Connecting Past to Present Goodlad Notes

Goodlad, J. I. (1990). Connecting the present to the past. In J. I. Goodlad, R. Soder, & K. A. Sirotnik (Eds.), Places where teachers are taught (pp. 3-39). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

• Studying the Education of Educators
  • "It was apparent to us that each institution's teacher education program has been shaped by powerful internal forces: tension between arts and sciences faculty members and those in education, the rapid growth of a research emphasis, financial crises brought about by rapid decline in enrollment, and so on (p. 13)."
• Diversity and Commonality
  • Great diversity exists across the institutions. Similarities include : "...the dual demands of general and professional curricula in those preparing teachers at the undergraduate level, a substantial psychological orientation for prospective elementary school teachers, subject matter majors for high school teachers, subject matter majors for high school teachers, a block of time set aside for student teaching, heavy reliance on teachers in the schools (cooperating teachers) for the day-to-day guidance of student teachers (p. 16)."
  • "Although institutional context has always played a significant role in creating diversity, institutional context itself is conditioned significantly by outside forces, particularly war of peace and economic prosperity or depression (p. 17)."
• Some Emerging Themes
  • Stability and Instability
    • "A substantial proportion of the colleges and universities in our sample began with the education of teachers as a major or even central mission (p. 18)."
    • "The close, long-term relationship between the president and chair or dean of education has virtually vanished (p. 19)."
    • "Secondly, partly because of this situation (the disappearance of the relationship between the president and the dean) and partly because of mixed signals from political and accrediting arenas, schools of education are in limbo, waiting for directional signals or for still another shoe to fall (p. 19)."
    • Instability in leadership - deans in particular
  • The Search for Institutional Identity
    • The transition of teacher education from centrality to the periphery: "The progression of normal schools to teachers' colleges, to state colleges, and then to regional state universities not only increased the size and status of the arts and sciences departments but also added professional, semiprofessional, and technical colleges (p. 21)."
  • From Teaching to Research
    • "...Teacher education not only ranks low among university priorities, it is marginal in the school or college of education (p. 25)."
    • "Teaching teachers is a highly demanding activity, requiring a great deal of time and energy (p. 25)."
  • Fragmentation
    • "Yet schoolteachers, much more than either lawyers or doctors, come together as workers in institutions that are heavily dependent on arrangements presumably carried out collegially by faculty groups. Many students of school reform see these institutions failing precisely because faculty groups are not able to establish the infrastructure and relationships necessary for school renewal and the restructuring demanded by profound social disjuncture and changing student demographics (p. 29)."
    • Courses are often fragmented and not taught by the professoriate.
  • Discontinuities
    • Programs should be cohesive across all borders with regard to philosophical orientation.
    • "Even in these settings, however, others participating in the program, such as cooperating teachers in the schools, rarely were brought into the dialogue and planning (p. 30)."
    • "It was more common than uncommon to find cooperating teachers who did not have the faintest glimmer of program goals or of whether any such existed (p. 31)."
    • "Cooperating teachers - not necessarily picked because of their outstanding talents and not initiated into a coherent teacher education program that they helped plan - simply induct student teachers into their ways of teaching and dealing with pupils (p. 31)."
  • The Knowledge-Practice Tension
    • "Suddenly, this beginner is thrown not only into the norms of practice but into a situation demanding quick recourse to survival techniques - techniques almost invariably provided by the cooperating teacher. They are taken on because they appear to work; there is little time or inclination to ponder alternatives (p. 32)."
    • A discrepancy between the taught pedagogy and the enacted pedagogy of the professors in college classrooms.
    • "More often than not, ongoing school practices, not cutting-edge theory and knowledge, drove the behavior of neophyte teachers at the critical stage of their first significant immersion (p. 33)."
  • The Urban Problem
• Concluding Observations