CURMUDGUCATION: NCTQ: Terrible Teacher Prep and Headline Research

CURMUDGUCATION: NCTQ: Terrible Teacher Prep and Headline Research:

NCTQ: Terrible Teacher Prep and Headline Research

The National Council on Teacher Quality is one of the great mysteries of the education biz. They have no particular credentials and are truly the laziest "researchers" on the planet, but I think I may have cracked the code. Let me show you their latest piece of "research," and then we can talk about how they really work.

Their new report-- "Learning about Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs To Know" (which is a curious title-- do other teachers NOT need to know these things?)-- is yet another NCTQ indictment of current teacher education programs. The broad stroke of their finding is that teacher education programs are not teaching the proven strategies that work in education.

That's the broad stroke. As always with NCTQ, the devil is in the details. After all, that sounds like a huge research undertaking. First, you would have to identify teaching strategies that are clearly and widely supported by all manner of research. Then you would have to carefully examine a whooooooole lot of teacher education programs-- college visits, professor and student interviews, sit in classes, extensive study of syllabi-- it would be a huge undertaking.

Or you could just flip through a bunch of educational methods textbooks.

What Every Teacher Needs To Know 

First, NCTQ had to select those methods that "every new teacher needs to know." Here's the methodology for that piece of research-based heavy lifting:

In Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning: A Practice Guide, the Institute of CURMUDGUCATION: NCTQ: Terrible Teacher Prep and Headline Research: