The Problem of Teacher Education

Since the time teacher education emerged as an identifiable activity, there have been few periods when it was not being critiqued, studied, rethought, reformed, and, often, excoriated. The title of this editorial does not refer to the "problem of teacher education" in a pejorative sense, however. Rather, the phrase is intended to draw attention to teacher education as a problem in three senses--the problem or challenge every nation faces in providing well-prepared and effective teachers for its children; teacher education as a research problem, which involves a larger set of educational issues, questions, and conditions that define an important concern of the scholarly community; and teacher education as a problematic and contested enterprise, troubled by enduring and value-laden questions about the purposes and goals of education in a democratic society. This editorial concentrates on teacher education over the last 50 years. It suggests that during that time, as a society and an educational community, we have conceptualized and defined the "problem of teacher education" in three quite different ways: as a training problem, a learning problem, and a policy problem. (1) The editorial concludes with concerns about the current emphasis. TEACHER EDUCATION AS A TRAINING PROBLEM During the period from roughly the late 1950s to the early 1980s, teacher education was defined primarily as a training problem. The essence of this approach was conceptualizing teacher education as a formal educational process intended to ensure that the behaviors of prospective teachers matched those of "effective" teachers. To do this, teacher educators were charged with training teacher candidates to display those behaviors that had been empirically certified through research on effective teaching. Underlying this way of defining teacher education was a technical view of teaching, a behavioral view of learning, and an understanding of science as the solution to educational problems. In a symposium on teacher education that helped to shape this emerging view, B. O. Smith (1971) made this clear: "Generally speaking, ... teacher education attempts to answer the question of how the behavior of an individual in preparation for teaching can be made to conform to acceptable patterns" (p. 2). What was "acceptable" had to do with research. When teacher education was constructed as a training problem, the point of research on teacher education was the identification or the invention of transportable teacher-training procedures that produced the desired behaviors in prospective teachers. This effort in teacher education built on and paralleled the process-product research on teaching that was dominant during the time. With process-product research, the goal was to develop "the scientific basis of the art of teaching" (Gage, 1978) by identifying and specifying teacher behaviors that were correlated with pupil learning and applying them as treatments to classroom situations (Gage, 1963). The version of this that became prominent in research on teacher education was treating the independent variables of process-product research on teaching (i.e., observable teacher behaviors, such as question-asking strategies or clearly stated objectives, which were presumed correlated with Student achievement) as the dependent variables in research on teacher preparation. Teacher-training procedures (e.g., microteaching, training prospective teachers to use interaction analysis or behavior modification, lecture, demonstration, and/or clusters of these procedures with and without different kinds of feedback) were the independent variables. The training approach to teacher education was not without its critics. Some questioned the training approach at its very core by critiquing the effectiveness research on which it was based. They argued that the empirical research base for specific and generally applicable teaching behaviors was thin and that the competency-based, teacher-training programs that arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s did not have a greater amount of empirical support than other teacher education programs. …