Professor David C. Berliner began studying teacher expertise in 1977. His observations of extraordinary teachers had important implications for teacher training. By contrasting the well–trained, confident expert with the beginner who received the worst placements and the least support in the classroom, he made a case for providing more field–based experiences and mentoring for teacher candidates and beginning teachers.
A passionate defender of public education, Berliner is the coauthor of The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools (Addison–Wesley, 1995). At the end of this school year, he steps down from his position as Dean of the College of Education at Arizona State University to devote more time to teaching, writing, and research. He will continue as Regents' Professor of Psychology in Education. Berliner spoke with Educational Leadership about the need for more highly trained teachers and offered recommendations for improving the profession for experts and beginners alike.
A few years ago, you wrote about the expert teacher and the qualities needed to be one. Are you still exploring that topic?
Yes, and we've verified that it takes between five to eight years to master the craft of teaching. Only through experiencing the complexity of the classroom does a teacher learn. We now know that we cannot completely pre–train teachers. A college degree in education only takes you so far. It prepares you to be a beginner in a complex world.
What expert teachers have is case knowledge. They can go back in their memory banks to compare situations and figure out what to do. When expert teachers encounter a new student, a new learning problem, or new curriculum materials, they have references stored in memory. Expert teachers are also much better at impromptu responses. They're much better at capturing teachable moments. They know what's going on in the classroom all the time. They know how to get the class from point A to point B. Novices have no such experiences stored in their memory banks. Of course, some novices never get a clue about what's going on; they never learn from experience. But promising teachers and experts are learning each year.
If so much must be learned through on–the–job experience, what is it that professional education and certification do to prepare teachers?
Professional education gives teachers more familiarity with cultural, academic, and human diversity. Methods courses teach the pedagogical side of algebraic equations or the rain cycle. In professional studies, teachers begin to probe the underlying ecology of learning, teaching, and assessment. Without a professional knowledge base, a teacher takes a lot longer to understand how students learn and what and how they need to be taught.
Imagine going into a hardware store and not knowing the names of the things you need to buy. Professional education teaches the vocabulary of schools—learning disabled, gifted, mean, median, mode. And it teaches the pedagogy: What does it mean to do reciprocal teaching? How does one teach math in a way that allows kids to discover the answers? Untrained teachers cannot invent reciprocal teaching on their own. Learning some tips about classroom management during a short–term summer program is not enough.
At a recent meeting about school choice, advocates of charter schools were arguing for fewer regulations concerning teacher certification. They want principals to be allowed to choose from bright candidates who are not necessarily certified. In these times of shortages, how do we convince the general public of the importance of trained teachers?
We disseminate the research that shows that uncertified teachers do not perform as well in the classroom as certified teachers do. Experienced teachers have more skills than inexperienced teachers have. That's why almost all the prestigious private schools hire certified teachers. It's only the poorest of the private schools that are hiring uncertified teachers. In Arizona, the five charter schools leading in achievement hire certified teachers.
In Phoenix, Arizona, candidates in Teach for America are having terrible difficulties in the schools. Our university is mentoring the entire group. The candidates are having difficulties because they have not had training, and it's very hard to teach in the settings in which we put them. I'm not a fan of Teach for America, but I'm not against it, either, because some districts have a real need for more teachers. But we shouldn't assume that these bright, uncertified teachers are competent. They're not.
What can schools do to attract a new generation of teachers—young people who have so many more high–paying options open to them?
One answer is better pay. In this culture, pay and status go hand in hand, and teachers are not well paid. Teachers don't have status in the eyes of some of their own students. Pay and status overlap, and we have to provide novice and experienced teachers with both.
In the United States, beginning teachers are earning about $8,000 a year less than other college–educated professionals.
In my state, a teacher starts at about $27,000. Graduates from the school of business start at $35,000. The business grads are no smarter than the education students. Their coursework is no harder. Why can't teachers start out $8,000 higher?
Why can't they?
If you look at purchasing power parities, seven of 23 nations exceed the United States in starting salaries for teachers. The richest nation in the world—the richest nation the world has ever seen—is the United States, and yet seven nations are willing to start their teachers at a higher salary. Nine of 21 nations exceed the United States in salaries at the top of the schedule—the salary for a teacher at the end of his or her teaching career. Twelve nations invest more in education than the United States does. Those other nations are saying that education, educators, schools, and children are worth more to them. Let's be clear. The United States is saying to its educators that they are not really important; if we thought they were important, we'd pay them a larger share of our gross domestic product, as other nations do.
What can the profession itself do to improve the quality of teachers?
To improve our profession, we need a twofold approach. One is to improve salaries. Both starting salaries and top salaries need to be higher. The other is to improve teachers' working conditions. Teachers must become more involved in their own professional lives. Unless we start changing working conditions so that teachers participate more in planning the curriculum, choosing the tests, and running the schools, thoughtful professionals are going to bail out. The current emphasis on testing has already driven out people because it takes away characteristics that define for teachers what it means to be a professional.
Teachers and physicians practice an art. Currently, physicians determine what to accomplish during rounds, but imagine how they would react if the state told doctors how to do rounds. Just as we are seeing physicians leaving the field because insurance companies have taken away their freedom to practice medicine, we're seeing the same trend for teachers operating under an inappropriate use of testing. Some states are telling them, "This is what you teach, and this is how you teach it." So teachers are leaving.
When you say you'd like to see teachers more involved in the professional life of schools, what kind of involvement are you advocating?
I'm not talking so much about site–based management as about teachers studying one another's lessons the way the Japanese do—visiting classes, presenting case studies about hard–to–teach kids, advising one another. I'm talking about the involvement of teachers in the life of their schools, their communities, their kids, and the decisions about curriculum. Too many teachers show up at school in the morning and go home in the afternoon. They have nothing to do with the life of their school. They don't even live in the community.
What should schools do to attract more minority candidates into teaching?
Start where the minorities are—for example, in the community colleges. Increase pre–education coursework about education issues and policy, and explain to minority students what education can be as a profession. Education is a wonderful opportunity, especially for the first–generation college graduate. We need to systematically recruit minority candidates, not wait for them to show up.
Do required teacher tests increase the quality of the teaching force?
Nobody wants an incompetent teacher in the classroom, but the teacher tests are not always the best way to tell who is competent. Putting candidates in a classroom and evaluating them is a better way to determine competence. At the university level of teacher education, we do a pretty good job of policing ourselves. Nobody believes that we do, but we do. We require student teaching of all candidates. And each year, we recommend that some students not be certified by the state to teach.
But a time of shortage is the wrong time to come down with a heavy fist in the form of a teacher test. We need to open doors, not close them.
How serious a problem is out–of–field teaching?
The statistics about out–of–field teaching are shocking. Only 41 percent of those who teach math have a math degree. Out–of–field teaching is a tremendous problem for minority school districts and rural school districts. But it's not a problem for the wealthy school districts. There isn't a single uncertified teacher in one of our wealthy Phoenix districts, but there are 50 or 60 uncertified teachers in one of our poorest districts. And we have data that show that the uncertified teachers achieve less with students than the certified teachers do.
How do we solve this problem?
If you were running any business that has a shortage of employees, you would recruit and pay the candidates you need. Industry complains about out–of field teachers, but industry is stealing our mathematicians. It has stolen one of the best and the brightest from the faculty of my university. We can't compete when industry doubles the salary.
What do you think about the career stage programs that allow teachers to advance from intern to novice to advanced levels, much as Cincinnati is implementing?
Career stages offer a mechanism for giving rewards to teachers and for devising ways that experienced teachers can nurture the next generation. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards also provides a mechanism to give more remuneration to the best teachers. If districts use these programs wisely, they will provide a richer professional life for their teachers and increase the pay for the best of them.
We recently published several articles arguing the value of merit pay. Will merit pay improve the status of teachers and make them more accountable?
I'm not a confirmed advocate of merit pay, but I am an advocate of National Board certification, and that's a form of merit pay. Teachers who pass those rigorous requirements show that they're superior in their knowledge and abilities. They ought to be paid for that. Some states offer a $10,000–a–year raise for 10 years to those who earn the certificate, and that is great.
But receiving merit pay on the basis of their students' performance could lead to teachers doing the wrong thing in their classrooms. Under such conditions, you see cheating. You see a narrowing of the curriculum—all for a few hundred dollars more a year. We ought to avoid this kind of merit pay. As for accountability, I think we'll find that most of the rewards will go to affluent schools. Most of the punishments will go to the schools with the harder–to–teach kids. These systems are patently unfair.
What have been the most promising reforms for teacher education during the last 10 years?
The push to field–based programs has been helpful. Professional development schools and laboratory–type schools have taken education courses off campus, put university students in the elementary and high schools, and teamed classroom teachers and college professors. More of our students are learning how to teach in real schools now than students did 15 years ago. That's a good trend, a healthy trend. The use of more clinical faculty is both fiscally smart for the university and good for the students. People rotate in, teach the course for a few years, and then go back to their original workplaces.
And mentoring has been an important reform. Mentoring programs are promising for two reasons. First, they cut the dropout rate of teachers from roughly 50 to 15 percent during the first five years of teaching. Mentoring is very important; without it, our shortages will grow.
But the second reason that we need mentoring is a moral, not a pragmatic, one. We must not abandon beginners who have been placed in the complex world of teaching. Through apprenticeships, novices can learn from masters. Mentoring helps new teachers think about their experience, and it helps them handle the emotional side of teaching. Teaching is an emotionally draining occupation. Teachers get caught up in the lives of the kids and their parents. They need to know what a healthy response is and when to put up boundaries. They need clear advice about how to do something better or different the next time they teach it.
How widespread is the practice of mentoring?
Not widespread enough. We have one of the largest programs here at Arizona State. We mentor more than 1,000 teachers in their first two years of teaching. About 300 teachers from the school districts mentor these new teachers and dozens of supervisors from the university are working in the schools. Every state really needs a program like this. It costs a few hundred dollars per teacher per year for the first two years of the teacher's professional life. But mentoring programs cut the dropout losses from the teaching profession, and they are morally the right thing to do.
How do we change the public's negative perception of teachers?
Only teachers themselves can change the public's perception of teachers. Teachers need to provide more leadership, to be more politically active, and to show that are concerned about the community. They should share their intellectual skills with the public by writing op–ed pieces and letters to the editor and by speaking at public meetings. No one else can change the perception of teachers except teachers themselves, but there are three million of them. And they ought to be out there—and much more active then they are now.
