Facilitate Wonder

Check out the sunrise on two different days of the year shot from the same window.  The videos were shot out of my classroom window at Tapestry High School (on the third floor of St. Mary’s School for the Deaf) in Buffalo, NY.

Note too the times for sunrise on the different dates. The first video shows the morning of November 11, 2007. The second shows the morning of January 3, 2008.

Pay attention to where the sun rises on the different days. (The time is hard to read underneath the youtube logo, dang it). You can run both videos at the same time and pause them at sunrise.  If you watch the video on the youtube site, there’s no logo.  The dates above are linked to Youtube and will open each in its own window.

The building in the distance is Erie County Medical Center. The clouds, especially in the second video are pretty cool to watch too.

Cheers,

Don

Do your best to forget all you know about schools (but remember what you understand about learning).  Now, picture this conversation:

Fred: I’ve got a great idea! Let’s put 20 or 25 fifteen year-olds in a room for fifty minutes at a shot and have some adult tell them about algebra!

Jackie: That is a great idea! Say, you could have them do that everyday!

Nate: Yeah! Yeah! And you could do it with biology and history too!

Jackie: And Spanish and English and Art! They’d be able to maybe go down the hall to different rooms for each of those things for the fifty minute blocks.   That’d be so awesome!

Keesha:  Ooh!  We might be able to get a couple of thousand teenagers into a really big building all at once!  You all are geniuses!

Fred:  Oh indeed we are!   Indeed we are.

Of course, this isn’t how high schools came to be as they are.   But, if the idea sounds stupid in this imagined discussion, maybe that’s because it’s simply a bad idea.  Maybe schools fail so many students because the structure is fatally flawed.

Maybe the reason so many bright, hard working nice people leave the field of teaching is because the field has set out a task for itself that is next to impossible.

None of this is to say that schools don’t have positive effects on many students.  Clearly they do.   Most Americans, according to an AP-AOL Poll, can identify a teacher who changed their lives. But 37% of us can’t.  And by the time you graduate from high school, you’ve probably had about 40 teachers…

Is trying to improve schools in 2007 akin to trying to improve typewriters in 1987?  That is, something that’s possible (and important to the users) but…

The safety information is below.

The longer term plan includes having students create things a little like this:

To figure out how to do class-based video production, I’ve started the first one and we’ll work together as a class to make a copy with subtitles that describes ( but does not explain) what happens.  The original, without the descriptive subtitles, can then be used by other classrooms to puzzle over the demonstration.

They too can create a careful description and check it against their initial explanation. Almost everyone has an initial explanation that fails to correctly explain the order of observed events.

I’ve spent an absurdly long time processing this demonstration, and I hope it is ultimately worthwhile. As I see it, understanding the underlying science is required to understand convection and that understanding convection is required to understand an incredible amount of Earth science. Understanding a bit about fire is also helpful for understanding quite a bit more about Earth processes.

I’ll admit the production values need a little work.

Later this week, I plan to post #2: A Water (Vapor) Balloon: What happens when you microwave a sealed balloon with just a few drops of water in it?

SAFETY AND OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR THE GLASS ON THE FACE DEMONSTRATION:

 I have burned myself in two different ways doing this demonstration:

1. Holding the glass on its side or at an angle before placing it against my cheek. DON’T DO THAT!!!   This allowed the upper rim of the glass to heat up and that created a semi-circular burn on my cheek.

2. I used too large a piece of paper and consequently had a large flame licking my cheek. DON’T DO THAT EITHER!  That was really just stupid on my part.

I am sure there are a number of other ways to injure yourself when you play with fire in this way.  Be smart.  Be careful.  Where eye protection.

OTHER TIPS:

1.  Teachers should spend time processing the demonstration. Too many science demonstrations are dealt with too quickly. Kids may think it’s cool, but they should also figure out what’s going on. Please don’t simply tell them. (Note too that I haven’t told you why this does what it does).
2. Newspaper burns better than paper intended for the copy machine or printer.  And it’s cheaper.
3. The glass needs to be clear and clean so people can see what’s going on.  Wash it after a few uses to keep it clear.
4. The glass needs to be glass so it won’t melt.
5. Razor stubble makes it so the glass won’t stick.  Shave shortly before the demonstration (if your face requires it).
6. Tik Liem, who I saw do this years ago at a STANYS conference, put the glass on his forehead.  I’ve never had my hair short enough to do that.
7. If you leave the glass on, it will leave a hicky, according to Liem.  I trusted him on this and have never left it on for very long.
8. You may know that accupuncturists do stuff like this as part of therapy.  I don’t have any real sense if such things have any health benefit.  (That’s more an aside than a tip, I suppose.)

And, on a completely different note, I’ve added some folks to my blogroll.  Take a look at what Joe and Melisa have to say.

I should be sleeping at 2:00 a.m. on the night before classes start, but I’m not. I’m thinking about what I’m doing. About what we’re doing at Tapestry. About why I’m doing it and why we’re doing it. Certainly it has some feeling of trying to save the world. Or some kids in Buffalo, anyway. For whatever reason, I’m drawn to that type of work. And I wasn’t doing it at Colgate. Striving to serve the best served didn’t serve me very well.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve twice had jobs that I loved — as a teacher at Norwich High School and as a graduate student (and instructor and researcher) in Michigan State University’s College of Education. I left the first job because I could find something more fun and more important (and because even though I loved it, there were problems that I truly drove crazy and I thought I might be able to help fix those problems). I left the second because I graduated and they wouldn’t let me stay.

Both of those jobs I loved had a few commonalities. Teaching and learning to central to both and so was saving the world. I am trying to save the world, but why? Partly it’s because I think and hope I have skills and knowledge that can be useful in the task. Perhaps more than any of that though, I’m trying to save myself.

While having had good jobs was a blessing, it was also a curse. I know good, rewarding, fun jobs are out there and I can’t settle for a job doing some variant of the wrong thing. Part of what (for me) has made a job fun has been a focus on the public good; on making the world a better place.

So, I’m a goody-goody.

Nah, at least not through and through.

I’m looking to save myself. I’m at my best personally and  professionally when the center of the work is helping others understand important ideas in ways that inform their our action.  That also creates the environment in which I learn best. If I’m doing reasonably well at the task, the energy from my students energizes me. More importantly, students teach me about the world.

Another part of a good job is working with fun and smart people. It looks like I’m doing that too. As things look right now, I’m about to engage in this venture with some very impressive colleagues — we’re committed to doing good work and I think we each hold visions of what might be that resonate with one another. I think that we will make a difference. It looks as though those who got it off the ground already have. An added bonus is that I’m married to one of these wonderful folks. What fun. Life looks good.

G’night.

Don

I’m settling in and back on the blog! Tonight, just some quick thoughts that grew out of some of my summer professional development. I intend to expand these ideas a bit in a future post.

When you make a graph of something, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to show others something you think is important? Or are you trying to figure out what might be important? If you teach, why do you have students create graphs?

My gut (backed up by experience in many, many different classrooms) says that when graphing is used in teaching, it usually is about showing. Do those who are out to discover something have different purposes for their graphs?  Does that have implications for inquiry-oriented teaching?

Can we have our students use graphs to explore their data?  What does that mean?  What does it look like?

I suppose I should note that it is quite important to use graphs to show things to others and that’s key to the work of many researchers, but it’s not the only thing they do with a graph.

Do you have good examples of how you’ve used graphing in either your teaching or your research? Do you have some examples that maybe aren’t so good that you’d like to think through?

These thoughts were catalyzed by The Expeditionary Learning Schools’ High School Institute in Boston last month. The science and math slice of the institute was facilitated by Ron Berger and John LeCavalier.  It was truly good stuff.  Again, more on that later.

It’s good to be back in blogland!

Don

I’m at the moment homeless though not in the scarier sense of the word.  We’ve closed the sale of our Hamilton house and won’t be able to move into the new house in Amherst until about August 1.  I’m also officially without a computer.  Putting these bits together explains why my blog has only been updated sporadically for a while (really, since its inception).  That sporadic nature will continue for at least another month.

Cheers,

Don

The following was also submitted to the Norwich Evening Sun.

I taught science at Norwich High School from 1987 to 1994 and then went off to graduate school.  A winding professional path brought me to Colgate University and back to the Chenango Valley in 2003.  As I prepare to once again leave the Chenango Valley, I want to extend my thanks to some fine educators with whom my students and I have worked.   As the list is long, I am sure to miss some important players and I apologize for anyone I have overlooked.

When I left the valley the first time, what I missed most were my fine colleagues at Norwich High School, especially Rich Bernstein, Patti Giltner, Joe Stewart and Jim Wysor.  I learned much from them that has proved to be invaluable in the years since.  All these years later, I still value their friendship and professional expertise. I use the ways I saw Rich and Dave Paul interact some twenty years ago as the model for what teacher professional development should look like.  It has been great to reconnect professionally with Rich as he helped Colgate student teachers consider aspects of teaching too often overlooked.

I’m also thankful to my two former college students, Sarah Miller and Correen (Seacord) Briggs who have made me look good by doing so well as science teachers at Norwich High School.

In leaving Colgate University, the work I will miss the most will be my collaboration with teachers, administrators and students at Sherburne Earlville Middle School.  Working together with Principal Jill Lee and English and mathematics teachers allowed me to “teach” what I believe is the best course I’ve taught in my 20 years as an educator.  The reality is that it wasn’t me who did most of the teaching.  My students were taught more by middle school students and their teachers.  Rennie Korver, Linda Leach and Dave Westervelt were especially helpful in opening their classrooms and themselves to my students.

Laurie Doliver also worked with several of my students and it was a special delight to have one of my former high school students as such a fine colleague.  (I’ve also been lucky to see some of my other former high school students doing first-rate work as teachers).

I want to pass along my thanks to the middle school students as well.  These middle school students were perhaps the best teachers for my college students.  It is difficult to describe the breadth and depth of issues related to teaching and learning that middle school students taught my Colgate students but it was impressive indeed.  Most of my students came to know and respect at least one child whose school experiences were remarkably different from his or her own.

I am optimistic that all involved – me, my students, the teachers and their students – benefited from the collaboration.  My students learned from smart dedicated teachers about what characteristics make a good teacher.  They learned important lessons about the many reasons why students do poorly in school and that many of those reasons have little to do with how smart or how nice a kid is.

I am hopeful that the middle school students got something just as valuable.  Many got individual attention to help them complete schoolwork.  That is nice, but I think some got something far more.  There was a respectful relationship between the students of Colgate University and those of Sherburne Earlville Middle School that I think will make both groups more successful as they each move forward in the years to come.

Linda, Rennie, Laurie and Dave were not the only teachers who helped make the program work well.  Over the past four years, I have had students work with most of the mathematics department and a few members of the English and science departments Danielle Goedel, Kevin Vibbard, Roseanne Kantor and Harmon Hoff all provided wonderful experiences for my students, as did others too numerous to mention.

With sincere appreciation,

Don Duggan-Haas

I wrote a quick response to Ben Stein’s commentary on Tuesday night’s Marketplace. In Stein’s commentary, he raised appropriate concerns about regulating the emissions of private jets and yachts. Aspects of the way he raised those concerns struck me as inappropriate. Specifically, he defended the use of SUVs and belittled Prius drivers (such as myself). Here’s my response:

I’m a Prius driver who happens to be about as beautiful as, well, Ben Stein. While I wonder too about why we don’t ban private jets and yachts, I found his defense of SUVs coupled with the belittling of hybrids troublesome. While my wife (who also drives the Prius) is indeed beautiful, I’m not. As teachers, we’re not rich. The car costs quite a bit less than the average SUV to buy and far, far less to fill up. Our other car isn’t a Ferrari — it’s a 1998 Chevy Prizm.

Stein is right that the rich need to do their share. He’s also right that their share is larger than Joe Sixpack’s. Joe is superior to the super rich in that he does far less damage to the environment. Ecological damage is not something we want to equalize if it means catching up to the rich.

The rich tend to have more than one big house, more than one car and they fly an awful lot more.

Whether the (jet) flight is in a private jet or an airliner, the plane typically spews out tons of CO2 for each and every passenger. That fact deserves much more attention, but belittling ugly Prius driving schmucks like me isn’t the way to do it.

You should be able to catch me on the radio tonight (depending on where you live). To find if Marketplace is on in your area, see their station locater map. Clicking on the map pins will show time and station. I assume the piece will be posted to the website after the show. If I’m right about that, I’ll post the link.

Sometimes it’s good to be a schmuck!

Post air date update:

I was indeed on the show but they edited my comments down to about five seconds of fame and mispronounced my name.  Ah well.  Fame is elusive, I suppose.

These are intended as follow up to a previous post. If you are considering teaching, what should you do to help you decide if it really is the career for you? What should you do to prepare yourself? These two questions have very closely related answers. Much of what you do to help you decide will also to prepare you. Ultimately, you should do all or most of these things on your trajectory to become a teacher.

Key activities to prepare you and help you determine if teaching is right for you:

• Work with kids in a mentoring, teaching or coaching capacity. This is the single most important thing you can do. Before you go on to student teach, you will want some of this experience to be in a school setting, but it doesn’t need to start there. Working in summer camp settings, for example, provides great experience. As you do this work, think about (and perhaps write about) what it is you are helping them to figure out. What makes it hard to figure out what kids are figuring out?
• Evaluate what aspects of teaching will be most challenging for you and seek out experiences that will help you to grow. If getting up in front of a group makes you nervous, initially find ways to work with smaller groups and build up to larger groups. Coaching, summer rec programs and camps are good places to get this kind of experience. Of course, so is volunteering in schools. This is a common concern, but teaching is much more than talking in front of a group. You need to understand content deeply and in different ways than other professionals. You also need to understand understanding and how it is built. That means you need to learn about learning and learn about kids (or adults, if that’s who you will teach).
• Always work on building content knowledge — and think about how new knowledge is generated. Most content standards give good attention to ways of immersing students in the activities of the discipline, whatever the discipline might be. Elementary teachers need to think about this across disciplines.
• Build understanding of how you learn. Think beyond the idea of “I’m a visual learner.” (Most people claim that they are). That idea goes primarily to information input. How do you organize information? Consider the reports from National Research Council’s Committee on How People Learn. Links to all of those reports are found in the Learning Links section of this site.
• Analyze the teachers you have and have had. What characteristizes the best teachers you’ve had? What characterizes the worst? Did your classmates generally agree on teacher quality related to these teachers? What are the implications of that?
• Watch videos that show good teaching. Many fascinating classroom video can be viewed online. My favorite site for this is Annenberg Media (formerlythe Annenberg/CPB Channel). It’s URL is easy to remember: http://learner.org/. There are many other sites, including some that are specific to certain subject areas. Engaging examples of middle school math teaching can be found at the Modeling Middle School Mathematics Project site.
• Consider carefully the differencs between learning and teaching. What are somethings that you understand well? How did you build those understandings? For many people much of what they understand well they learned in ways very different from traditional schooling. I believe this is an indicator that schools should change.
• Think about what motivates you. Some great teachers are driven primarily by their passion for the content they teach. Others are driven more by the fulfillment that comes from working with young people and the promise of changing the world through enriching young people’s lives.  I think most good teachers have a mixture of these passions (though some won’t admit it).  I’ll admit that I began exploring education because I saw that becoming a physics teacher would allow me to play with toys in front of an audience.  I still like that, but once I saw that I was helping kids make sense of the world, my primary purpose changed.  If you want to teach because you think it will be easy, you should look for a different career.  Please.
• Familiarize yourself with requirements in the state where you wish to teach. For most undergraduates considering teaching, completing a university-based teacher education program will lead to certification that is transferable to many other states. This is true for non-traditional students as well, but they are often more constrained financially or geographically.  New York State has a reprocity agreement with most other states making it fairly simple to gain licensure in the new state.  New York State requirements can be found here.
• Look at the job market where you want to teach. In much of the Northeast, there is a substantial surplus of elementary school teachers, for example. There are ways you can make yourself a more attractive candidate to schools in fields with a surplus of certified teachers. Math and English are the focus of much elementary teaching and many elementary teachers and have weaker science backgrounds. Majoring or minoring in one of these areas can help build strengths not common to the applicant pool. At the secondary level, math, special education, Spanish and certain kinds of science teachers are generally in higher demand. While generally science teachers are in high demand, this is considerably less true in biology. Talk to professionals in the kinds of schools you would like to work. Find out what they think makes candidates stand out.

What do teachers reading this list suggest? What to future teachers wonder about?

This post is intended to give guidance to individuals considering becoming teachers. My intention that the information be useful to traditional college students and career-switchers who are older than the average college student. I have worked in four different teacher education programs (and have degrees from two others) and they differ markedly in their nature and quality. Before becoming a professor I taught high school science for eight years. I’m returning to high school teaching next year. (See my earlier post about the change in professional direction. If you read between the lines in this current post you may gain additional insights into the move.)

Before going further, I’ll make a plea to consider program quality as far more important than program convenience. Hopefully the program will be adaptable to your needs, but it should actually teach you something. Good teacher know more than the discipline or disciplines they teach. It takes more than intelligence to teach well. Chances are if you’re reading this you’ve had enough formal education to have known teachers and/or professors who are both brilliant individuals and terrible teachers.

Good teachers know and understand the key principles of their discipline and how to teach it. They can, for example, engage common conceptions that students hold related to their discipline(s) and make sense of common mistakes students make as students engage in figuring things out. Good teachers also understand that while teaching often involves pointing things out, learning requires that students figure things out.

I have come to the conclusion that four years is simply not enough time to provide a liberal arts education, a content area major that relates to the K-12 curriculum, and to complete an effective teacher education program (except with the most exceptional students who plan their college schedules very carefully). Consider earning a BS or BA in the discipline you wish to teach and then earning certification through a Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program.
Some resources related to the art and science of teaching can be found in the Learning Links section of Facilitate Wonder. Following the list of questions are brief descriptions of, and links to, two recent reports on teacher education.

The questions:

1. How many teachers has your program certified in _________(insert your certification area here) in the last five years?
2. Roughly how many of those graduates (or those you certified) were you able to write strong letters of recommendation for?
3. Describe for me what you expect a candidate to understand and be able to do by the end of the program. In other words, what’s necessary for a student to earn a strong letter of recommendation at the end of the program?
4. What are the most common problems that student teachers have in the program? How often, if ever, do problems lead to people not completing student teaching?
5. Roughly what percentage of last year’s graduates are now teaching in their own classrooms? Do you have a sense how many graduates from five years ago are teaching?
6. Could I contact a few of your recent grads to ask them about the program?

If you can’t get email addresses or phone numbers for at least three, consider this a serious red flag unless the program is brand new.

7. What kind of fieldwork will I do in schools before I student teach?

New York State requires that teacher candidates complete 100 hours of school-based fieldwork prior to student teaching. That is the equivalent of three weeks of instructional time for a teacher. If that work doesn’t include at least a couple of structured experiences where you actually teach real kids, consider that a red flag. Not only should you teach; you should analyze the experience in writing.

As of 2004, state regulations also require that the experience include a variety of settings. You should:

• Work in classrooms in high needs schools (high poverty schools). See Teacher Loan Cancellation Low Income for a list. As the web page title implies this list also applies to schools where you might work to have certain kinds of student loans forgiven!
• Work with special needs students (special education students)
• Work in classrooms at both levels of your certification

• For early childhood that means preschool and school-age children
• For elementary students that means lower elementary and upper elementary children
• For secondary that means middle school and high school students

Work with English Language Learners (non-native speakers)

• This is notably more difficult if the program is in a rural area, but mechanisms should be in place.

Have an opportunity to interact with parents or at least observe interactions with parents.

8. How will I be prepared to teach my particular subject or subjects? (Or, how will the program connect content and pedagogy?)

If you’d like to be a secondary school teacher…

• Does the program have pre-student teaching coursework connecting content and pedagogy and is that coursework specific to my certification area? Will I, for example, learn about planning, assessment and the nature of the discipline I plan to teach before I actually begin teaching it during student teaching? Will I have an opportunity to plan and teach at least a couple of lessons in a real classroom prior to student teaching?

• How would you describe good teaching in the discipline? In science, I would look for something that resonates with these key features of inquiry:

Five Essential Features of Inquiry (Center for Science Mathematics and Engineering Education., 2000)
1. Learner engages in scientifically oriented questions
2. Learner gives priority to evidence in responding to questions
3. Learner formulates explanations from evidence
4. Learner connects explanations to scientific knowledge
5. Learner communicates and justifies explanations to others

• In any discipline, I would look for something that relates the teaching and learning of the discipline to ways in which knowledge is generated within the discipline.

If you’d like to be a elementary school teacher…

• Does the program have pre-student teaching coursework connecting content and pedagogy in reading, writing, math, science and social studies?
  
• What is the background of the people teaching these courses? Do at least some of them have K-12 teaching experience?
  
• What does the elementary program do to give me an advantage over other candidates in a field with a surplus of candidates?

Throughout most of the Northeast, there are far more certified elementary teachers than there are elementary teaching positions. Those with special preparation in science, mathematics, special education and those who are bilingual have an advantage over those without such preparation.

9. How does the program prepare future teachers to successfully manage a classroom?

I almost left this off. It is regarded as a major concern by many beginning teachers and understandably so. There are few things more stressful than being in a roomful of out of control kids when you are expected to be the adult in charge. I know that. But I also worry about programs that overemphasize the issue. Management is what you do when the lesson doesn’t work. Learning about classroom management should be woven throughout the program and given special attention in classes with associated fieldwork. Sometimes even the most engaging lessons can fall victim to a kid having a bad day and it is essential to develop strategies for dealing with that. You should seek programs that will help you build community in classrooms and that will help you to connect to the communities that are associated with the school and its students.

10.  You’ve certified _(# of teachers)  in the last five years.  Of those how many would you place in each of these categories:

• I would be pleased to have teaching my own children.
• I would not be disappointed to have teaching my own children.
• I would be disappointed to have teaching my own children.

Reports on Teacher Education

There are two important fairly recent reports on the state of teacher education that include much more detailed descriptions of what to look for and what to avoid in teacher education programs.

Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers’ College at Columbia University wrote Educating School Teachers. This well researched report is highly critical of the state of teacher education. The table of contents is shown below and makes clear that Levine sees substantial problems with the status quo. The entire report (or just the Executive Summary) may be downloaded from the site.

EDUCATING SCHOOL TEACHERS

TABLE of CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Part I: Teacher Education in Flux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Part II: The Pursuit of Irrelevance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Part III: Inadequate Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Part IV: A Curriculum in Disarray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Part V: A Disconnected Faculty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Part VI: Low Admission Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Part VII: Insufficient Quality Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Part VIII: Disparities in Institutional Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Part IX: Exemplary Teacher Education Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Part X: Educating the Teachers America Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Appendix 1: Data Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Appendix 2: Northwest Evaluation Association Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Appendix 3: A Description of the Nation’s Education
Schools by Carnegie Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Appendix 4: A Description of Five Non-University
Teacher Education Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Appendix 5: Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Linda Darling Hammond and John Bransford edited the book Preparing Teachers For A Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn And Be Able To Do. The website allows you to easily view the table contents and to download Chapter 1 which provides a helpful overview of the report. This report has a more positive spin, though I find both helpful.

These reports are so depressing. What are they helpful for?

I see them as helpful for people who intend to teach in their search for an effective program. I also believe that they can be helpful for practicing teachers to inform their own professional development. If your teacher education program failed to do something that these reports analyze, these reports can provide guidance on how to fill those gaps.

Questions for you

If you’re a classroom teacher, what do you think is important? If you’re a potential teacher, what else are you wondering about?