Juno News - July 07, 2024


Should universities have a monopoly on teacher training？


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

187.38771

Word Count

2,086

Sentence Count

138


Summary


Transcript

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