“Your first few years are spent learning that almost everything you thought teaching was supposed to be was completely wrong. You’re overwhelmed by classroom management and discipline struggles. You have no idea how to plan a unit or an effective lesson. You don’t recognize the importance of constant quality assessment, and you sure as hell don’t have a clue as to how to go about creating one. You don’t yet know how exactly to build relationships with kids (even though you thought you did), nor do you quite realize how critically important they are to the children who are almost completely deprived of positive relationships. You don’t realize that in addition to teaching your subject matter, you desperately need to teach your kids how to read, but you don’t have a clue how to. You can’t see through the bullshit that the administration throws at you or the petty bickering that some of your colleagues may do around you. And on the day that you think your lesson actually went okay, you don’t realize that not a single one of your students will be able to demonstrate that they learned what you thought they did the next day.
…
“These are things that teachers learn over years of experience. You don’t get them in a summer training, or even in your first year of teaching. They come slowly. …
While some of this is true, I disagree that much of this can’t be taught. Rather, I think this anecdotal evidence should fuel the fire of creating better teacher education programs. Most teacher education programs I know of in the USA are terrible compared to their counterparts in Canada, Australia, and some European countries. No teacher should be “thrown in” to teach. They should be guided, over time. Yes, some of the lessons listed here will be clarified only with experience over time. But with better teacher ed programs, I think it is more than possible to prepare teachers for much of what GFBrandenburg lists here.
[h/t to Sylvia Martinez (http://www.twitter.com/smartinez) for this blog post]