Juno News - July 07, 2024


Should universities have a monopoly on teacher training？

Topics
university monopoly on teacher training university monopoly on teacher training
Mentioned
Kaylin Ford Andrew Lawton Show Stephen Hawking
Feds spend $1.7 million promoting carbon tax abroad Poilievre takes aim at Trudeau's ＂woke ideology＂ in Stampede speech

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

187.39

Word count

2,086

Sentence count

127


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with the founder of the Alberta Classical Academy, Kaylin Ford, to discuss her thoughts on the need for a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) in education and why it should not be required.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I want to turn from the regulation of the internet to education. It's been a recurring theme for so
00:00:15.480 many people in this country, frustrations with what their kids are learning in the classroom.
00:00:19.960 But these issues go beyond just curriculum concerns. It's also about the caliber and
00:00:25.680 quality of education. And a lot of that comes down to the caliber and qualities of a quality of
00:00:30.680 teachers. But Kaylin Ford has done her part in Alberta to push back against a lot of the problems
00:00:36.460 in the education system, founding the Alberta Classical Academy. And she also had a great piece
00:00:41.460 in the hub. Universities have a monopoly on teacher training. They don't deserve to keep it. This was
00:00:47.980 an argument I hadn't really entertained before. Actually, a conversation I had with you not that
00:00:53.360 long ago, Kaylin, because I had always just sort of accepted the status quo as being necessary,
00:00:58.420 that a teacher's college at a university is the way you train and certify teachers. But
00:01:03.780 there's a better way, you say. Tell me about it. Sure. Well, I guess to give a little bit of
00:01:10.480 background here, in Canada, this is different in some other international jurisdictions. But in
00:01:15.040 Canada, you basically need a Bachelor of Education or a B.Ed. if you want to teach in a classroom
00:01:18.980 and be certified by a teacher's college. You can also do a post-degree B.Ed. So after you've
00:01:26.580 already obtained a Bachelor's degree, you can then go back and do what is in most provinces
00:01:30.440 a two-year post-degree Bachelor of Education. And I think that the reason why this has been
00:01:37.240 implemented is precisely for the reason that you alluded to. We think people, you know, teaching
00:01:41.800 is an incredibly important vocation. It's one of the most important jobs for sort of perpetuating
00:01:46.760 and preserving your civilization is the education of the next generation. And you want to make
00:01:50.940 sure that your teachers are well qualified to do that. And I need to sort of preface this
00:01:57.060 by saying, of course, there are tons of really brilliant teachers. There are also some great
00:02:00.780 people in education faculties. And not all education faculties are the same. So forgive the generalization.
00:02:07.300 But typically, these programs are not producing the kind of training that we would expect given
00:02:13.200 the importance of the job. And a lot of teachers will admit this themselves.
00:02:17.960 So one of the things that strikes me as so bizarre is you could have, you know, Stephen Hawking,
00:02:23.660 for example, when he was alive, one of the most brilliant physicists in the world,
00:02:27.180 would be unqualified to teach a high school science class for lack of a Bachelor of Education. I mean,
00:02:33.420 and that's the extreme example. You could have a former Prime Minister of Canada who decides in
00:02:39.000 retirement, he or she wants to teach a civics class at high school and wouldn't be able to. And
00:02:43.900 there are little ways around that, are there? Are there not?
00:02:48.120 Well, it's very limited. But yeah, that's, that's, you've hit on one of the absurdities of this B.
00:02:52.900 Ed. requirement. And we've encountered this with our charter schools, of which we now have three.
00:02:57.560 We're a specialized program. So we do things that are a little different than what a standard public
00:03:02.000 school might do. We offer Latin and in high school, ancient Greek, for example, we focus very heavily
00:03:09.000 on history. And it's almost impossible in our experience to find a certificated teacher that is
00:03:16.420 someone with a B. Ed. who can teach Latin, let alone ancient Greek. So there are a couple of provinces
00:03:22.240 have devised some work around, some of them quite rarely used, whereby in Alberta, for example,
00:03:27.440 a minister can offer an exemption for an individual to become a teacher. That's not really a scalable
00:03:32.400 solution, though. So it's not just limited to us. I mean, there are STEM-focused charter schools.
00:03:37.840 It's very hard to find people who can teach high level science and technology or engineering courses,
00:03:44.080 or there's arts academies similarly that encounter this problem. It's also experienced for vocational
00:03:51.120 traits. You know, if you've got someone who's like a master welder or something or a woodworker,
00:03:56.640 but they don't also have a Bachelor of Education, then it's very difficult to offer those courses
00:04:01.040 in high schools. Now, the argument, I suppose, if I give the government and sort of the status quo,
00:04:07.760 the benefit of the doubt here, is that teaching is itself a skill that needs to be taught above and
00:04:13.200 beyond the knowledge you have. And anyone who's taken, you know, university classes can probably
00:04:18.080 attest to this. There are brilliant people that are absolutely atrocious teachers. So
00:04:22.240 why does the B.Ed. not do that, in your view, or not do it well enough to justify its continued
00:04:28.080 existence or requirement? So yeah, very good point. I don't want to imply that just because you have a
00:04:32.800 doctorate in literature that you are qualified to teach teenagers, right? A PhD doesn't qualify you to
00:04:40.000 be a primary or secondary school teacher, but neither does a B.Ed. It takes a special kind of person
00:04:46.000 who has the aptitude and the passion to do that. And teaching is, you know, teaching in the sort of
00:04:53.120 modern context is very much, it's an art and it's a craft. And what I would argue is that in addition
00:05:00.160 to the having sort of possessing subject matter content knowledge, which all teachers should have,
00:05:05.760 the other dimension is learning the art and the craft of teaching. It takes a lot of special skills.
00:05:10.000 There's a real art to classroom management, to assessments, to explicit and to providing effective
00:05:15.760 instruction, what we would call explicit instruction. And the best way to learn that
00:05:20.240 is in the practicum. So we surveyed 26 of the teachers in our school system and asked them what
00:05:25.520 they learned and what they didn't learn in their B.Ed. And the really devastating thing was a lot of them
00:05:30.000 were saying that the practicum was really valuable, being in a classroom with an experienced mentor
00:05:35.360 teacher guiding them. But very often the mentor teacher was telling them, ignore what you've
00:05:40.640 learned in the classroom, in your university. It's bunk. It's not going to work in practice.
00:05:45.440 So I recall one teacher actually saying, you know, the damage of my coursework, the damage of my B.Ed
00:05:51.520 was mitigated by having great teachers in the practicum. But the actual coursework was of,
00:05:57.760 according to our teachers, it was typically of little to negative value. It sometimes actively
00:06:02.800 maleducated them as to what effective teaching and effective pedagogy looked like.
00:06:07.760 Interesting. One point that I don't know if it's the same in other provinces, but in Ontario,
00:06:12.000 they've, especially in the last several years, changed the length of time it takes to do a B.Ed,
00:06:17.760 not based on the material you need, but based on, you know, the availability of teaching jobs. You
00:06:23.520 know, at one point they made it two years because they had too many teachers and wanted to slow it
00:06:27.760 down. And then they had too few. So they expedited it, which proves that in a lot of ways,
00:06:31.520 it is an arbitrary, an arbitrary degree for people, for some people.
00:06:36.080 Yeah. And to that point, you know, there was a, during COVID era, there were some U.S. states
00:06:40.880 that on an emergency basis, hire teachers without sort of certification. By the way,
00:06:47.200 a number of U.S. states don't require it at all. But they found that in the aftermath of COVID,
00:06:53.840 there was no real difference in the academic gains if, depending on whether students had a
00:06:58.720 certificated teacher or one of these emergency hires without a teaching background or teacher
00:07:02.560 training. So there was no real difference there. And again, I don't mean to discount the difficulty
00:07:08.160 of teaching in a classroom. It is a really, really difficult job to do it well, but it doesn't seem
00:07:13.920 to be correlated with whether you have a B.Ed or the length that that B.Ed program took you to obtain.
00:07:19.200 What would your ideal model be? If you were the education minister in Alberta and you could just
00:07:24.080 start from scratch, what would you make the requirement? Well, I tend to err on the side of
00:07:30.560 sort of local authority. So, you know, the sort of the extreme recommendation would be to say,
00:07:35.040 give superintendents, the people who are actually in charge of school authorities and who are closest to
00:07:39.280 the level of practice and to being able to observe and assess teachers, give them the authority to
00:07:43.600 decide who to hire. I know that this would not fly with a lot of with the bureaucracy and it would
00:07:50.560 probably it would get some people's backs up. So I think another solution that we have proposed would
00:07:57.680 be an alternative pathway to teacher certification, especially for people who already have a degree
00:08:03.120 that is expedited over the two years. We've suggested a paid practicum centered model. So maybe
00:08:08.880 one year rather than two years, which is what it currently is for a post degree B.Ed in Alberta.
00:08:13.360 One year where you're sponsored by a school authority, you're being evaluated by them,
00:08:17.600 they're paying you at least something, maybe not a full teacher salary, but something to
00:08:21.280 minimize the opportunity costs that are associated with, for many people, a mid-career change in their
00:08:28.160 profession. So make it practicum focused, have some coursework, but not nearly the degree of credits
00:08:34.400 that are currently required because there's very little value, it seems, in that coursework and really
00:08:38.960 focusing on that practicum experience and shortening the timeline. So one of the things we encountered
00:08:45.120 was we have all these people that we've wanted to hire, but they have a doctorate in classics or
00:08:50.320 philosophy or physics or something, they have families, they have mortgages, they can't drop out of the
00:08:54.880 workforce for two years to go get a B.Ed. And so it's about figuring out how you can improve this sort
00:09:00.480 of labor mobility and bring exceptional individuals who do have a passion and an aptitude for teaching
00:09:05.920 into the profession.
00:09:06.720 And interestingly, I don't believe it exists in Canada, but in several United States,
00:09:12.160 states, you can do that with law, where you can actually practice law without a law degree,
00:09:16.720 if you apprentice your way in by working under a lawyer. And, you know, again, something like that
00:09:21.200 would sound so shocking to people, but this is not without precedent. And the law, I'd say, is,
00:09:25.040 again, no offense to teachers, but a lot more of a complicated thing than teaching is.
00:09:31.360 Yeah. And like teaching though, I mean, the idea that law is an academic discipline is sort of
00:09:37.280 bizarre. I mean, there are sort of legal scholars, but legal practitioners are not academics. So
00:09:43.360 focusing on coursework doesn't make sense, right? Actual like articling type experience is where the
00:09:48.960 value is if you intend to be a legal practitioner. Of course, you also need to know things, right? So I
00:09:53.760 would hope that people in these, both of these professions would come at this with a lot of
00:09:57.600 background knowledge that they can contribute. But yeah, it's not, it's not really an academic
00:10:02.480 discipline and faculties of education. Again, I'll qualify this. There are some great people in these
00:10:08.560 faculties, but in general, they're not known for their academic rigor. A lot of the teachers are
00:10:14.000 disconnected both from classroom practice, as well as from the serious research when it does occur.
00:10:19.840 They're sort of political monocultures. They're heavily influenced by social
00:10:23.280 reconstructivism and critical theory. So, you know, I think I'm going on a bit of a tangent here,
00:10:29.680 but all the more reason to say this might not be the best approach to training teachers.
00:10:34.800 Well, if you want to learn a little bit more about this vision, Kaelin Ford's piece,
00:10:38.560 In the Hub, universities have a monopoly on teacher training. They don't deserve to keep it.
00:10:43.120 Came out a couple of weeks back, but very timely now. Kaelin, thanks for coming on today. And also,
00:10:47.440 if you want your kids to get a classical education, the Alberta Classical Academy has you covered
00:10:52.400 there. Kaelin, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Andrew.
00:10:55.440 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North
00:11:00.080 at www.tnc.news.co.uk at www.tnc.news