New Tack in Teacher Education - Essay Example

Once a would-be teacher passed this set of criteria in the old days, a normal school, or a university offering the regular 4-year teacher education courses, proceeded to use these basic attributes as building blocks toward making the student teacher attain proficiency in the subjects considered as fountainheads of knowledge on teacher preparations: psychology, sociology and general education. In the traditional approach, that was all there was to teacher education. The assumption was that tutelage in psychology and sociology would sufficiently prepare student teachers for the tasks of reaching out to young people from diverse social classes with different beliefs, behaviors and mental constructs.

General education, for its part, is the euphemism for the nitty-gritty, and more taxing part, of teaching - preparing lesson plans, checking test papers, evaluating pupils' performance, what to do with a difficult and rowdy class, handling slow learners. Under this assumption, teacher education hardly counted as a field of specialized study and as object of academic research. Teacher educators were not even asked to participate in research into their work (Korthagen, F., Loughran, J. & Russell, T., 2006). Only lately did policy makers, lawmakers and academic researchers begin to question the old notions of an effective teacher education program when confronted by repeated year-to-year reports of poor academic performance across the school systems.

Something must be wrong in teacher preparations indeed when respectable publications like the US News and World Report play up stories like: as of 2000, 75 million American adults or 2 out of 3 Americans can't read adequately. It looks worse in less developed countries, such as one in Asia where it was reported that only one of five elementary graduates showed a passable competency in the five basic subjects of science, mathematics, English and writing. Bullough & Gitlin (2001), as cited in Korthagen, et al. (2006), confirmed that the traditional approach to teacher education was among the features of the educational system that needed an overhaul when the two academic researchers were asked to develop a new teacher education program from the old one.

The research duo noted that the old TEP model they worked on was "disjointed, fragmented and confusing." The theory-to-practice view, the research team added, suffers from many limitations and inadequacies and is thus counterproductive. Another instructive indictment: the standard TEP model is irrelevant to the reality of everyday practice in schools. From these observations, the search for new ways of preparing teachers emerged. One of the persistent concepts that developed operates on the principle that knowledge (theory) should relate to experience and emotion (practice).

This means that immersion in theory, on which traditional TEPs are focused, is not altogether bad so long as an equal emphasis is placed on practice. In other words, the more ideal approach is for theory and practice to go hand in hand so that when student teachers go out to practice their profession they know how to handle the problems of everyday teaching through theory-guided actions.This new tack in teacher education is reflected in TEPs that set aside rote recall in favor of understanding and application, giving due