Powerful Teacher Prep
Your article “Training Teachers for a Marathon” countering UCSB Teacher Education Program’s failing grade by National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), prompted a sense of dread as well as a need to reply.
If 60 percent of the children in this area are not reading at grade level by 3rd grade, our public schools are certainly not meeting the needs of our society to prepare young people to participate in a democracy dependent on an educated electorate. However, in my 30-year experience as a teacher educator here in Santa Barbara I can testify to the powerful preparation our local teacher education programs offer to teacher candidates.
The UC Santa Barbara programs for Multiple Subject and Single Subjects have been recognized locally, statewide, and nationally for their innovative and high quality preparation. One important difference between UCSB and other programs is the remarkable placement of teacher candidates with our community’s high performing teachers for the entire school year. This is historically one of the most important aspects of excellent preparation, giving the candidate an understanding of the teacher’s role from preparing their classrooms for students at the beginning of the year to how teachers close out the year.
Another important function of teacher education is to prepare candidates for the full range of diversity found in our public schools. That means methods that foster inclusion, belonging and appreciation of the diverse backgrounds, languages, interests and special needs of every child. If the critics “fail” UCSB, it is because of their own confusion about what really matters in our schools and how actually difficult it is to design instruction to meet a wide range of students’ needs.
The example in your article makes this abundantly clear. “She used the example of two 3rd-grade students assessed to be reading at a preschool level. One, she said, was an English learner with ‘beautiful decoding skills’ but an emerging level of vocabulary, while the other had an impressive English vocabulary but struggled with decoding. ‘They got the same score, but they need different support,’ she explained.” That example requires diagnosing the problem, designing targeted interventions, managing time and reassessing the value of the intervention. New teachers are confronted with the individual needs of each child, and thankfully they are supported by mentors for the first two years of their practice.
There is always room for growth and change in every profession. Teachers in our area are continually learning the newest research findings, reflecting on their practice, adjusting their strategies and growing in their knowledge, skills and awareness of the incredible gifts or challenges their students bring to their classrooms. We need to stop the nasty, undermining that only alienates the greater society from our public institutions and instead start recognizing our teachers as the heroes/heroines that they are!