To the Editor:
I write this letter in response to your Friday article entitled "Study Suggests Teacher Certification is Ineffective" (April 14). We in the Education Department's Teacher Education Program do not question the quality of Professor Staiger's research. Nor do we challenge its central claim that graduates of some teacher accreditation programs do not help their students generate higher standardized test scores in Los Angeles than do their non-accredited peers, though such tests are only one very narrow measure of a teacher's effectiveness.
I simply need to stress the need for caution in interpreting the article's stark title and ensuing generalizations. While Andrea Palmer '08 is right that personality is an important factor in a teacher's likelihood for success, it is by no means enough. I held attitudes very similar to Palmer when I graduated from Dartmouth with little formal preparation in teaching, and I went to a boarding school where I taught charismatically, energetically and passionately; like Palmer, I was "good with children."
Fortunately, I then attended an excellent teacher certification program that showed me the seductive danger of relying merely on charisma, energy, passion and being good with children, of believing that teaching was a simple enough profession that one was somehow born with all of the skills and knowledge necessary to excel. After a subsequent decade teaching in a school for children with learning disabilities and then a public middle school, I know exactly how much difference a good teacher education program can make.
For if some of excellent teaching is an art, much of it is a painstaking craft -- one that requires deep understandings of child and adolescent development, of one's content area, of the latest research into how the brain learns, of the impact of learning and cultural differences, of the best approaches to planning overarching curriculum and daily lessons, and of strategies for negotiating the bewildering world of state and national standards, legal standards and the exhausting standards set by excellent teachers for themselves. Why would we not want our young teachers to have these understandings?
There is enormous variety in the quality of accreditation programs nationally, and some fundamental ingredients that distinguish the best. Certification candidates should spend extensive time in schools under the guidance of excellent mentor teachers, in the same way that doctors-in-training go through extensive internships before working solo. They should be observed teaching multiple times by a professor versed in the latest educational research and a veteran him or herself of years in K-12 classrooms. They should be required to produce bodies of evidence that demonstrate their ability to meet exacting expectations for content knowledge, implementation techniques, and forms of meaningful assessment. And they must become reflective practitioners, so that they enter such a critical profession equipped to learn from both their successes and mistakes.
This is why too many Dartmouth students that I have known over the last five years have struggled in programs like Teach for America that require so little preparation for the classroom. They leave Dartmouth full of idealism, personality, excellent content knowledge and a genuine desire to make a difference. Far too often they leave teaching forever two years later, overwhelmed by challenges they were not prepared for and without the necessary strategies for dealing with these challenges.
It is naive to assume that merely attending an accreditation program will make you a good teacher. It is fundamentally irresponsible, though, to assume that there is nothing to be gained from an excellent accreditation program either. Do we really want, as the article suggests, to encourage college graduates to go straight into classrooms to see if they are any good, without the preparation a strong teacher education program can provide? Would we accept that approach with aspiring doctors?
Our children deserve better.
