The mentoring and support tend to focus on teacher-driven behavior. In a classroom, reality is give and take not teacher-driven exchange. Students are not compliant, disruption happens, and the kids have to be convinced to have fun learning. Just one or two hecklers in a high school class, one or two talkers in middle school, or one or two immature behavior kids in an elementary classroom can effectively destroy the day’s lesson. You have to learn how to coerce the disruptor into helping you teach, and if that fails you have to learn how to suppress the disruption with the help of peer pressure. This means understanding child psychology.

Mentoring and support does not deal with the psychology of the kid in the room. Instead, they focus on maneuvering the thinking and behavior of the teacher, because that is what a district can control relatively cheaply. It is also what can be measured easily (Did the teacher demonstrate the use of strategy X or not?). Psychology classes are not required for teachers. Yet, I believe that over half of the effort in an effective classroom is based on understanding the behavior motives of the kids.

No matter how much mentoring and support a teacher gets, until he or she learns to “read” the kids and to see behavior patterns for what they are, the kids aren’t going to focus on the lesson when it is so much more interesting to “play” the teacher. I don’t see mentoring and support changing any time soon, when it is so much cheaper to focus on manipulating how the teacher teaches instead of focusing on how to make the students learn even when they do not want to do so.

As you know, I work for the New Teacher Center. Even our own analyses don’t suggest nor have we as an organization promised an impact in one year, let alone the first year of implementation of a brand new program in a school or district. It takes at least two years for induction to impact practice and student learning. The benefits are long-term. It’s why we run a two-year induction program. One year doesn’t cut it. It’s important to note that a two-year treatment was added to the Mathematica study after it was underway to take a close look at multi-year induction–and not just a single-year treatment.

Check out today’s Ed Week story for a more balanced take on the Mathematica study: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/10/30/11induction.h28.html

We may not have a vocabulary but we certainly have jargon.

When I started graduate school in math, the graduate assistants who were teaching were required to take a one hour course on the teaching of math. This course was from the math department, not the education department. It was an okay course in many ways. The teacher gave us some practical ideas on testing, and a little bit of practical information on organizing the college algebra course we were teaching. But what really impressed me was that week after week she would simply cancel the class. So long as problems did not develop for the graduate assistants, she apparently felt we had nothing to talk about. Of course I like that priority in one way. She pretty well left us alone. She placed no demands on us, and that was good. But I also felt it was a tremendous waste of potential. I could have filled that time with no trouble whatsoever.

The teacher of this course had managed to get a masters degree in education along with her doctorate in math. What did she learn in this masters curriculum? Why didn’t she have anything to impart to us? She didn’t try to be a mentor to us, and that was good. But must we conclude that the best we can do for new teachers is just to leave them alone?

I don’t want to make it a knee jerk habit to blame everything on ed school, but I do feel I am forced again and again to two conclusions. One, as I mentioned above, is that many good teachers are no good at all in explaining or describing what they do. That would not be the case if ed school really had substance. My second conclusion, which does a lot to explain the first conclusion, is that ed school has chosen ideology, not analyses, as it’s foundational basis. I have expanded this idea here.

The next semester, I went to another high school. I had one mediocre mentor, and one truly great one. The great one was a wonderful teacher and was very involved in my training. To the degree that I am a good teacher, I owe much of skill to her. I have often wondered how bad a teacher I would now be if I had not been lucky enough to have met her.

Almost all of what I learned in my teaching credential classes was useless or nearly so. My experience with that one great master teacher taught me far more about teaching. The quality of the mentor makes all the difference in the world.

Marco

I’m not denying that such training is important. I just think the focus on increasing training neglects problems with incentives and the motivation of educators to learn effective techniques and implement them well. Lack of information is not the only problem.