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In the book Teaching 2030 by Barnett Berry and 12 classroom experts, the authors pinpoint specific skills educators will need to teach in the schools of tomorrow. They say teachers must be prepared to find and adapt new technologies to engage the digital generation, as well as work across traditional subject areas using project learning. They must be able to use data and evidence to inform their practice and know how to work in both virtual learning environments and brick-and-mortar schools. And they’ll need to collaborate with community-based organizations and work in schools that provide all kinds of other services for students and their families.

Along those lines, Berry has outlined five changes he believes need to be made to the future of teacher education.

1. INFORMED BY NEED. University-based education schools currently produce about 170,000 graduates every year — but only 70 percent of those actually enter teaching. One reason is the mismatch between production and market demand. In some “teacher surplus” states, universities graduate far too many teachers prepared for subjects and areas in low demand (such as elementary, physical education, social studies), while math, science, and special education vacancies continue to frustrate school leaders as well as parents. And because of the way education schools are funded, most universities offer just about every kind of teacher education major, irrespective of the local needs of area districts looking for new recruits. In the future, as long as we have the right policies in place, education schools should recruit and prepare those who are needed — and use the cost savings to recruit the right teachers who can teach the right subjects — as well as invest more in the right kind of pedagogical training.
2. INVESTMENTS IN CLINICAL TRAINING. Most university-based teacher education programs, unlike those in engineering, architecture, and nursing (and of course medicine), have few resources to prepare recruits in clinical, or real-life, contexts. Future teachers have had little opportunity to learn how to teach in schools under the tutelage of master teachers and college faculty who can closely supervise them and ensure they pass muster on rigorous (and more expensive) performance assessments. Teachers must also learn how to work effectively in both virtual networks as well as in community-based organizations that serve student learning in 24/7 venues. Policymakers must do their share by investing in the clinical training of future teachers, who can learn how to teach by interning in the places and with the people with whom they work in order to serve students effectively.
3. CHANGING THE CONTEXT OF CONTENT. Most education schools have taught teachers how to know things and think about things. But they’ve never had the chance to practice implementing high-level strategies, like communicating with parents and eliciting student thinking around subject areas. How do you teach someone to unpack a student’s thinking around specific subjects, in physics, social studies, literature? How do you build, create, and score assessments? How do you communicate student progress to not just parents but also policymakers? How do you give homework that’s meaningful? How do you help students, who are growing up on virtual reality games and Google figure out how to determine the accuracy of content and how to use it in solving problems? Universities must help future teachers understand and capitalize on the changing context of content in teaching diverse learners to meet high academic standards.
4. SEAMLESS CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PRE-SERVICE EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT. With an explosion of diverse students in chaotic school environments (and growing numbers of those with special needs or whose first language is not English), it’s that much more difficult for novice teachers to be fully prepared. The teacher education system needs to ensure that pre-service teachers learn crucial skills (see #3) in settings similar to those in which they will teach. They must go through performance assessments to determine their strengths and weaknesses, and this information must be used to craft plans for their future development as educators. With virtual communities like Teacher Leaders Network, and new outlets like the Teaching Channel, teachers can learn from each other, while ed schools and school districts can find ways to capitalize on these connections. Doing all of this will require that policymakers fuse the resources of universities and school districts in creating seamless connections between pre-service training and on-going professional development.
5. LEARNING AND LEADING IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. In preparing all students to work in the global economy and participate in our complex, evolving democracy, public schools need to capitalize on the untapped potential of teacher leaders. Our education schools need to prepare this new generation of teacher leaders, who know how to spread their pedagogical expertise to colleagues and administrators and can communicate effectively with policymakers and parents. Doing so requires not just teachers who have technical skill in connecting good ideas with the right stakeholders and constituents, but who also have a deep understanding of how historical imperatives shape future prospects for the profession that makes all others possible. Educators who train teachers must cultivate a critical mass of teacher leaders, or teacherpreneurs, who continue to teach but have knowledge and skill to lead the transformation of teaching and learning.

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Disrupting the entrenched education system is daunting. There are 7.2 million teachers in the U.S., 76 million students, and more than 98,000 public schools, according to a government census (as of 2008).

So what’s the most effective way to unshackle the current archaic system from ineffective tactics that no longer work in the digital age?

Google, the world’s go-to for answers, has an idea for the most impactful place to start. Last week, the company’s educational overseers organized the Google Faculty Institute, to which they invited the faculty from California State University (CSU) schools of education. The mission: to show those who teach teachers the most effective, useful, and helpful digital tools.

Why the focus on CSU teachers? Simple math — 60% of teachers in California and 10% of teachers in the U.S. — are trained through the CSU system.

“We want to make California a model for the rest of the country,” said Maggie Johnson, director of education and university relations for Google. “We wanted to find a mechanism for talking about education technology and all the ways of using it in transformational ways — not just ways to support teaching as it’s always been done.”

Over the course of three days, the 39 attendees — mostly faculty who teach at the CSU schools of education — were tasked with coming up with proposals that would demonstrate the use of technology in new and inventive ways. They had to show how the proposal could be scaled and how it could go viral. For its part, in addition to hosting the event and providing experts and resources at the workshop, Google will donate $20,000 to each group, which has six to nine months to implement their ideas.

Here’s what they came up with:

• The Math of Khan: Documenting, testing and disseminating the process by which a teacher can flip their classroom using Khan Academy videos.
• Making Teachers ‘Appy’: Encouraging a “maker” philosophy with pre-service educators (teachers-in-training) by teaching introduction to programming in an educational technology course.
• Birds-Eye Detective: Teaching pre-server educators how to use Google Earth, Maps and fusion tables in the context of project-based K-12 instruction.
• Team-Teaching Classroom Innovation: Identifying a large number of pre-service teacher pairs to develop technology-rich science and math modules, test those modules in their classrooms and share with each other.
• Transforming STEM Educators: Delivering short workshops on how to use technology to do formative assessment, while saving faculty significant time.
• Examining Climate Change: An integrative math/science/technology approach to learning about climate change by developing a module for a methods course showing the power of technology in the context on relevant issues and to address misconceptions.

For these educators of educators, learning the tools of the trade for themselves deepened their understanding of how they can be taught to their students, and in turn used more fluidly in classrooms across California.

“They now understand the ability to manage some of these tools that can make teaching more fruitful and more exciting,” said Jaimie Tasap, Google senior education manager.

Though there were “bumps in the road,” namely legitimate obstacles that faculty would face in taking these ideas back to school to implement, Johnson said she’s confident they’ll follow through.

“We want them to influence the rest of the faculty at their schools,” she said. “You get the attention of hundreds of these faculty members, then you make a real change in California.”

Flickr: conbon33

If the way we teach and learn is changing, the way that teachers learn should be changing, too. What are schools of education doing to keep ahead?