Excellent teacher training: Not content OR pedagogy; it should be content AND pedagogy.

The American Educator Summer 2011 issues spotlights the ugly divide between knowing a subject and knowing how to teach. I keep circling back to the idea that good teacher requires that one know how to teach a particular subject. Jeff Mirel aptly points out that during the early part of the 20th century, the rise of professional expertise led both the educationists and the liberal arts experts to pull back into different corners and bolster the specialization within their fields. Which led, I think, to the division of content and pedagogy to the detriment of teaching in schools of education and in other disciplines.

Which takes me back to another piece in American Educator by David K. Cohen entitled "Learning to Teach Nothing in Particular." Cohen wisely points out that teacher education programs cannot prepare teachers to teach anything because every state and district has its own curriculum, its own sequence of courses and content, so teachers must prepared to teach anything, anywhere. That is particularly true of elementary grade teachers, but it applies in secondary subject areas. Teachers of Social Studies in one state might have students enter a class without US History, while teachers in another state would have a class in the same grade of those who did.

It all seems absurd, I'm sure, to teachers in Finland and other places we turn to when we compared ourselves--all of which are places with some version of a national curriculum that can be part of teacher training. In Finland, I am fairly certain that teachers are not prepared to teach nothing in particular.