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Adequate Teacher Training
September 7, 2014
An article published in Education Week, August 14, 2014, reports teachers feel inadequately prepared for Common Core, even after receiving steady training. In 2012, two-thirds of teachers reported they were receiving “…high quality” training, but that fell to only half of teachers reporting in 2013.
A major source of concern was that only 40% of the teachers felt their textbooks and teaching materials were aligned with the Core Curriculum. Of course, that illustrates the tendency of teachers to feel the textbook is the curriculum.
But the overall feeling of inadequacy and anxiety on the part of the teachers when they participate in training regarding the standards, assessment, and resources rests on not having a framework within to contextualize the material. That context is an understanding of presenting, (teaching), new information and skills to students. If teachers were to first have training in an instructional framework, they would look at the new standards and be able to see them fitting into the instructional model, or at least be able to customize the standards to a teaching model.
An analogy for this phenomenon is trying to teach a mechanic how to fix a fuel injector on an engine without the mechanic first understanding the role of the injector in the total picture of how an internal combustion engine operates.
TESS has found after visiting thousands of classrooms around the State and across the country, and current research verifies, that the greatest variable in the classroom is the teacher’s understanding and practicing of instruction.
