USA- There will be no courses at the Relay Graduate Schoolof Education, the first standalone college of teacher preparation to open inNew York State for nearly 100 years. Instead, there will be some 60 modules,each focused on a different teaching technique. There will be no campus,because it is old-think to believe a building makes a school. Instead, thegraduate students will be mentored primarily at the schools where they teach.And there will be no lectures. Direct instruction, as such experiences will becalled, should not take place for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. Afterthat, students should discuss ideas with one another or reflect on their own.
If it all sounds revolutionary, it’s supposed to. In itspromotional materials, Relay uses fiery terms to describe its mission,promising to train schoolteachers in a way that “explodes the traditional,course-based paradigm that has been adopted by traditional schools of educationover the past century.” Norman Atkins, the founder of a network of charter schools and thepresident of Relay, talks about his program as being beyond ideology, a word hebelieves has a negative connotation.
“The messiah is not going to come in the blink of an eye,”Mr. Atkins said recently. But he hopes, he said, to help bring about a futurein which teachers and schools use instructional techniques that are known towork and are held accountable for student performance, two core tenets ofRelay.
Mr. Atkins’s goal of upending teacher training stems from abroader diagnosis shared by many who work in public education: that it isfailing millions of American children, leaving them without the skills theyneed to succeed in the 21st century. Vastly improving teacher education, theybelieve, is critical in fixing that picture.
There are wide concerns that too many teachers areunprepared for the classroom, though they may have more educational credentialsthan ever before. Master’s degrees are required for permanent certification inonly a few states, including New York and Kentucky. But data collected by theNational Center for Education Statistics show that 52 percent of kindergartenthrough eighth-grade teachers have a master’s degree or higher — which oftenqualifies them for a pay bump. And so graduate school in education is bigbusiness. In the 2008-9 school year, the 178,564 master’s degrees in educationthat were awarded across the country accounted for 27 percent of all themaster’s degrees awarded.
Over the years, some of the toughest critics of educationschools have been educators themselves. In 1986, the HolmesGroup, a collection of deans from education schools, warned that too manyschools were indifferent to the importance of hands-on teacher preparation.Their curriculums were outmoded, and their standards for admission andgraduation were lax. Major research universities accorded them a low priority.Twenty years later, Arthur Levine, the former dean of Teachers College atColumbia University, argued in a scathing report called “EducatingSchool Teachers” that most of those problems still held true.
“While there are some wonderful teaching schools,” he toldme recently, “there are some that place students at failing schools withfailing teachers to learn how to teach. There are some in which the professorsare really far behind the times. There is enough bad practice to justify gettingrid of the bottom of the field.”
But even those calling for reform face a problem, Dr. Levinesaid: There is little research into what kind of training is most likely toproduce a successful teacher, a fact that social scientists are now working toremedy through long-term study.
In the meantime, states, which set the rules for certifyingeducators, are taking an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to reform,raising the standards for existing schools while opening the door to new kindsof organizations, from online schools to charter school networks to museums, totrain their teachers.
For example, New York invited nonacademic institutions toapply for $12.5 million in grants to develop and offer “clinically rich”master’s degree programs in teacher preparation. Among the 11 winningproposals, which were announced earlier this month, are the American Museum ofNatural History, which already has a doctoral program in biology, along withFordham University, Mercy College and two campuses of the City University ofNew York.
These changes come as large numbers of teachers alreadybypass traditional education degrees, entering classrooms with temporarylicenses after as little as several weeks or months of pre-service training.
Today, about 500,000 of the nation’s 3.6 million teachershave entered the field through these alternative routes, such as Teach forAmerica, mostly to work in public schools in high-poverty areas.
Even Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education,has joined in questioning traditional teacher education, advising districts ina speech last year to rethink the practice of rewarding teachers with a raisefor a master’s degree, because “there is little evidence teachers with master’sdegrees improve student achievement more than other teachers.”
Education schools, particularly those that offer top-notchtraining, might be excused for feeling they are under attack.
“The rhetoric is enormously heated,” Dr. Levine said,speaking from his office at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation,where as president he helps universities restructure their teaching programs.“We have a group of education schools that are perplexed at why they are beingso criticized,” he said. “We have states saying they are going to create alternateroutes to becoming a teacher, and they are going to increase standards for theexisting education schools.
It was a Saturday in May, and a full-day session of TeacherU was convening in a windowless high school classroom on the Upper East Side ofManhattan. Class started at 9 a.m., and at 9:45 a.m., the master’s studentswere still trickling in.
They were mostly young — the average age is 25 — and dressedin weekend attire: sneakers, jeans or khakis, T-shirts and baseball caps. Theynursed iced coffees and nibbled chocolate croissants and yogurt parfaits.Full-time teachers, almost all at charter schools, they work grueling hours,and they were tired. There were no books out, though one young man consulted“The 10-Day M.B.A.” during breaks. Instead, the students followed along on whatthe school calls “interactive handouts,” worksheets that provide exercises toaccompany their teacher’s PowerPoint presentation.
The morning’s subject was “Right Is Right,” a technique inwhich teachers learn to hold out until their students give them answers thatare 100 percent accurate. It is the second of 49 strategies cataloged in “Teach Like a Champion,” a 2010 bookby Doug Lemov, a teacher and principal who founded the Uncommon Schools charterschool with Mr. Atkins. Mr. Lemov’s work is such a backbone of instruction atTeacher U, students say, that he has near-guru status there, as does DaveLevin, a founder of the KIPP charter schools, and Julie Jackson, formerprincipal of North Star Academy in Newark.
“I am a believer,” said Zach Mack, 31, a Teacher U studentwhom I watched one day in June deliver a dynamic social studies lesson to hisfourth-grade class at Public School 139 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He scheduleseach day down to the minute, and posts daily goals on the board so students cansee them. “As Doug would say,” he added, “if you don’t have a plan for them, theyhave a plan for you.”
Teacher U opened three years ago as a program within Hunter College School ofEducation, part of the City University of New York. Its monthly daylong lessonstake place at Hunter College High School, the college’s laboratory publicschool. The program has already gained attention with its nearly single-mindedfocus on practical teaching techniques. And this summer, when it transformsinto the Relay School of Education, independent of Hunter, it will move evenfurther away from a traditional education school model of classroom instructionand theory, sometimes above practice.
Some education theory will be integrated at Relay, Mr.Atkins insisted, but not “37 1/2 hours’ worth” — the length of the traditionalthree-credit course that the new school eschews. Forty percent of itscoursework will be online. When students do gather, it will be mostly in smallgroups, mostly for discussion — expanding on a core practice at Teacher U.
Teacher U was founded by leaders from three prominentcharter school chains — Achievement First, Uncommon Schools and KIPP — in partto provide a setting where their own teachers could receive master’s-leveltraining that was tightly focused “on stuff that will help you be a betterteacher on Monday,” said Brent Maddin, the program’s senior manager of teachingand learning, and Relay’s future provost.
It is one of a few examples around the country of charterorganizations developing degree programs to train their own and other teachers.High Tech High in San Diego has a master’s program with training inproject-based learning techniques. Such models, in turn, are part of a nationalmovement emphasizing practical instruction for teachers already in theclassroom full time.
“To make a crude analogy, if I am learning to become ablacksmith, I also don’t learn how to be a pipefitter,” Mr. Maddin said of TeacherU’s focus on pedagogical technique. “I also don’t read a ton of books about howto shoe a horse. What I do is I show up and shoe horses.”
On that Saturday, the teacher, Mayme Hostetter, a formerteacher at a KIPP charter school, started off by playing part of a NellyFurtado pop song called “Say It Right,” to hook students into the lesson. Herco-teacher, Romina Piersanti, then showed a series of video examples from realclassrooms explaining dos and don’ts of Doug Lemov’s “Right Is Right” strategy.
One clip showed an expert teacher making an error. StephanieEly, at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, asked a classroomfull of uniformed sixth graders for the perimeter of a rectangle that is 4 by 8feet. She cold called a girl in a yellow headband named Takira, who responded,“24 units.” Ms. Ely corrected her: she should have said feet, not units. Takiragrimaced.
“Let’s just do a quick share out,” Ms. Piersanti said,replaying that part of the scene. Takira looked crestfallen. She seemed mad atherself and disappointed. Ms. Ely should have encouraged Takira to get to theright answer herself, instead of correcting her, the graduate students agreed.“You can praise what she did to get to that 80 percent answer, so that there ismore clarity about going to the 100 percent,” Ms. Piersanti said, offering thekind of tip that is Teacher U’s specialty. “This goes back to the biggerpicture idea that everything a teacher does or doesn’t do, says or doesn’t say,sends some message to the student and has an impact.”
Later that morning, the graduate students experimented withteaching technique No. 46 — “J-Factor,” as in joy. While many of the Lemovtechniques are geared toward setting a disciplined classroom tone of highexpectations, some are about fun. The students split up into three relay teamsand sprinted down the hallway toward a pile of numbered cards, racing to be thefirst team to collect all the ones that match a certain criterion, such as evennumbers or multiples of 10. After sharing out how to use the exercise withtheir students, Ms. Ely herself led them through a discussion about differentways to help middle school students solve an algebra problem.
There was no mention of John Dewey, Howard Gardner or PauloFreire, the canon of intellectuals that tend to take up an outsize portion ofthe theory taught at traditional education graduate schools. But that seemedfine with the students, who chatted avidly about their own experiences. Afterclass, they told me about the improvements they saw in how they managed theirclasses.
“I can study Vygotsky later,” said Tayo Adeeko, a24-year-old third-grade teacher at Empower Charter School in Crown Heights. Shewas referring to another education school staple — Lev Vygotsky, a Soviettheorist of cognitive development who died in 1934. “Right now,” she added, “mykids need to learn how to read.”
The progress of Ms. Adeeko’s students is not optional.Another core component of Teacher U/Relay is that, before they can earn theirmaster’s degrees, they must submit a portfolio showing that their own studentsmade at least one year of academic progress in a subject.
To that end, each of the 280 Teacher U students has a Flipvideo camera to document their lessons, and they must track their students’test scores and other work. It’s a technique that Hunter College also uses withits traditional education students. (The camera can be a useful teacher’s aide;Mr. Mack, for example, said he found his students behave better when they knowthey are on a video that could be shown to their parents.)
As practice-focused as Teacher U is, its founders still feltconstrained by the three-credit course structure mandated by Hunter. So lastyear, they applied to create the standalone graduate school. Relay will startwith 200 part-time students, and hopes to expand to 800 in five years. Thegoal, Mr. Atkins said, is to reach beyond the charter school world, and forhalf of its students to be traditional public school teachers. “The techniquesand strategies that you are learning here are applicable to all settings and toall types of kids,” he said. “However,” he allowed, “if you believe thatchildren shouldn’t have homework, or you believe that testing is evil, thisprobably isn’t the best program for you.”
A $30 million initial investment from the Robin HoodFoundation to start Teacher U will help finance Relay, and it is estimated thatother revenue sources (such as AmeriCorp stipends for Teach for Americateachers) will reduce the cost of the two-year program for most students from$35,000 to as low as $4,250. That is well below the roughly $40,000 fee atTeachers College, its most storied private competitor.
Relay has not had an easy go of it, though. Eight of the 13graduate schools around New York City objected to the idea. A key concern wasthat the school would add extra competition to an already crowded field duringan era of budget cuts and potential teacher layoffs. Another was that its tightfocus on pedagogical technique would mean less intellectual rigor.
The office of CUNY’s chancellor, for example, wrote in aformal objection to the state that Relay “is essentially a similar educationalmodel as the existing Teacher U/Hunter College partnership program, except thatit would lack the depth of educational and other resources that a universitybrings to the partnership.”
Even the state-appointed team of university educators thatreviewed Relay’s charter expressed concerns, though it ultimately recommendedapproval. “The institution must recognize the importance of scholarly activityin a graduate school,” it warned. “It must specify how it plans to supportongoing (rather than episodic) scholarly work by full-time faculty.” Relay hassince agreed to hire a director to oversee faculty research into effectiveteaching practices.
The debate mirrors a larger concern nationally, which isthat by treating teaching as a trade instead of an art, and permitting newteachers to run their own classrooms from the first day, alternative educationprograms will, in the long term, reduce the quality of America’s teachingforce. A great teacher, critics of the new approach argue, should also betrained in advanced work in his or her field, as well as be versed in childpsychology, cognitive theory and educational philosophy, so he or she can workin any setting.
Lin Goodwin, the associate dean at Teachers College,describes Relay thusly: “What they are doing is teacher training, to follow aprotocol, to be able to perform in a particular context, to know how to work inthis way. And I think that what that does is it dumbs down teaching, and takesus back a few steps, in terms of our struggle in the profession for teachers tobe seen as professionals.” At Teachers College, she added, graduate studentscommonly spend three and a half days a week in student teaching, in addition toa full evening course load in theory, pedagogy and advanced subject-areacontent.
Jerrold Ross, the dean of St. John’s School of Education inQueens, said he had expressed his concerns about Relay to David M. Steiner, thestate education commissioner. “The thrust to improve practice is one to whichwe subscribe, but any path which further separates content from practice in myview is not the best way to go,” he said. “The answer lies in better monitoringand supervision of existing graduate schools, more than it is ‘Let’s just tossto the side and create something different.’ ”
Yet Relay and programs like it are already having a broaderimpact.
Dr. Steiner, who had recused himself from the Regents voteon Relay, helped start Teacher U when he was the dean of the Hunter CollegeSchool of Education. As commissioner, he led the rewriting of state policy onteacher education as part of New York’s successful Race to the Top federalgrant application, and those regulations share some similarities with Teacher Upolicies.
By 2013, New York will begin holding all graduate studentsin education accountable for student learning in their classrooms before theycan get their degrees, as at Teacher U and Relay. It is one of 22 states toexperiment with accountability standards through a pilot being conducted out ofStanford University. And New York and eight other states are piloting a programsupported by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education toreorganize teacher education around clinical practice rather than academicstudy.
One rising model is residencies, in which students willteach full time but get intensive mentoring and coursework. Programs arealready under way in Boston and Denver.
“We don’t think that all the wisdom is lodged in theeducation schools,” Dr. Steiner told me. “The fundamental point is that we needpeople to think outside of the box, to shake things up a little bit.”
Experts hope that out of this sea of experimentation comes aconsensus on what teacher training should look like. In some programs, it takesa semester to train a teacher, in others five years. Some require a year ofmentored student teaching, others almost no teaching at all.
But as new approaches are tried, there are also potentialdangers, said Linda Darling-Hammond, an expert on teacher education at StanfordUniversity.
“As with anything else, we should have a high standard forit to be done responsibly,” she said. Just as doctors must have extensivetraining before they can work independently, so should teachers, she said.“Otherwise, we risk learning on other people’s kids.”