MORE CLINICAL EXPERIENCES WON’T IMPROVE TEACHING

MORE CLINICAL EXPERIENCES WON’T IMPROVE TEACHING

The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), in its “Blue Ribbon” report: Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers, recommends that teacher-training programs need to operate more like medical schools and require more hours of clinical experience.

Rhetorically, such a prescription holds appeal because it plays on the prestige that our culture ascribes to medical doctors.

Is that prestige, however, based on the actual performance of the medical community, or is it based on our culture’s materialism that gives doctors their esteemed social status because of their income?

Before we thoughtlessly appropriate medical schools as the right model for teacher preparation, we need to consider the findings of a study recently conducted by the U.S Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General reporting that mistakes by medical care providers lead to around 15,000 deaths every month. Those same mistakes cost U.S taxpayers about $4.4 billion dollars each year.

Why aren’t these failures tied back to the professional preparation of doctors and nurses in the same way that low student test scores are tied to the preparation of teachers? Why is no one screaming for our nation’s medical schools to be placed under greater scrutiny and to be held more accountable? While medical schools do require students to spend much more time in clinical experiences than do colleges of education, how many of those 15,000 deaths each month can we attribute to the excessive demands placed on medical students during their clinical experiences that drive so many of them to exhaustion, burn-out, depression, and substance abuse?

Is this really the model that teacher education needs to follow? Is more clinical experience always better? Given the rate of errors leading to patient deaths, too much clinical experience might not be what’s best for medical students or their patients. In another recent study, July is the deadliest month to be admitted to a hospital. It also happens to be the month when most graduating MDs begin their residency programs.

NCATE’s proposal misdiagnoses the problem. Teacher education receives criticism primarily because we have done so little to improve the quality of public schooling. But to criticize us on these grounds assumes that our graduates actually practice in accordance with what we teach them in their teacher education programs.

As in other states, teacher educators in North Carolina develop their curriculum from the professional teaching standards set by the State Board of Education (SBE) and various national accrediting agencies, including NCATE.

Just because the SBE sets these standards, doesn’t mean that the professional culture of public schools actually supports teachers in adhering to the standards in their day-to-day practice. Particularly in this era of high-stakes testing and accountability, the leadership of far too many public schools abandons professional standards in favor of the vulgar pragmatism of teaching-to-the-test.

Teacher educators actually have no control over the professional culture of schools. Our interns and student teachers frequently tell us that their clinical supervisors and teacher mentors encourage them to forget everything they ever learned in their teacher education programs.

This pattern demonstrates more of a rejection of state and national standards by the dominant culture within public schools than it does a rejection of teacher education.

Therefore, how can teacher educators ever really be held accountable for the quality of instruction delivered in schools? And, why would NCATE suggest that requiring more clinical experiences in those schools will do anything to interrupt the status quo?

Until we find a way to meaningfully transform the professional culture of schools, we should expect no substantive improvements in their outcomes.