Looking at Training High School Educators

Transitioning from classroom teaching to university researching has been more difficult than I expected. Why? It falls along the line of "Publish or Perish" and "#'s and Perish." As a classroom teacher, my intent was to do great work at the pace I was able to keep with the hundreds of students on my roll for six hours a day and the volumes of keeping up with my expectations for them. This, coupled with State crack-down on scores (which I'm proud to say I found success), a more diverse student population every year and then a hit or miss administration style, was cause for a lot of stress. Now, the stress is not as physical as it is mental. At the University, one must "Know" their "field" enough to "profess" it to others in written form. Keeping up with such truth is difficult.

I bring this subject up as it is my intent to be a trainer of teachers and to best prepare them for English classrooms. For this reason, I found R.G. Sultana (2005) to be extremely interesting. His review of initial teacher education programs covers the debate between what is best in preparing teachers. Should the preparation exist more on campus with experts in the research field professing knowledge onto students or should the experience occur in professional development schools where students will get experience in the field to reflect on?

Where I stand on this issue is not the purpose of my post. Instead, I wish to connect a few of Sultana's observations with my thinking on "blogs" as a teaching tool. He writes, "The fact remains that education must be responsive to new societal realities, trends, and "needs" (while remaining critically sensitive to the fact that "needs" are anchored in socially constructed discourse that in never politically innocent" (237). He continues to note that Initial Teacher Education should make "efforts to help prospective teachers make a shift from insular to connective specialization and to socialize them into the habit of lifelong learning...." (237). Perhaps, teacher preparation cannot ignore the changing communities of online interactions, because such cyber-communication is growing normal.

R.G. Sultana leads his readers to the following: "It is nevertheless critical to emphasize the point made by Papert (1987) that the more quickly new technologies of communication have been integrated into teaching/learning nexus, the more easily they seem to have become co-opted in the mainstream educational paradigm, that is, top-down delivery systems that fail to recognize real differences among learners" (239). He makes this point after recognizing that technology has been used to create interdisciplinary learning communities.

My point with this posting is that educators preparing future educators cannot ignore the ebb & flow of technology in the ecosystem before us. With this said, paying attention to blogs this semester hasn't been a waste of time.

Papert, S. (1987). Computer criticism vs. technocratic thinking. In Educational Researcher, 16 (1), 22 - 30.
Sultana, R.G. (2005). The initial education of high school teachers: A critical review of major issues and trends. In Studying Teacher Education, Vol. 1, no. 2, November, pp. 225 - 243.