I can’t help but feel worried about teacher education. You know, university courses for learning our craft. Today I ran into some unfortunate stories of the experiences our aspiring teachers might come across. Who knows whether this is a universal, worldwide issue but I have long held concerns. They have niggled away in the back of my mind. After all this is such an important formative experience for people entering our profession.
- How can you not have lesson intentions or success criteria for sessions about how we teach?
- How can you not have technology rich experiences for our aspiring teachers?
- How is “technology and me don’t mix” still a sentence people say?
- How can you be so muddled about the student course and curriculum, you have no time to talk about learning?
- How is a young teacher meant to learn when nothing of the contemporary classroom is modelled?
- How come we are not thinking deeply about the student teacher experience?
So many questions and so much that needs to change. I know this may be in the minority here in Australia. Well I hope it is.
We are on the cusp of a project with an education team from a university here in Melbourne. I am excited about what we might create together in re-designing teacher education. It is one of a few pieces of our eco-system that is, well, broken. If over the next 5-10 years we can raise the quality of the aspiring teacher experience, it figures that everything might flow in a positive direction from there.
Pic Western Decay by sleepinyourhat
Baby steps are good Cyndi – looking forward to sharing more of our project as it gets started here in Melbourne.
AAAAH! I feel your pain. I teacher technology in the teacher education program at Kansas State University and have the same questions and feel to some extent we are also broken. I have to say we are taking some baby steps froward, but I would love to talk about what you are doing.