Model Teachers

Our most highly paid, most highly regarded teachers have no training in education. None. They don’t have education degrees, teaching certificates, or even, at least at first, any teaching experience. They’re professionals in their fields, but amateurs in the field of education, even the best ones, and, for good reasons, no one seems to think this matters.

I’m talking, of course, about university professors.

What do they have going for them? They have great educations themselves—the hiring process ensures that those offered jobs and then tenure generally have the best credentials, have gone to the best schools—and they are experts in their fields.

But back up one year, from freshman year of college (where your teacher is likely to be a lowly Teaching Assistant, not a professor) to senior year of high school, and requirements and expectations alter radically. Your best high school teacher was likely a union member with a master’s degree in education and a teaching certificate, an amateur in the subject she taught but a professional teacher.

Should our goal in improving teaching then be to require more credentials and certifications, to professionalize something that we don’t really recognize as a profession? Or would we be better off if we figured out how to take what works in universities and make it work for younger students?