The Importance Of Teacher Education

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Accountability for teacher quality in every school has become one of our nation’s educational reform priorities. Researchers have demonstrated that teacher quality was the single most important factor influencing student achievement (Cunningham & Allington, 2003; Darling-Hammond, 2000; Darling-Hammond, Wise & Klein, 1995; Jackson, 2009; Marzano 2007; Marzano, Pickering & Pollock, 2001). The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) included provisions on teacher qualifications and student achievement. The law requires that every public school’s faculty consist of licensed or certified teachers in all core academic areas (i.e., English, language arts, civics and government, mathematics, science, economics, arts, history, and geography) by the end of the 2005-06 school year. The NCLB Act defined a “highly qualified” teacher as one who has earned a bachelor’s degree, is fully licensed or certified by the state in the subjects they teach, and can demonstrate competence in the subjects they teach (No Child Left Behind Act, 2001). This mandate, requiring all classrooms be staffed with “highly qualified” teachers, created …show more content…

Teacher education programs can do much to build lenses and conceptions that can lead to teachers being prepared for the rigors of the classroom, with classes of 25 or more students and detailed and busy curricula, and being prepared to question their own expectations, appreciating the need to talk with other teachers about teaching, and, most importantly, seeing learning through students’ eyes. Such “Apprenticeship of Observation”, as Dan Lortie (2002) refers to this issue, is a significant challenge for student teachers as they move from seeing classrooms as students to seeing classrooms as teachers of students (Hattie, Visible Learning,

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