Lessons Learned as a Teacher Educator (1977-2010)
© Tom Russell, Queen’s University, 2010
------Principles of Teaching and Learning-------
1. Learning to think pedagogically is at the core of learning to teach, just as learning to think mathematically is at the core of learning mathematics.
2. Teachers new and old are unlikely to adopt new teaching procedures unless they have experienced those procedures themselves and analyzed the effects on their own learning.
3. Principles of good learning are essentially the same for adults and for children. Crucial elements include engaging experiences, metacognition and addressing what students already know.
4. Reflective practice is a worthy goal that involves much more than everyday meanings of the word reflection. Teacher educators need to teach people how to reflect and model their own reflective practices explicitly.
-------The Importance of Individual Relationships-------
5. The professional relationship between teacher candidate and teacher educator is crucial to the teacher educator's influence on how a teacher candidate will teach.
6. Each teacher candidate takes a unique set of messages from the shared experiences of an education course. The single most important influence on what candidates take away is the tacit knowledge of teaching and learning that they bring from their many years watching their own teachers.
7. Continuing the teacher educator-teacher candidate relationship into the early years of teaching can be productive for individuals who are willing to write about their early teaching experiences.
------The Importance of Listening to Others and Self-------
8. Listening to teacher candidates' experiences of education courses and practicum teaching is crucial to teaching them effectively.
9. Self-study of personal teaching practice, or action research, is the only way to know how one is influencing one's students and thus is central to improving one's teaching.
10. Writing about one's teaching and learning is a powerful way to document and understand one's development as a teacher or teacher educator.
------Challenges Embedded in our System of Education-------
11. Sending teacher candidates to schools for practicum experiences and sending faculty to observe them does not establish partnership or collaboration with schools.
12. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the practicum is not a setting for experimentation and risk-taking. The more appropriate setting is the teacher education classroom, where the teacher educator can explicitly demonstrate experimentation and risk-taking.
13. Teacher education tends to pay greater attention to the content of the school curriculum than to pedagogy, yet how teachers teach is at the heart of the changes many teacher educators would like to see in schools.
14. Many teacher educators seem unaware of or inattentive to research in teacher education.
15. If teachers at all levels of schooling do not share their pedagogical thinking and encourage students to explore the nature of learning, then we will continue to produce members of society, including politicians, who fail to understand the complexities of teaching and learning.