Count me as not surprised

From a comment  by JennyD to this post at Up the Down Staircase:

I teach in an ed school, and I'm also involved in doing a review of what the ed school teaches. What I discovered is that a number of ed school instructors--both former teachers and academics--tell our students that teaching is not preplanned, that they don't need to learn practices, that their teaching should emerge organically from their interaction with students. I've also discovered that our instructors are not unusual, and that lots of people in ed schools say these things.

These folks teach our students that there aren't necessarily better ways to build skills, and that there aren't skills that are best taught together.

You would be surprised how many ed school faculty are entirely out of touch with what teachers do in classrooms.

Like I said, count me as not surprised.  Perhaps this is one the data indicates he teachers are overwhelmingly ineffective and take up to 10 or 12 years to reach peak effectiveness.

Comments

[Chris C.]

Most expert/novice studies frequently find that it takes about 10 years to be an expert at something, so i'm skeptical that peak effectiveness could be reached earlier than that.

However, that doesn't mean teachers couldn't be more prepared coming out of ed schools. I was surprised and disturbed by Jenny's observation that many ed school faculty think teaching is not a planned activity. Of course, most teachers have so little time to plan that maybe the ed school folks aren't as out of touch with reality as they appear...