teachers

"In the United States teaching is not treated as a profession that requires extensive training  like law or medicine".

"The people who are willing to be responsible for young people's learning deserve to learn how to do this work well, and the children that they teach, particularly, deserve to have those teachers taught".

"The idea at Michigan now is to focus everything on practice.  That's a big change.  Students used to spend a lot of time reading and talking about teaching but rarely practicing it.  The assignments in the past were much more reflections and analysis.  In some sense we could have been mislead by people getting good grades for writing well.  And although it may sound a little too extreme, we're more interested now in whether they can do it well not how they can talk about it".

"Education ideas developed in the US weren't being used by American teachers but they were being used in Japan".

"When new idea about teaching and learning are introduced, Japanese teachers have a way to learn those new ideas and practice them.  American teachers don't.  Some people are trying to change that by bring Lesson Study to the United States".

American Radio Works: Teaching Teachers

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