Hey, young South Dakotans! Sign up now to get your teaching certificate from South Dakota’s Regental universities! You’ll get to dedicate 40 to 50 of your 120 credits to education courses and spend a full year doing an internship, one of whose major purposes is to prepare you to teach to the standardized tests:
In the past, education majors have spent a semester doing student teaching in K-12 schools. Now, though, they are embedded in schools for an entire year, said Paul Turman, system vice president of academic affairs.
“That entire year of a degree program at Northern or (the University of South Dakota, for instance), now you start the school year along with the other teachers and the other students. And you spend the entire year with those students, so you get exposed to every feature of how classroom management is set up, how you deal with conflicts with parents, what the curriculum looks like, how you test students, how do you get them prepared for Smarter Balance or Dakota Step,” Turman said. “That’s going to have a significant impact on the candidates that we produce and how prepared they are” [Katherine Grandstrand, “New Educators Key Part of South Dakota Economy,” Aberdeen American News, 2015.09.06].
Yes, Dr. Turman, drilling prospective teachers on teaching to the test will have a significant impact on those candidates… an impact that will knock the brightest, most principled candidates right into another profession.
None of the 40 to 50 credits required of teacher candidates include financial planning to help students figure out how to get by on the lowest teacher salaries in the nation.
yet executives in state government who make over $150,000 per year will be getting a 2%+2 pay raise if the legislature has its way. Time to cap the top pay until our educators get paid well and educational program funding is back on par. I see the SAT scores are down, too. Can’t expect kids to remember the good stuff when all you do is teach to a test.
While I am still not excited about the year-long student teaching, SDSU is taking a very different approach and only requires 34 education credits. It has been very difficult for the content departments because we still will award content degrees–a degree in Math as opposed to a degree in Math Ed. Here is an outline of the SDSU education courses, http://www.sdstate.edu/tll/fields-of-study/ste/upload/Website-Residency-info-June2015.pdf
Wait–so how much, say, math reeducation do most of math teachers actually have?
Wait–so how much, say, math education do most math teachers actually have?
(Sorry for my garbled first version. Thumb typing doesn’t always yield intended results.)
At SDSU, students are required to take 45 credits of math. Within those 45 credits, there are four courses that are specifically math methods courses. These courses account for 13 of the 45 credits. At the other BOR institutions, the math credits range from about 34 credits to 41 credits.
Heidi, the BHSU math/science education degree requires 24 credits of straight math, 19–23 credits of one science, 5 credits of math/science teaching methods.
I like the part where it prepares future teachers on how to deal with conflicts with parents. That is only going to increase and we want to keep as many teachers as we can.
None of the 40 to 50 credits required of teacher candidates include financial planning to help students figure out how to get by on the lowest teacher salaries in the nation.
Do I detect a modicum of sarcasm,Master Cory?
Bitterness, not sarcasm.
Me, sarcastic? ;-)
I’m more dismayed that the 50-credit requirement boxes out the opportunity to take another minor that could add a teaching credential to one’s certificate and expand one’s job options.
Mike, that was my favorite part too! Cory, there are times when sarcasm is the only appropriate response. Well done!
I think Shirley H-M has a very good plan. No raises for the people in Pierre until the schools, which automatically includes teachers, are as fully funded as necessary to offer great educations to SD’s #1 asset, the students.
My daughter just started the math ed. program. There is a difference between some classes listed in the program course work from last spring and what is listed now. I think that this is the “dumbing down” of the classes needed so they can get more into this program. She plans on taking them anyway because they will come in handy when looking for a job in another state.
I really don’t think that anything is going to happen with education funding during this administration. Doogard does not want to be remembered as the one who raised taxes. Instead he will kick the can down the road and let the next guy worry about it. What I find ironic is that in the early 1980’s, the legislature passes a tax increase for a year or so to buy the BN rail line that was going to be abandoned. In the late 1980’s or so Mickelson raised the tax rate for a while to get a fund for business loans. Go figure.
I think a year long student teaching experience is actually a good thing, at least for elementary and special education majors. I think you learn far more about the intricacies of teaching by watching it done, and then doing it yourself. I learned far more about what it takes to teach and run a classroom in my first full year do teaching than I ever did in all of my teaching methods classes combined.
That being said, I do not like that the universities are adding that many more required credits for student teaching and not dropping others. It’s basically mandating one more semester for students to pay for.
Travis, I think that’s an excellent point on the trade-off and learning by doing. I found my ed classes mostly maddening. I found the student-teaching experience thrilling and deeply instructive. I’d be all for a compromise that expands the length of the internship while condensing the education classes or integrating them with the student teaching experience. What do you think of the Teach for America model, where new recruits get a quick summer boot camp on pedagogy, then teach full-time for a year while getting further instruction and feedback on teaching methods?
I’m not all that familiar on the process Teach For America uses to prepare / train candidates, but I do think what you described is a good and practical way to develop new teachers.
The NYT had a critique of American teaching programs this morning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/opinion/teachers-arent-dumb.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share
Good NYT article, Heidi. It says teachers need to know their subject… and they’ll know less of their subject if they take fewer courses in their major field (English, math, history…) to make room for more courses in pedagogy.
Travis, here’s a link to Teach for America’s description of its summer institute:
https://www.teachforamerica.org/teach-with-tfa/your-training-and-support/attending-summer-training
A key component of the program: participants teach summer school during most of their training.
Teach for America is a short-term solution as those people are not in teaching for the long haul, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/most-teach-for-america-instructors-plan-to-flee-teaching.
I don’t think that Teach for America is a great program as it doesn’t provide enough time in a classroom prior to actually teaching in the classroom. It is more of a Baptism By Fire approach and I don’t like it.
Dr. Math, I wonder if I would have enjoyed baptism by fire more than my ed block classes. In what ways are SDSU’s student teachers able to manage their student-teaching classroom better than TFA’s recruits can handle their first live experience in the fall?
TFA has that high “flight” rate because it recruits lots of people with no intention of remaining in education for their entire lives. It’s like the Peace Corps in that regard. The fact that lots of Peace Corps alums don’t stay involved in international aid is not an indictment of the training they got for their two-year stints. What would happen if we applied the TFA training/professional experience model to undergrads who say they want to become teachers?
And will anyone at tomorrow’s Blue Ribbon meeting have a conversation this interesting, with any eye toward coming up with a genuine new policy that differs from whatever draft the Governor’s staff have already prepared?