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In deciding which teacher certification program to follow in a school or
faculty of education, or in a teacher training college, you need to know
if the certification process is well-balanced and well-defined. In
a teacher certification program there will be invariably be practicums or
field experiences course in which you interact with a host teacher and
field experience supervisors Those personnel and the structure of the
practicum or field experience, along with the preparation and
support you will get for the field experience are critical. Your
success in the teacher certification program, its evaluation of your
suitability for becoming a primary or secondary school instructor, will
be based on those experiences.
Question - pointing to or calling for best practices
- Are host teachers screened for their class-room management and
subject expertise? Ideally, the host will be a
master teacher, familiar with the nuances and quirks of the local
curriculum and course material.
If host teachers are not screened, the field experience
is become a lottery. In the worse case, an unscreened host
teacher may base your direction in the field experience and the
judgment of your suitability for becoming a high school instructor on
your knowledge of substandard practices. The use of
untrained or unguided host teachers with unscreened people and
content to make pass-or-fail judgments on student teachers contradicts
assessment practices taught in schools and faculty of education, and in
the large, university codes for fairness and due support in assessment
of student teachers. .
- Are there any guidelines or training for the host
teachers?
If there are no guidelines, if any thing the host
teachers wants is satisfactory in the certification
program, the degree of support and direction is not
governed, and what is provided and sanctioned may depend on the host
teacher inclination. Since host teacher varies, the ease or difficulty
of your certification journey will depend on chance.
- How are the field experiences structured? Is there any
advanced notice to students of who will be their host teacher(s) and a
course to be met.
In some teacher certification programs, a field
experience is a random event. You are assigned a host teacher at
random, and two or three days after arrival in the host teacher
classroom, you are expected to deliver lesson plans and lessons. And in
that randomness, the subjects meet may be one of 5 plus, and you will
not have time to prepare. In other field experiences, you will
meet the host teacher before the start of the school year and
collaboratively plan or anticipate your interaction while building up
trust and identifying far in advance the subject or topics in which you
will have to plan and deliver lessons. The latter represents a best
practice.
- What is the certification program field experience policy with
respect to students knowledgeable in teachable subject without being
familiar with the local course materials and practices? Often
there are several courses in a high school mathematics program, and if
you have not met them before as a student in them, advance warning would
be useful.
If there is no policy that indicates the teacher
education program in question may fail to give you the support you need
and so let you fail. So If you are an older student starting a teacher
certification program, go the program office which monitors
student teaching and ask what will happened when a student teacher,
familiar in general with a subject is not familiar with the
current course materials and practice? That question is
important. If there is no special consideration for that circumstance,
there may be tacit assumption that you are familiar with the current
course materials and practices
Key Questions: Doe the teacher certification program describe in
sufficient detail the high school program in your field? Is local
course material clear and sufficient for course planning and delivery.
Are their undocumented practices? Is there nonsense or bureaucratic
bullshit in course materials and course definitions? Do you have
to ask for dozen examples of past finals to reverse engineer course
content.?
- Are field experience supervisors expert, master
teachers, in the course material in which your practicum or field
experience will occur? Will they be able to provide check and balance for
host teacher quirks? The question is important where professor of
mathematics education are not the field supervisors, or where professors
of education are expert in delivery style but not content. There is
no guarantee in North American that your professor of mathematics
education will know mathematics. He or she may have become a professor of
mathematics education without a good undergraduate knowledge of the
subject in schools and faculties where "style" is more important than
substance.
The certification program needs to provide access to a
master teachers familiar with the course material and its nuances or
quirks to provide a check or balance on the host teacher's expectations
practices. The assumption that a certified or qualified teacher is
course material and delivery expert often fails in secondary schools
where compulsory subjects like mathematics have to be given regardless
of whether or not the subject is in the zone of comfort of the host
teacher. I have met cases where substandard textbooks or course
material are approved and required. If your first encounter with
such substandard texts is in a field experience, and master teachers
are not available to provide aid, to supervise your field experience,
and to check or balance nonsense in course materials and your
unscreened host teacher behavior. your do-or-fail field
experience may end in a disaster.
- Does the teacher certification program provide instruction on
classroom management?
With the advent of compulsory school attendance in
authoritarian societies, instruction was teacher and subject centered,
in a way that manners and good behaviors was required. Otherwise, there
might be stiff penalties. In that environment, students were afraid to
misbehave. But in societies which are granting and recognizing more and
more freedom for their youth, school attendance may be required while
the consequences of not cooperating with the schools and their
instructors become less and less. In many societies today, school
attendance is compelled while poor manners and behaviors are not
enforced. So teachers have to artfully employ the limited means at
their disposal for classroom and hallway order and management. That
being said, your participation in school activities and your teaching a
course in a way that maintains or develops students will to cooperate
and participate in their own education minimizes the need for display
of fairness and firmness. Repeatedly providing students
opportunities for success is one way to encourage the will to
learn and work in each. Tat being said, you will sooner or latter give
a course in which the motivation of most if not all, is success in the
final examination. Good luck. You will be meeting students,
students likely to be well-mannered later on, who are in your face
rude. In all interactions, look for a path or intervention in which the
student or students decide that cooperation is in their best
interest.
- For the subjects you plan to teach, will the teacher certification
program besides describing or exhorting best classroom practice, describe
what is done as well? There again appears the question of style
being touted but not supported by education professors who are style
experts, not content experts. The latter is required for teaching
experience supervision. If the latter is missing, run or take your
chances.
If a teacher training program focuses on what should be
rather than what is, you will missing some necessary preparation
for the field experiences and lesson planning.
Teacher education programs may exhort you to act in a
certain manner and say what should be without focusing on what
is? Besides course on pedagogy, you may need a course from a
master teacher familiar with the current course materials in a
primary and secondary subject program, mathematics, science, history or
a language such as English or French or the language of instruction.
For example in mathematics or science, a master teacher at the
elementary level or secondary level, would describe the ends and means
of each year of instruction, course by course, to identify how later
skills and concepts are erected on earlier ones in a linear or spiral
(repetitive) manner. A master teacher would also describe the benefits
and limitations of current course materials, and identify nonsense in
them. Nonsense can appear and continue in course materials if the
latter are generated, approved and required in the absent of a master
teacher or subject master to object.
- For the subjects you plan to teach, does the college education
library keep on it shelves or computers, full set of course materials
(textbooks and governmental course definitions and final examinations)
for student-teachers and Professors of Education to consult?
The presence of course materials - what you will meet in
the classroom or in your field experiences - will allow you to get a
headstart. And if the course materials or government documentation are
not clearer complete, access to several, preferably a dozen, recent
final examinations may define course content for you. That is
important for subjects or school courses which you have not followed in
your school days due to their newness or because you followed another
path in school days, while or before current materials were in use.
- What are your withdrawal rights for the practicum's or field
experiences? Do they exist? What are the penalties?
In many college or university courses, there is a penalty-free
withdrawal period. So if you do not like the courese or its
instructors, you can withdraw. However, withdrawal in teacher
certification may be deemed a failure. But the right to withdraw
without penalty may be very precocious in field experiences where host
teachers and/or field supervisors and everyoneelse in the chain of
command are not master teachers in the subject at hand.
- If you fail a field experience due to unanticipated
difficulties with course practices and materials in subject will
you be allowed to continue the program at later date after studying the
subject in question in greater depth?
This may be important if you discover you subject
knowledge is not a great as thought, or if you meet undocumented
expectation in the field experiences, or if you meet nonsense and
bureaucratic bullshit in the course material and course definitions
that leaves you in a garbage-in, and hence a garbage out
situation.
- If you fail a field experience due to classroom management
difficulties, will the certification program allow you to re-enter in a
few years time to try again?
With the passage of time, maturity and
out-of-school experience in the workforce may provide the pose and
greater maturity needed for classroom management?
- If you fail and make an appeal, in the appeal process itself, will
there be a master teacher in your teachable subjects, so that any subject
related aspects of your appeal are heard?
- Does the teacher certification program or host institution provide
insurance cover for the possible hazards met in primary and
secondary schools, gentle to tough?
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