September/October 2002

Arming New Teachers with Survival Skills

A conversation with Katherine K. Merseth about teacher education

Last year, Katherine K. Merseth returned to directing the Teacher Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a program she founded in 1983. Her charge: to redesign the curriculum to train teachers to work in urban schools in an era of standards-based reform and tougher accountability for teachers. She spoke with the Harvard Education Letter about training a new generation of teachers.

How can teacher ed programs make the profession more appealing?

We need to find more ways to emphasize leadership and arm new teachers with the skills to become change agents. Simply putting well-trained, competent teachers in dysfunctional schools is a recipe for disaster. Fifty percent leave in five years, and everybody scratches their heads and wonders why. Money is important, but it’s not the reason that people leave. They come into the profession believing that they can make a real difference, but the bureaucratic obstacles they face seem insurmountable.

What are some survival skills new teachers need?

Teachers must reflect on their practice and make that a habit. Teacher research is important if they are to really understand the situations they’re in. Also, they need to understand school reform strategies—what’s been tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what could work in the future. By doing so, they will begin to understand why they’re making progress on a problem—or not. And, of course, teachers have to become effective pedagogues with a whole repertoire of skills.

Some critics of ed schools say that teacher training should focus less on pedagogy and more on content. How would you respond?

Teachers do need that fundamental content knowledge. But they also need to be able to understand how children learn, the different points of view, perceptions, conceptions, and understandings that they bring to learning. It’s important to have techniques in your repertoire for understanding the way kids make sense of things. Can you explain to me why one-half divided by two-thirds is three-fourths? Don’t tell me how to do it, because that’s what many people will do. Give me an example. Tell me a story that represents that equation. We all know you invert and multiply. But why? Or as a kid once said, "If x equals five, why did you call it x? Why didn’t you just call it five?" You need to be able to draw on the content knowledge itself. But simply having the content background will not make you an effective teacher. To be an effective teacher, you must understand your audience.

How can preservice learning facilitate this?

I am a huge proponent of practice-based learning from the first day. To stand in front of a classroom of kids focuses and grounds your experience. Then everything you try to do serves the question of how this plays in the real world, rather than what contribution this makes to the literature.

What does reflective practice entail?

Having the time, the opportunity, and the skills to really ask hard questions about your classroom, your instruction, and your kids—to document what you know and don’t know, what you want to know, and how you might find it out. [Also,] what do you believe to be the purpose of education? What do you believe is your mission? One reason schools have such a hard time with reform is that people do not articulate what they believe. They end up working at cross purposes because they have fundamentally different views about why we educate children.

What should an administrator look for in a job candidate who’s new to teaching?

The first thing is whether they have the content and pedagogical knowledge they need. I would take a topic in their field and ask them to explain it to me, keeping an eye out for how they communicate and connect. Second, can they collaborate with others? We all know of superstars who don’t do much for the rest of the building. Third, are they people who have the ability to reflect on what they are doing—to think about and change their practice with a can-do attitude?

What can an administrator do to keep and support them?

Before they make any decision, they should answer the question, "What does this have to do with teaching and learning?" The core enterprise of this business is teaching and learning. It’s not child care. It’s not transportation. It’s not food services. It’s teaching and learning. Administrators who make that commitment first will go a long way toward retaining the best teachers.

An expanded version of this interview appears in Teaching as a Profession, a new volume in our Focus Series of previously published articles from the Harvard Education Letter.