THE DILEMMA OF TEACHER TRANING
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Author
Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference, 2001 in Norfolk, VA ISBN 978-1-880094-41-9
Abstract
In 1957 the Soviets put up the first earth satellite, Sputnik I. For education in the United States this was a traumatic event. Until that time, many (but not all) people, including the popular press commonly denounced Soviet science as ineffective. The fact that it achieved this major technological development, visible in many parts of the country, before we did led to much trauma about the quality of science education in the United States. One reaction was a major organized curriculum effort in American education, the major such event in our history, mostly funded by the United States government, It lasted about 15 years. Many of the courses developed cost millions of dollars to produce, so the curriculum efforts were well funded. I would estimate that close to one hundred million dollars were spent in these extensive efforts, more by today's prices. Major individuals participated in their development, including major figures in science and education. The concentration was on the east coast, but it was a nationwide efforts. Books were the most common product, with some production of films and other items. Some initial efforts were in elementary science, including such major products as the Science Curriculum Improvement Project (often called SCIS) at the University of California, Berkeley, directed by Robert Karplus. A similar project was the Elementary Science Study at MIT. These courses were very different than existing practice at the elementary level, with much more emphasis on the processes of science, and much less emphasis on memory. Mathematics courses followed, also with new approaches. High school courses were developed, and even a few university courses. I was involved in one of these, the Harvard Project Physics course for secondary school. One project, Man a Course of Study, a fifth grade sociology course, brought this period to an abrupt end, for political reasons. This was a very interesting story, but not relevant to this paper. Although many of the resulting courses were widely praised by scientists and educators, most of the products were not successful in practical usage. Only the biology courses, produced by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study group are in common use today. This well-funded failure led to much agonizing about what went wrong. Some of this thinking appeared earlier, but we are still hearing the reasons for lack of success. Probably everyone, including me, 'knows' why failure happened. One such reason commonly given for this failure was of considerable importance at the time, and is the primary concern of this paper. Since these new courses were different than older courses, it was believed that teacher training was essential to prepare teachers for this new task. Not only the content was different, but with many of the courses the entire philosophy of what the student and teacher were supposed to do was strange to many teachers, different than their previous training. A major effort in training teachers in these new courses took place. It is difficult to estimate the funds that went into teacher training for the new courses, since the funding cam from so many sources. I have seen an estimate that teacher training costs for the post-sputnik courses were seven times the cost of development, which would make the total over five hundred million dollars, a huge amount. But mostly the courses were not helped by this large effort. Teacher training was not effective, and most of the major post-sputnik efforts died. We continue with such efforts in training teachers, for all of education. It is a major part of the educational funding of the National Science Foundation, and other major federal agencies. Almost every new school movement is matched with a corresponding training activity. But, in spite of occasional glowing reports, it is seldom successful. Training teachers is a common problem with education generally. One might say it is the Achilles heel of education.
Citation
Bork, A. (2001). THE DILEMMA OF TEACHER TRANING. In J. Price, D. Willis, N. Davis & J. Willis (Eds.), Proceedings of SITE 2001--Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 467-472). Norfolk, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved March 28, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/16736.
© 2001 AACE