AIOU Solved Assignments code 626 M.A. Autumn & Spring 2024 Assignment 1& 2 Course: Teacher Education (626) Spring 2024. AIOU past papers
ASSIGNMENT No: 1& 2
Teacher Education (626) Semester
Autumn & Spring 2024
AIOU Solved Assignment 1& 2 Code 626 Autumn & Spring 2024
Elementary schools exist worldwide as the basic foundational institution in the formal educational structure. Elementary schooling, which prepares children in fundamental skills and knowledge areas, can be defined as the early stages of formal, or organized, education that are prior to secondary school. The age range of pupils who attend elementary schools in the United States is from six to twelve, thirteen, or fourteen, depending on the organizational pattern of the particular state or school district. While a few, mainly small rural, districts, retain the traditional pattern of grades one through eight, a more common pattern is grades one through six. In most school districts as well as in many teacher preparation programs, elementary education is organized into the following levels: primary, which includes kindergarten and grades one, two, and three; intermediate, which includes grades four, five, and six; and upper, which includes grades seven and eight. A commonly found organizational pattern places grades seven and eight, and sometimes grade six and nine, into middle or junior high schools. When the middle school and junior high school pattern is followed, these institutions are usually linked into secondary education, encompassing grades six through twelve.
In comparing elementary schools in the United States with those of other countries, some distinctions in terminology are necessary. In the United States, elementary education refers to children’s first formal schooling prior to secondary school. (Although kindergartens, enrolling children at age five, are part of public schools, attendance is not compulsory.) In school systems in many other countries, the term primary covers what in the United States is designated as elementary schooling. In American elementary schools, the term primary refers to the first level, namely kindergarten through grades one, two, and three.
The elementary school curriculum provides work in the educational basics–reading, writing, arithmetic, an introduction to natural and social sciences, health, arts and crafts, and physical education. An important part of elementary schooling is socialization with peers and the creating of an identification of the child with the community and nation.
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The European settlers in the North American colonies, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, initially recreated the school systems of their homelands. They established a two-track school system in which the lower socioeconomic classes attended primary vernacular schools and upper class males attended separate preparatory schools and colleges. The primary schools–elementary institutions under church control–offered a basic curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion.
Colonial period. While many similarities existed in the colonial schools, there were some important differences between New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South. The New England colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, which were settled primarily by Puritans, were characterized by a strong sense of religious and social conformity. Because of their Calvinistic emphasis on reading the Bible and other religious literature, the Puritans quickly established elementary schools. In 1642 the Massachusetts General Court, the colony’s legislative body, made parents and guardians responsible for making sure that children were taught reading and religion. In 1647 the General Court enacted the Old Deluder Satan Act, which virtually established elementary education by requiring every town of fifty or more families to appoint a reading and writing teacher. Massachusetts and the other New England colonies developed the town school, a locally controlled, usually coeducational elementary school, attended by pupils ranging in age from six to thirteen or fourteen. The school’s curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, catechism, and religious hymns. The model of the town school, governed by its local trustees or board, became an important feature of later U.S. elementary schooling.
The Middle Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania were settled by diverse ethnic and religious groups. In addition to English, Scots, and Scotch-Irish, there were Dutch in New York, Swedes in Delaware, and Germans in Pennsylvania. The Middle Atlantic colonies’ religious and language diversity had important educational implications. Elementary schools were usually parochial institutions, supported and governed by the various churches.
Monitorialism, also known as mutual instruction, was a popular method of elementary education in the early nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries. Two rival English educators, Andrew Bell, an Anglican churchman, and Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker teacher, promoted monitorialism independently. The monitorial method relied heavily on monitors –more advanced pupils, trained by a master teacher–to teach younger children. Monitors aided teachers in conducting classes, taking attendance, and maintaining order. In using this method, the master teacher trained a selected group of older students as monitors in a particular skill, such as adding single-digit numbers or reading simple words. These monitors then taught that particular skill to subgroups of less advanced pupils. Since the monitorial method promised to teach large numbers of pupils basic literacy and numeracy skills, it gained the support of those who wanted to provide basic elementary education at limited costs.
Initially, monitorial schools were popular in the larger American cities such as New York and Philadelphia, where they were typically supported by private philanthropists and occasionally received some public funds. In the early 1840s monitorial schooling experienced a rapid decline and virtually disappeared. By the time that the New York Free School Society, which had operated monitorial schools, turned them over to the public school system in 1853, more than 600,000 children had attended its schools.
The common school. The common school movement refers to the establishment of state elementary school systems in the first half of the nineteenth century. The term common meant that these state-supported public elementary schools, exalted as the school that “educated the children of all the people,” were open to children of all socioeconomic classes and ethnic and racial groups. Nevertheless, many children, particularly enslaved African Americans, did not attend.
The common school movement in the United States paralleled some trends taking place in western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s the British parliament, though not creating a state school system, began to provide grants to educational societies for primary schooling. In France, under Guizot, a primary school system, too, was established during the regime of Louis Philippe. These transnational trends, found in Europe and America, indicated that governments were beginning to take the responsibility for providing some kind of elementary schooling. Unlike in France, which was beginning to create a highly centralized national educational system, U.S. public schools were decentralized. The U.S. Constitution’s Tenth Amendment reserved education to each state. The states, in turn, delegated considerable responsibility for providing and maintaining schools to local districts. Even within a particular state, especially on the frontier where many small school districts were created, resources available for schooling varied considerably from district to district.
Other northern states emulated New England’s common school model. As the frontier moved westward and new states joined the Union, they, too, followed the model and passed laws to create public elementary school systems. In the South, with a few exceptions, common schools were rare until the post–Civil War Reconstruction.
A unique feature in the United States was the small one-room school, found in rural areas and small towns across the country. These schools served local school districts, governed by elected boards. Although small one-room village schools existed in other countries, the American ones were local creations rather than impositions of a national government. The American school’s immediacy to its people made the local school a trusted institution rather than an alien intruder into small town life. In contrast, the teacher in France might be suspected as an outsider, a representative of the intrusive central government. Similarly, in tsarist Russia, the zemstvo school, established in the villages, was often extraneous to the needs of life in the countryside. The zemstvo teachers often were not accepted by the peasants whose children they tried to teach or were regarded as rivals of the village priest. In America’s one-room schools, the elected school board determined the tax levy and hired and supervised the teacher. This pattern of local control contrasted with the visiting school inspectors sent to inspect teachers and schools in France or even with the royal inspectors in the United Kingdom.
The pupils enrolled in the local one-room schools, often ranging in age from five to seventeen, studied a basic curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, grammar, spelling, and hygiene. They were instructed by the recitation method in which each pupil stood and recited a previously assigned lesson. Group work might include writing exercises, arithmetic problems, and grammar lessons that stressed diagramming sentences. The values of punctuality, honesty, and hard work were given high priority.
AIOU Solved Assignment 1& 2 Code 626 Autumn & Spring 2024
Importance of education in modern times cannot be understated being the integral part of our lives. Education helps in evolution, improves one’s position in society, provides wide exposure, helps in decision making independently and maintaining healthy lifestyle. Those nations who recognized the importance of education are ruling the entire world. But unfortunately, developing nations like Pakistan are still striving due to neglecting the importance of education. Even seven decades have been elapsed of its independence; Pakistan is still far behind of the world in the field of education. Education policies were framed at various points of times to streamline the important field of education but unfortunately none of them was implemented in true letter and spirit. Just three months after creation of Pakistan, its founder Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah called for national education conference.
National Education Conference 1947: First National Education Conference was held at Karachi from November 27th to December 1st, 1947. Quaid-i-Azam was its convener. He provided basic guidelines for future educational development. He also emphasized people to realize the sense of honour, integrity and selfless services to the nation. At this occasion, Fazal-ur-Rehman, the Education Minister of the country proposed three dimensions of education, i.e. spiritual, social and vocational. A number of committees were also formed at this occasion such as Primary and Secondary Education Committee, Adult Education Committee, Technical Education Committee, Scientific Research Committee, University Education Committee, Women’s Education Committee and Cultural Relations Committee. The major recommendations of the conference were:
i) Free and compulsory education in Pakistan ii) Education should be teamed with Islamic values and iii) Emphasis on science and technical education.
Unfortunately, this policy could not be implemented properly due to various reasons including increased number of immigrants and other administrative problems of new born country and British colonial system was continued.
National Commission on Education 1959: The Commission was addressed by the President of Pakistan, General Mohammad Ayub Khan, on January 5, 1959. Commission made education compulsory upto 10 years of age. It made religious education also compulsory. Further commission also recommended equal expansion for boys and girls education. Major recommendations of the commission include character building, compulsory primary education focus on science and technical education, national language as medium of instruction, three-year degree program, elimination of illiteracy, establishment of university grants commission, combination of internal (25%) and external (75%) evaluation in examination system and introduction of religious education in three stages, i.e. 1) compulsory at middles level, 2) optional at secondary level and 3) research at university level.
Recommendations of the National Education Commission were very useful but due to limited resources and conditions of country they were not applied in a better way.
New Education Policy 1970: The revised proposals were reviewed by the committee of the cabinet in the light of implications of the announcement by the President in his address to the nation on November 28, 1969. The new Education Policy was finally adopted by the Cabinet on March 26, 1970. Emphasis on ideological orientation, emphasis on science and technology education, decentralization of educational administration, eradication of illiteracy and formation of national education units were salient features of this educational policy. This policy was also not implemented mainly due to the war with India, separation of East Pakistan, and collapse of the military government.
Education Policy 1972: Zulifqar Bhutto announced a National Education Policy on 29 March 1972. Salient features of this policy include promotion of ideology of Pakistan, universal education, equality in education, personality development, curriculum based on socioeconomic needs of the society, integrated technical and science education, active participation of teacher, students and parents in educational affairs, nationalization of educational institutions, free & universal education up to Class X for both girls & boys (first phase October 1972, all public & private schools to provide free education up to class VIII, Second phase starting 1974, free education extended up to Class X). This policy was a good approach towards betterment, but has many drawbacks due to which it cannot be achieved thoroughly e.g. universal basic education, shift towards agro-technical studies etc.
National Education Policy 1979: Minister for Education announced this policy in October 1978. The Draft work plan of the policy was presented to the Cabinet in December, 1978. The Policy was announced in February 1979. In 1979 National Educational Conference was held for reviewing the education system and developed following aims:
i) Fostering loyalty to Islam, ii) Creation of concept of Muslim Ummah
iii) Promotion of science and technical
education and iv) Equal opportunities
The following strategies were suggested to achieve the goals:
1.Curriculum revision, 2. Merging madrassa and traditional education, 3. Urdu as a medium of education, 4. Effective participation of community in literacy programs, 5. Linked scientific and technical education and 6. Separate set up for male and female.
This policy was not implemented properly and failed due to lack of planning and financial resources.
National Education Policy 1992: A National Conference was held at Islamabad in April, 1991 under the chairmanship of the Federal Education Minister. In this Conference scholars, writers, newspaper editors, scientists, teachers and Lawyers proposals for preparing the Education Policy. The policy framework was discussed by the Education Minister with the Education Committees of the Senate and the National Assembly. The Policy was announced in December 1992. The major aspect, aims and goals of National Education Policy include Promotion of Islamic values through education, improvement in women education, range of general and technical education at secondary level, demand oriented curriculum, expended span of graduation and post graduation, use of AV aids promoting private sector to participate in enhancement of literacy. This policy could not be implemented due to change in political scenario of country.
National Education Policy 1998-2010: The Prime Minister advised the Ministry of Education to design a new Education Policy in January 1998. The first revised draft was submitted to the Cabinet on 18 February, 1998. The Policy was announced in March 1998. Major objectives of National Education Policy include making the Quranic principles and Islamic practices an integral part of education system, to achieve universal primary education, to meet the basic educational needs of every individual, to expand the basic education, to ensure equal opportunity of higher education, laid emphasis on diversification, to make curriculum development a continuous process, to introduce in-service training programs for betterment of education.
Suggestions for achievement of above goals were:
i) Introduction of idea of multiple text
book, ii). Diversification of curriculum,
iii) Development of National Testing Services, iv) Expansion and emphasis on technical and science education, v) Upgrading the quality of Deeni Madaras, vi) Teacher training programs both pre and in service and vii) Introduction of comprehensive monitoring system.
Education Sector Reforms 2005-2010: This originated from the policy of 1998-2010 and focuses on development of human resources. The existing Education Policy was announced in 2009. The major thrust areas of ESR include free and universal primary education, free text books, equal access to opportunities of learning and improving all aspects in quality education, introduction of new educational curricula, development of training learning resources and materials, offering incentives for private sector, introduction of computer course at all levels, strengthening of research in higher education and grant for affiliation of madrasas, allocation for education would be 7% of the national GDP by 2015, literacy rate will be enhanced to 86% by 2015, a Bachelor degree, with a B.Ed, shall be the minimum requirement for teaching at the elementary level and masters degree for the secondary and higher secondary with a B.Ed, shall be ensured by 2018.
Ultimate Objectives of Pakistani Education policies is advancing literacy rate upto 80% in 2018 from 57% in 2009 which seems to be impossible under present scenario. For attaining higher literacy rates, government should prioritize education. Govt. should work on war footing basis to combat illiteracy in the country
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2009 prepared by the federal government seeks transformation of society along the lines of Islamic teachings and revitalise existing education system to cater to social, political and spiritual needs of individuals and society.
The NEP has nine chapters and describes overarching challenges, articulates the ways of filling the commitment-implementation gap, puts forward the provisions of Islamic education and transformation of the society on Islamic and human values, outlines reforms and policy actions to be taken at the sub-sector level, and broadly suggests a framework for implementation of the policy.
According to the policy’s draft, teaching Islamiyat to Muslim students is meant to provide them with opportunities to learn understand and apply the fundamental principles of Islam in their lives. This, it says, will reform and develop society on the principles of the Holy Quran and Sunnah. The policy declares Islamic education as duty of the society and the state. It says ideology of Islam forms the genesis of the State of Islamic Republic of Pakistan and its fundamental principles were defined in the Objectives Resolution, 1949, which part of the Constitution.
Titled as Islamic Education, the NEP’s Chapter Four gives out the vision for teaching Islamic Studies. It says as provided in the Constitution, all steps will be taken to enable Muslims of Pakistan, individually and collectively, to order their lives in accordance with the fundamental principles and basic concepts of Islam, and to provide facilities whereby they may be enabled to understand the meaning of life according to the Holy Quran and Sunnah.
According to the NEP, Islamiyat will be taught as a compulsory subject from Grade-I to Grade-XII, extending up to graduation level in all general and professional institutions, and advanced Islamic Studies will be offered as an elective subject at grades IX-X and XI-XII.
The policy divides the Islamiyat curriculum into five main parts – Al-Quran Al Kareem; Imaniyaat and Ibaadat; Seerat-e-Tayyiba; Ethics and Good Behaviour, and Prominent Personalities of Islam. The first part includes the reading of the Holy Quran (Nazira), the memorising selected small Suras of the Holy Quran (Hifz), the memorisation and translation of selected small Suras and the Quranic supplications, and selected Hadith.
According to it, the Islamic teachings will be made part of teacher training curricula and the curricula of other training institutions. It says Arabic teachers, preferably having the qualification as Qaris, will be appointed to such institutions. The policy promises to ensure that textual and other learning materials don’t contain anything repugnant to Islamic injunctions and controversial material against any sect or religious or ethnic minorities.
The policy recommends teaching Ethics and Moral Education instead of Islamiyat to non-Muslim children, and appointment of subject specific teachers for the purpose.
The policy says Deeni Madaris (religious seminaries) will be mainstreamed by introducing contemporary studies alongside the curricula of Deeni Madaris to enhance prospects of their students to pursue higher studies. It recommends the establishment of Madrassa Education Authority by the Interior Ministry.
AIOU Solved Assignment 1& 2 Code 626 Autumn & Spring 2024
Teacher education is a discipline and sub sector of education with its distinct pre service and in service forms. It equips prospective and in service teachers with information, knowledge and pedagogical skills to help reform their attitudes and behaviour to the profession of education. The key objective is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge (cognitive, affective and psychomotor) to students and to build their character and personalities. In other words teacher education refers to the policies and procedures designed to equip teachers with the knowledge, attitudes, behaviours and skills they require to perform their tasks effectively in the school and classroom. (Wikipedia, 09) [2] According to Sheikh M.A (1998), teacher education encompasses acquiring all that knowledge, skills and abilities which are relevant to the life of a “teacher as a teacher” It reshapes the attitudes, remodels the habits, and develops the personalities of teachers.
Teachers’ general education and professional training both require utmost care and attention, as whatever is acquired by them is transferred to their students with high multiple effects. The present has witnessed and is still experiencing a rapidly but positively changing scenario of processes and procedures of teacher training. New innovative methods are continuously being added to the already practiced traditional pedagogical techniques. Acquainting with these developments to the point of mastery is needed for the promotion and maintenance of good teaching learning standards. Good quality teacher education about these key elements paves the way of the development of the education system in the long run.
Teachers are the layers of the foundations of future citizens, hence need to be educated with futuristic perspective, so that they can develop the personalities of their students, not only as per present requirements but also for the years to come, accommodating the new trends from the global outlook. This is very important as teacher is one of the key agents of change in all communities and a service provider as per needs of the future. Changes are taking place not only at national but also at international level. With every passing day distances are shrinking and communities are coming closer to each other affecting each other’s practices of life.
The purpose of teacher education primarily is to equip prospective teachers not only with suitable aptitudes for teaching but also with appropriate skills and abilities required to make them effective and efficient professionals. Through different theoretical and practical activities, they are helped to understand not only the philosophical, psychological, and sociological basis of teaching, but also the relationship of education with the society and its values through teaching and learning processes.
The process of formal teacher education can help the prospective teachers minimize the troubles and save the students from the wastages of hit and trial. Appropriately rendered teacher education, provides ample opportunities to would be teachers to understand the nature of teaching; to envisage responsibilities of a teacher; to discover that to be a teacher is much more than learning by heart the philosophies and theories of learning; and to comprehend the practical implications of the pedagogical strategies. It is learnt that the profession of teaching is in fact facilitating the acquisition and retention of knowledge, values, skills and right attitudes for successful life that can initiate and promote positive changes in the society.
Keeping this in view teacher education, through teacher-preparatory years focuses on the development of abilities and skills that would not only make them capable teachers but will enable them to discharge duties effectively, take initiatives, motivate students and facilitate learning. With the belief that practice makes one perfect, students during teacher education phase are given the opportunity to teach or instruct and receive constant guidance and encouragement during practical delivery, in order to strengthen good habits and to overcome the pedagogical weaknesses.
Farrant, J. S. (1990)[3], observed that since the dawn of the twenty first century teacher education in developed countries remained divided into three phases:
1) Initial Teacher Education
2) Induction
3) Continuing Teacher Education
1) Initial teacher training / education
This education pertains to the training that is undertaken before formally starting the teaching profession. It is a pre-service course done before entering the classroom as a fully responsible teacher. It is usually provided in education colleges and education departments of universities where the student teachers are introduced to the knowledge and skills needed to be professional teachers. The students are formally taught the important components of this profession including aims of education, history of education, perspectives of education, modern approaches to learning, assessment and evaluation of learning and basics of curriculum development, educational psychology, philosophy and pedagogy. It also provides first hand experience of the practical aspects of the teaching profession. It usually takes a year or so and culminates into a certificate or a degree.
2) Induction
This informal phase begins when a student teacher changes from being a part time, visiting student teacher to a full time adequately responsible professional. Basically induction refers to the process of providing on the job guidance and support to the teachers during the first few months of teaching or the first year of the professional career. In countries like UK, during induction the teacher is on probation, and receives guidance and supervision formally by the teacher-tutor, and informally from all other colleagues & head teacher. The work load during this phase of education is reduced in order to provide time and opportunity for guidance, reflection and grooming. This is a transitional phase from being a student to being a full time teacher.
3) Teachers’ continuous professional development
It is an in-service process for professional refinement of practicing teachers. It is a life long process in which efforts are made to improve and polish up the potentials of the teachers. It includes professional trainings like workshops, short courses and seminars. This is usually formally arranged by good schools or can be self directed through reading of professional books, discussions with colleagues, benefiting from on line courses, or attending training workshops, conferences, and symposiums.
With the passage of time, all institutions have started to value in service training of teachers more and more; and are regularly arranging training programs of different durations for their teachers. These trainings are sometimes general in nature for the improvement of the overall teaching methodologies, and sometimes focused on improving specific subject-teaching skills, enabling teachers master innovative concepts recently incorporated in the existing curriculum. Such in service trainings are usually taken up in anticipation for the expected promotions.
AIOU Solved Assignment 1& 2 Code 626 Autumn & Spring 2024
Teacher education has always provided opportunities for prospective teachers to practice teaching in school settings while still in their preparation programs. For decades, these experiences occurred during the last year of the preparation program and lasted approximately six to eight weeks. In many programs, this was the only experience that prospective teachers had in a school or with students. The typical experience included assigning the student to an experienced teacher in the school who would provide guidance and supervision. A teacher education faculty member would provide a minimum of three visits to observe the prospective teacher teach.
In the 1960s, programs began requiring early experiences in the schools for undergraduate students, often during their freshman year and continuing throughout the four years, culminating in a full semester of student teaching or internship. Preparation programs began placing clusters of four or five students in the same school so as to provide a collective experience rather than a private ordeal for future teachers.
Changes in the requirements of preparation programs regarding field experiences coincided with changes in what teacher education faculty were required to do and expectations of what schools should do. In 1986 and 1990 the Holmes Group argued for professional development schools (PDSs). In a PDS, a teacher preparation program or institution would commit to providing a school population with a cadre of prospective teachers, several higher education faculty, and curriculum assistance over a period of several years. The goals of a PDS are to provide better field experiences for the teacher education students, increased faculty cooperation with the schools, and sustained curricular improvement in schools and in teacher education programs.
Many variations have occurred and will continue to occur in the field experiences of prospective teachers. The reactions of student teachers to their experiences will likely continue to be consistent. Study after study reveals that the student teaching experience is rated most important of all their preparation programs. And why not? It is the one time that they have sustained interaction with the young people that they have professed a desire to spend their working lives with.
Who teaches the teachers? Who is a teacher educator? The broadest conception of who is a teacher educator includes everyone who teaches prospective and practicing teachers, from their freshman English professors and those who teach special methods courses to those who supervise student teaching. Teacher educators may be defined specifically as “those who hold tenure-line positions in teacher preparation in higher education institutions, teach beginning and advanced students in teacher education, and conduct research or engage in scholarly studies germane to teacher education” (Ducharme, p. 6).
Research on teacher educators began in the 1980s as Heather Carter, Edward Ducharme and Russell Agne, Judith Lanier and Judith Little, and others began publishing research studies of teacher education faculty. In The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, published in 1996, Nancy Zimpher and Julie Sherrill describe the teacher education professoriate as majority male and more than 90 percent Anglo. Summarizing several studies, they note that males dominate in the higher ranks, publish more than females, and work less in schools. Ducharme offers the observation that “there is a contradiction between a commitment to prepare a professional cadre of students, a majority of whom are female, to become powerful teachers and effective advocates for youth in which the female faculty are in roles and positions implying an inequity between the genders” (p. 120).
The ethnic makeup of the teacher education professoriate is heavily skewed toward white males. The Anglo population of the professoriate is between 91 and 93 percent. Candidates for teaching remain heavily white. With the exception of faculty in the historically black colleges, there are few black or other minority professors in teacher education. As the schools become more and more multicultural, those who teach teachers remain majority white and male; those who teach children in elementary schools remain mostly female and white; those who teach adolescents remain majority female and mostly white.
Many teacher education programs have defining characteristics. Programs generally lean toward one of several thematic patterns: behaviorist or competency-based, humanistic, and developmental. The 1960s and 1970s were the heydays of the competency-based teacher education (CBTE) and performance-based teacher education (PBTE) programs. In CBTE, researchers attempted to isolate what they perceived as the discrete tasks of teaching, develop protocols for training teachers to master the tasks, and produce tests to assess whether or not the teachers could perform the tasks. The CBTE movement soon degenerated into lists of hundreds of competencies as proponents attempted to outdo one another through elaborate lists. Instead of a system designed to help manage teacher education, it became an unmanageable process.
In Teacher Education (1975), N. L. Gage and Philip Winne defined PBTE as “teacher training in which the prospective or inservice teacher acquires, to a prespecified degree, performance tendencies and capabilities that promote student achievement of educational objectives” (p. 146). Both CBTE and PBTE derived from beliefs in relationships between teaching practices and student learning. Intensely behaviorist, both CBTE and PBTE grew in part from a desire for accountability in education, a concern that has persisted into the twenty-first century. Although the nomenclature of CBTE and PBTE has largely vanished from higher education teacher education syllabi, the concerns for accountability and the premises underlying the movements persist.
AIOU Solved Assignment 1& 2 Code 626 Autumn & Spring 2024
Joseph Axelrod describes two types of teaching as “the didactic modes, employed by teacher-craftsmen, and the evocative modes, employed by teacher-artists” (p. 5). Didactic teaching implies passing on traditional knowledge or lore, or teaching how to do something. Teachers use lecture to inculcate knowledge or demonstration to model actions, after which students demonstrate they have learned what was taught either by reciting or writing the material or by repeating the demonstration, as in a science class experiment. Much state and national testing relies on rote recall of material. In this context, learning means being able to reproduce what has been taught or demonstrated. For example, students should recall key facts of American history such as the order of the American presidents. Emphases are often on learning facts and conditions, not on understanding complexity and drawing conclusions.
Early in human history, most teaching was didactic. Poets recited ancient myths and stories and a few listeners learned them by rote. Individuals acquired skills by observing their elders who were fishers, artisans, lawyers, or anything else, and emulating what they saw. Seeing teaching as a process of passing on knowledge has persisted. Paul Woodring argues that “The oldest form of teacher education is the observation and emulation of a master. Plato learned to teach by sitting at the feet of Socrates. Aristotle, in turn, learned from Plato” (p. 1).
Much observation and emulation still go on. In The Teacher Educator’s Handbook, Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Janine Remillard note that “Like much of our society, prospective teachers believe that teaching is a process of passing knowledge from teacher to student and that learning involves absorbing or memorizing information and practicing skills. Students wait like empty vessels to be filled and teachers do the filling” (p. 70).
Most teaching in early America was highly didactic. Teachers taught both the processes of learning to read and the morals attendant to a proper life through moralistic texts. Children learning their letters in the early nineteenth century read in the New England Primer under the letter A, “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all”; under the letter F, “The idle fool Is wipt at school”; and under the letter J, “Job feels the rod Yet blesses God” (pp. 12–13). Students thus simultaneously learned their letters, religious lessons, and injunctions about behavior.
Not all teaching in the past was didactic; not all learning was rote. Socrates relied on the relationship between himself and his students to arrive at truths of human existence; he was, in Axelrod’s sense, an evocative teacher. Socrates corrected occasionally and enjoined his students, but rarely taught didactically. The Socratic, or evocative, method places responsibility for knowledge growth on the students.
Using the evocative method, social studies teachers might teach geographical lessons from which they expect students to describe how communities develop relative to the natural world surrounding them. Teachers might present students with a computer program describing an environment near a river, with large forests, good soil, and a moderate climate. Students would then describe how they believe a community might evolve, given these circumstances. The teacher’s role is to elicit conclusions, probabilities, and hypotheses from the students and have them assiduously pursue the most likely correct answers. Learning means being able to gather and assimilate data and evidence and draw conclusions based on sound thinking.
Neither didactic nor evocative teaching alone will suffice because learners vary widely in how they learn. Some individuals learn material effectively when teachers present it sequentially or chronologically; others may learn better when teachers present material thematically. Some learners have an affinity for concreteness while others prefer abstraction. Teachers require tolerance and understanding for these and other differences in learners. Although some learners may master a variety of ways of learning, teachers more often than not appeal to what they discern to be the learner’s most comfortable way of learning. Ideally, teachers attach neither special praise nor stigma to different ways of learning. They recognize not all individuals learn in similar ways. However, in many classrooms, teachers fail to teach a variety of ways of learning. This can frustrate many learners.
Didactic teaching and evocative teaching are merely two modes of instruction among other related ways teachers teach and learners learn. Little exists to suggest one mode is superior to all others. Nearly all teachers use a variety of modes of instruction as they go about their daily teaching tasks. Teacher education must provide opportunities for prospective and practicing teachers to master a range of teaching modes.
In his biography of John Adams, David McCullough points out that in colonial America, teaching was something men did if they did not have anything better to do. He notes that in 1755 John Adams, not having the money for the fee to apprentice to a lawyer, although “untried and untrained as a teacher, immediately assumed his new role in a one-room schoolhouse at the center of town” (p. 37). It is interesting that McCullough uses the phrase “untried and untrained.” The fact is there was no training for teachers in 1755. The first formal teacher preparation began in the 1820s with the establishment of “normal schools” in Vermont and Massachusetts.
The establishment of normal schools became a movement later in the nineteenth century; almost every state had at least one of them. The normal schools’ purpose was perfectly straightforward: the preparation of teachers. Cities were desperate for teachers. By the early 1900s, nearly every city with a population of more than 300,000 had a normal school, often tied in with the high schools. Normal schools were technically oriented toward the practice of teaching. Modeled on earlier established European institutions for teacher training, these schools provided very specific training. In The Salterton Trilogy (1986), Robertson Davies pro a fictional but accurate picture of what transpired in many normal school classrooms. “They [normal school teachers] taught howteach; they taught when to open the windows in a classroo when to close them; … they taught ways of teaching children withtalent for drawing how to draw; they taught how a school could be formed and trained where there was no instrument but achpipe … they taught how to make hangings, somewhat resembling batik, by drawing in wax crayon on unbleached cotton, and pressing it with a hot iron” (p. 79). These examples illustrat didactic mode of teacher education in which prospective teachersrn how to do things, not how to thinkabout the and wherefores of doing things. Didactic teacher education treatsching as craft. It suggests that individuals can acquir essential skills to impart knowledge, facts, and even abilitiesough lecture and demonstration. By contrast, the evocative as applied to the education of teachers, suggests that teaching is an emergent art in which teachers evoke from students what they already know and lead them to the acquisition of new knowledge and skills. By the 1940s, most normal schools had expanded, into four-year state teachers colleges or liberal arts colleges hasizing teacher education, and then, during the higher educ expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, into state universities. For example, by the 1960s, the three former normal schools in Vermont had become four-year liberal arts colleges with new campuses and diminished teacher education programs.
As the normal schools morphed into four-year colleges and eventually state universities, established state universities that did not already have them began to develop teacher preparation programs. University and college teacher education programs grew rapidly as states developed specific licensure requirements often based on college level coursework. As accreditation of secondary schools grew, the need for teachers with college degrees also grew. The norm became a combination of a degree with a major in an academic subject and completion of required education courses. Scholars argue that universities were anything but altruistic in their development of teacher preparation programs. Reasons included a desire to show some public service commitment, a need to increase revenues from enrollment of teacher education students, and the development of graduate programs in educational administration. In 2002, most universities had firmly entrenched teacher preparation programs on their campuses. Campus programs remain the major place of preparation for teachers. State universities continue to be major sources of beginning teachers. Institutions such as Utah’s Brigham Young University, South Florida University, Indiana University, and Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan, annually graduate hundreds of licensed teachers. In addition, liberal arts colleges with small teacher preparation programs consistently graduate licensed teachers. More than 1,200 institutions continue to provide teacher preparation programs.
During the last decades of the twentieth century a variety of nontraditional centers of activity evolved. The combination of the need for teachers in critically short areas such as mathematics and science and the public criticism of campus-based teacher education produced situations in which individuals and groups developed alternative routes for teacher preparation. Periodic shortages in teachers, particularly in urban and rural settings, led to a variety of ways of circumventing licensure regulations and university requirements. Teacher education was occurring through a variety of vehicles, including colleges and universities, public schools, state departments of education, special projects such as Teach for America, and district and university affiliated programs such as a New York City project for recruiting non-traditional candidates.
College and university-based teacher education is often the target of many critics contending that students in teacher education programs are academically weaker than students in other programs, that preparation programs are vacuous, and that the faculty are second-rate. Despite reliable studies responding to these criticisms and demonstrating some of the criticism as ill founded, the attacks continue. The alleged low quality of teacher education students has led to a lack of acceptance by higher education faculty of teacher education on the campus.
Burton Clark and Harry Judge have noted a certain university reluctance to own teacher education despite its major presence on campuses. Clark shows how faculty at state universities that had been normal schools or state teachers colleges resent the influence of “education people”; Judge believes that such institutions, their faculties, and their administrations have little respect for teacher preparation. He contends that the further away from direct involvement in teacher preparation the education faculty are, the better they feel about themselves. Thus, although teacher education has a long history on campuses, the relationship between it and the broader campus remains strained.
Chester Finn, a vitriolic critic of teacher education, argues that colleges of education “are the most-despised institutions in the education universe” (p.234). Even among the friends of teacher education, criticism is severe. In his 1990 book, Teachers for Our Nation’s Schools, John Goodlad notes, “Teachers and teacher educators don’t know enough about how to teach, and they don’t know enough about how to understand and influence the conditions around them” (p. 108).
- Palmer describes the tenuous nature of teacher education: “Training programs that were established tended to disappear after a few years. Then, as now, public universities were not certain how to deal with teacher education or if they wanted it. The low status of teacher education in state universities was established early, and it has persisted” (p. 52). A reason for the low status of teacher education faculty may be that they prepare people who work with the young in schools: preschool staffs, day care center employees, elementary and secondary school teachers–all groups that are held in low esteem by various segments of society.
Programs to prepare teachers remain remarkably consistent. They generally consist of a general arts and sciences component, advanced study in a discipline, a teacher preparation component, and field experiences. In The Teacher Educator’s Handbook (1996), Barbara Senkowski Stengal and Alan Tom note that “Traditional teacher education programs are typically marked by three components: foundations of schooling and learning, teaching methodology, and practice teaching” (p. 593). Foundations of schooling and learning include the vital areas of psychology, philosophy, and learning principles, a pattern first established in the normal schools.
Teacher education has always provided opportunities for prospective teachers to practice teaching in school settings while still in their preparation programs. For decades, these experiences occurred during the last year of the preparation program and lasted approximately six to eight weeks. In many programs, this was the only experience that prospective teachers had in a school or with students. The typical experience included assigning the student to an experienced teacher in the school who would provide guidance and supervision. A teacher education faculty member would provide a minimum of three visits to observe the prospective teacher teach.
In the 1960s, programs began requiring early experiences in the schools for undergraduate students, often during their freshman year and continuing throughout the four years, culminating in a full semester of student teaching or internship. Preparation programs began placing clusters of four or five students in the same school so as to provide a collective experience rather than a private ordeal for future teachers.
Changes in the requirements of preparation programs regarding field experiences coincided with changes in what teacher education faculty were required to do and expectations of what schools should do. In 1986 and 1990 the Holmes Group argued for professional development schools (PDSs). In a PDS, a teacher preparation program or institution would commit to providing a school population with a cadre of prospective teachers, several higher education faculty, and curriculum assistance over a period of several years. The goals of a PDS are to provide better field experiences for the teacher education students, increased faculty cooperation with the schools, and sustained curricular improvement in schools and in teacher education programs.
Many variations have occurred and will continue to occur in the field experiences of prospective teachers. The reactions of student teachers to their experiences will likely continue to be consistent. Study after study reveals that the student teaching experience is rated most important of all their preparation programs. And why not? It is the one time that they have sustained interaction with the young people that they have professed a desire to spend their working lives with.
Who teaches the teachers? Who is a teacher educator? The broadest conception of who is a teacher educator includes everyone who teaches prospective and practicing teachers, from their freshman English professors and those who teach special methods courses to those who supervise student teaching. Teacher educators may be defined specifically as “those who hold tenure-line positions in teacher preparation in higher education institutions, teach beginning and advanced students in teacher education, and conduct research or engage in scholarly studies germane to teacher education” (Ducharme, p. 6).
Research on teacher educators began in the 1980s as Heather Carter, Edward Ducharme and Russell Agne, Judith Lanier and Judith Little, and others began publishing research studies of teacher education faculty. In The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, published in 1996, Nancy Zimpher and Julie Sherrill describe the teacher education professoriate as majority male and more than 90 percent Anglo. Summarizing several studies, they note that males dominate in the higher ranks, publish more than females, and work less in schools. Ducharme offers the observation that “there is a contradiction between a commitment to prepare a professional cadre of students, a majority of whom are female, to become powerful teachers and effective advocates for youth in which the female faculty are in roles and positions implying an inequity between the genders” (p. 120).
The ethnic makeup of the teacher education professoriate is heavily skewed toward white males. The Anglo population of the professoriate is between 91 and 93 percent. Candidates for teaching remain heavily white. With the exception of faculty in the historically black colleges, there are few black or other minority professors in teacher education. As the schools become more and more multicultural, those who teach teachers remain majority white and male; those who teach children in elementary schools remain mostly female and white; those who teach adolescents remain majority female and mostly white.
Many teacher education programs have defining characteristics. Programs generally lean toward one of several thematic patterns: behaviorist or competency-based, humanistic, and developmental. The 1960s and 1970s were the heydays of the competency-based teacher education (CBTE) and performance-based teacher education (PBTE) programs. In CBTE, researchers attempted to isolate what they perceived as the discrete tasks of teaching, develop protocols for training teachers to master the tasks, and produce tests to assess whether or not the teachers could perform the tasks. The CBTE movement soon degenerated into lists of hundreds of competencies as proponents attempted to outdo one another through elaborate lists. Instead of a system designed to help manage teacher education, it became an unmanageable process.
In Teacher Education (1975), N. L. Gage and Philip Winne defined PBTE as “teacher training in which the prospective or inservice teacher acquires, to a prespecified degree, performance tendencies and capabilities that promote student achievement of educational objectives” (p. 146). Both CBTE and PBTE derived from beliefs in relationships between teaching practices and student learning. Intensely, behaviorist, both CBTE and PBTE grew in part from a desire for accountability in education, a concern that has persisted into the twenty-first century. Although the nomenclature of CBTE and PBTE has largely vanished from higher education teacher education syllabi, the concerns for accountability and the premises underlying the movements persist.
Other programs emphasize a more developmental approach, typically focusing on field experiences integrated with coursework, analyses of classrooms, journal writing, and reflective practice. The 1980s and 1990s saw emphasis on reflective practice as a program keynote in many institutions.
