Found a really strong article last week in the New York Times Magazine on Creating Better Teachers. Teacher training, certainly in my experience, has been pretty much of a hit-and-miss thing, with an underlying assumption that teachers are larger born not made and that content knowledge is the most important part. My own experience over the years starting with my first round of teachers training in California in 1973-4 was that my University instructors were essentially worthless, had not been in the classroom in years, or never in some cases, and had nothing of value to communicate.

I was very lucky that I was able to spend most of the year in the classroom with 3 different mentoring teachers watching them, learning and practicing. A great deal of what I have been able to learn about teaching since then has been learned from colleagues and from simple classroom experience. I have been privileged to team-teach sometimes and have learned so much from it as we fed off of and critiqued each other constantly.

It has also been my experience that while content knowledge is important it is not near as important as the ability to communicate that knowledge. Many, if not all, of us who went to university experienced professors who were geniuses in their field but could not teach anything and did not really care: "I present the information, it is their job to learn and if they don't it is their fault."

Getting back to the NY Times article, it was good to see that serious research study is finally being done in this area. While I believe that the majority of problems that we are experiencing in education are not issues of content or testing(!) it does seem to me that better teacher training would help reduce the struggles our students are having.