Residency: Can It Transform Teaching the Way It Did Medicine? as the Nation Examines Teacher Preparation, the Time Is Ripe for Exploring How the Profession Can Create a Teacher Residency Process Modeled after Medical Preparation
2014; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Medical Education and Admissions
Resumo[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In March 2014, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a board-certified orthopedic surgeon, brought together 18 teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and 18 members of Congress who are board-certified physicians. Convened at the U.S. Capitol, the purpose of the meeting was to have doctors and teachers compare notes on how their respective professions prepare practitioners. conversation was illuminating. physicians spoke about how board certification in medicine is the norm not the exception, even though it is voluntary as it is in teaching where only 3% of teachers are board certified. Education has not built a similar pipeline that leads teachers in this direction. More significantly, teaching has not embraced residency, which the physicians described as being as important to their profession as medical school and, in some ways, even more so. They expressed surprise and concern that nothing similar exists in teaching. When finished my M.D. degree, Andrew Harris (R- Md.), a board-certified anesthesiologist, recalled, I had a lot of book learning and a little bit of experience, but to become a real expert and to gain that expertise, you go through residency and board certification. Should the education profession push for universal residency for teachers? What would it look like? How would it affect student learning and the basic culture of the teaching profession? Given that it would substantially raise the bar for entry into the profession, what effect would it have on the workforce? How would we pay for it? This teacher-doctor conversation at the U.S. Capitol, along with the intense scrutiny directed at teacher preparation programs, raise important questions about whether the time has come to implement broad-scale residency programs for teachers that would acknowledge and respond to the complexity of teaching and the experiences an educator must have to have a guaranteed level of competence on day one. We can't burden teacher preparation programs with all of this responsibility. best university-based programs in the country can't prepare a 22-year-old for the challenges of effective autonomous practice any more than a degree from Harvard Medical School prepares an M.D. to care for patients. work of a successful teacher requires more than just knowing one's content or the various pedagogical approaches that can help facilitate learning. work is about successfully deploying the knowledge and skills in an ever-changing and unpredictable dynamic of classrooms. call for teacher residency programs is hardly new. Indeed, a number of different efforts are already under way in such places as Boston, Chicago, and Denver, organized admirably through the Urban Teacher Residency Network; similar programs such as the one created by the Aspire schools are popping up everywhere. National Education Association, through its Center for Great Public Schools, recently issued a report calling for and outlining how residencies through partnerships can improve teacher preparation (Coffman & Patterson, 2014). At the core of this report is NEA's belief that, The best way to ensure that every teacher is 'profession-ready' from their first day as teacher-of-record is for preparation programs to incorporate teacher residencies that go beyond what most consider the capstone student teaching (p. iii). American Federation of Teachers (AFT) called for a similar requirement in its Raising the Bar report (2012). While the AFT report specifically refers to the need for a full year of student teaching, the vision is very much aligned to the medical model of residency because it follows a formal teacher preparation program and emphasizes clinical experience and understanding that is at the base of effective teaching. All of these efforts move teaching in the right direction although am less sanguine about those who believe clinical experience itself is sufficient preparation. …
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