Darling-Hammond, L., & Baratz-Snowden, J. (Eds.). (2005). A Good Teacher in Every Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers our Children Deserve. Reviewed by Hailing Wu, Michigan Sate University

Darling-Hammond, L., & Baratz-Snowden, J. (Eds.). (2005). A Good Teacher in Every Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers our Children Deserve. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Pp.112 ISBN 0-7879-7466-8 Reviewed by Hailing Wu Michigan Sate University January 17, 2007 The past few years have seen a marked increase in attention to the issues of teacher quality. One might argue that since the release of No Child Left Behind, the requirement to provide “highly qualified” teachers for every classroom has been the number one task to be accomplished in the field of education. At the same time, there have been many studies critiquing traditional teacher education programs for their ineffectiveness in educating “highly qualified” teachers. Under these circumstances, it is especially valuable to have research on how to improve the quality of teacher preparation and, in turn, the quality of teaching and student achievement in each classroom. A Good Teacher in Every Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers our Children Deserve (Darling-Hammond & Baratz-Snowden, 2005), among some others, represents a major effort to address this issue. A Good Teacher in Every Classroom seems destined to be a highly influential. It is sponsored by the National Academy of Education (NAE), “a highly visible organization with an influential voice in the educational community” (Cochran-Smith, 2004, p. 111). Shortly after its publication, it was given loud applause by the National Education Association (NEA, May 24, 2005). One of the editors of the book is Linda Darling-Hammond, a well-known educational researcher from Stanford University. Darling-Hammond has served as co-chair of the NAE’s Committee on Teacher Education. The other co-editor, Joan Baratz-Snowden, is director of Educational Issues at the American Federation of Teachers. She has worked for several other educational associations as well.. A Good Teacher in Every Classroom originates from what the National Center for Alternative Certification calls “a groundbreaking new study” (NCAC, 2006), that is, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and be Able to Do (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). It is also a much slimmer volume than its parent. A Good Teacher in Every Classroom, in about 90 pages, summarizes the 600-page book’s recommendations, encapsulating the ideas of more than thirty contributing authors by reviewing an abundance of research on learning, effective teaching, teacher learning, and teacher education. In other words, it is an executive summary and policy report for Preparing Teachers for a Changing World. Such a distillation always raises the concern that some arguments or evidence might have been lost in the process of summarization. I am reviewing the short book as a free-standing piece, without regard to how well it reflects its much longer parent book. In this brief book, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden hope to improve the quality of teacher preparation, traditional and alternative, by outlining a professional and scholarly consensus on what makes a good teacher, thus giving suggestions to teacher education programs and policy-makers at different levels. In addition to the preface and the introduction, the book includes four chapters centered around four questions: What do teachers need to know? How can teachers learn? What should teacher preparation program do based on the answers to the questions above? What should policy do to enhance the quality of teacher education? The first chapter is the most important one of the book for two reasons. First, it seems that for a long time there has been no agreement on what should constitute teacher preparation curricula. The fact that these authors are able to forge a consensus represents a major accomplishment. Second, the answer to the question, “What do teachers need to know?” should and does lay a foundation for the next three chapters, especially the policy recommendations in the last chapter. Figure 1 below provides a schematic illustration of their answer. The central label reveals the author’s argument that teaching should be perceived as a type of professional practice much like medicine. Although Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden do not define their notion of a “profession,” they mention repeatedly throughout the book that in recent history medical education has gone through a process of professionalization by establishing a common curriculum and convey the idea that teacher education should learn from medicine to try hard to come up with a core curriculum. The authors say less about why they choose medicine as their primary reference point. Without examining the similarities and also the differences between teaching and medicine, their argument lacks force and could be misleading to some people. The second important message conveyed in Figure 1 is that new teachers should be aware that learning and teaching should take place in a democratic environment, and the purpose of education is to let students “participate fully in political, civic, and economic life” (p. 6). This is a helpful reminder to reformers who think of education as primarily a means to foster an efficient labor force for the country or to realize social mobility for the individual. The third, and ultimately most important, point depicted in Figure 1 is that to be professional, a new teacher needs to acquire three “interdependent” (p. 5) domains of knowledge: knowledge of learners and their development in social contexts, knowledge of subject matter and curriculum goals, and knowledge of teaching. Put into such a broad classification scheme, these ideas are not particularly new or enlightening. It is already acknowledged that an effective teacher has a good understanding of how to deal appropriately with the triangle: learners, subject matter, and teaching. The problem that has plagued teacher education for years is defining what is included in each domain. The text accompanying Figure 1 does elaborate each domain with some, but limited, examples. The first circle in Figure 1 deals with understanding of the learner. Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden conclude that in this domain beginning teachers need to learn three things: how students learn, how students develop, and how students acquire language skills. No doubt, each of the three aspects is important for student teachers to know. However, it would help to understand the logical relationship among them. For instance, there is considerable overlap between learners’ learning and their development. And language acquisition is part of students’ learning and development. It is understandable why Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden single out the language issue. In recent years, there has been an enormous growth in the population of English Language Learner (ELL) students in U.S. public schools. Despite this, one may question if there is a better way to frame what beginning teachers need to learn and understand about learners. The second section has to do with subject matter. In this section, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden emphasize that “teachers must know the subject matter they will teach and understand how to organize curriculum in light of both students’ needs and the schools’ learning objectives” (p. 14). They appear to discuss subject matter in terms of what to teach and why, or “curricular content knowledge” (1986) in Shulman’s words. This reminds me of Shulman’s other category of knowledge: “subject matter content knowledge,” a concept that is missing in Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden’s discussion. Although the authors do not attempt to “focus on the format, length, or location of teacher education” (Darling-Hammond & Baratz-Snowden, 2005, p. 4) in the book, some readers would likely be happier if Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden had responded to the following practical questions: How much subject matter content knowledge should student teachers learn in order to teach elementary or secondary schools? Where should student teachers learn subject matter content knowledge? From the teacher education program, the department in a subject area, or some other place? Should student teachers take advanced subject matter courses at the college level which seem irrelevant to what they will teach? The third circle in Figure 1 represents knowledge of teaching. A genuine understanding of teaching includes knowledge of how to develop content-specific pedagogies, how to teach diverse learners, how to assess students, and how to manage classroom activities. In discussing each domain of knowledge, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden offer a useful rubric for student teachers and teacher educators to check if they have learned or are learning what they need to learn. This is one of the book’s most useful contributions. However, the first chapter is not that satisfactory in two respects. First, this chapter centers on what beginning teachers should learn rather than what they actually learn from specific teacher preparation programs. In fact, little of the latter is touched on. I believe that if Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden had intertwined the latter with the former, their recommendations would be more powerful and convincing. Second, with regard to what student teachers should learn, the authors might need to do some revision to Figure 1 and to unify the vocabulary a bit. There seems to be a degree of arbitrariness in their decision to put eight sub-points into the framework shown in Figure 1. Moreover, too many terms appear in this chapter and give the impression of messiness rather than comprehensiveness. With this framework established, Chapter Two addresses the question “How can teachers acquire the knowledge they need?” This is another important question, given that traditional teacher education programs are blamed for their uneven quality in preparing future teachers, and given that more and more people enter and are prepared for teaching through alternative approaches. In this chapter, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden describe some general rules of teacher learning and development. They outline three major problems of learning to teach, viz., misconceptions about teaching or “apprenticeship of observation” as Lortie called it; the problem of enactment; and the problem of complexity. In their opinion, student teachers should learn about practice in and from their own and others’ practice. Therefore, teacher education programs should offer student teachers “consistent opportunities to apply what they are learning, analyzing what happens, and adjust their efforts accordingly” (p. 31). This chapter illustrates the tradeoff between depth and breadth: the brevity of this book is refreshing, but at the same time, reading a chapter like this makes the reader yearn for more on the “how” aspects of teacher learning and development. Chapter Three provides suggestions to teacher preparation programs, whether traditional or not. Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden list the problems existing in traditional teacher education programs: “being overly theoretical, having little connection to practice, offering fragmented and incoherent courses, and lacking in a clear, shared conception of teaching among faculty” (2005, p. 37). Based on some research on exemplary preparation programs, they bring forward a framework for learning to teach, displayed here in Figure 2. In this framework, several points are emphasized for student teachers to develop: a vision of good practice, knowledge of subject matter and how to make it accessible to diverse students, conceptual and practical tools for use in the classroom, a repertoire of teaching strategies for practice, and a set of dispositions or habits of thinking and action about teaching. In addition, learning to teach had better occur in professional communities, which means that teacher education programs should cooperate closely with schools to educate prospective teachers. According to Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden, the framework in Figure 2 “mirrors the knowledge and skills teachers need to be successful with all students, illustrated earlier in Figure 1.1[Figure 1 above]” (2005, p. 39). This might be confusing for some readers. Since from their perspective the framework in Figure 2 is pretty much the same as that in Figure 1, one may wonder why they did not just stick to the first framework and keep it coherent and consistent throughout the book. There seem to be differences between the two frameworks, at least in use of terms. It would have been better if they had integrated them into a single, more unified framework. After introducing the framework in Figure 2, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden suggest that teacher preparation programs should deploy specific pedagogies to cultivate future teachers, namely, student teaching and internships under close supervision, performance assessments such as teaching portfolios, analysis of teaching and learning represented in various types of documentation, case methods, and action research by focusing on a specific issue of learning and/or teaching and collecting data to analyze and improve it. Here, they are cautious to argue that “none of these pedagogies is a silver bullet. Each has particular strengths and limitations, all can be implemented well or poorly, but in combination these strategies have the potential to greatly enhance the learning of new teachers” (p. 42). Also, a useful rubric is provided under each type of pedagogy. With regard to this part, I agree with Stephen Dinham, who in his review of this book wrote, “there is nothing particularly ground-breaking or innovative here, but it is a useful frame of reference” (Dinham, 2006, p. 96). The last chapter focuses on policy implications. As pointed out earlier, A Good Teacher in Every Classroom is a policy-oriented report. Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden believe that a higher quality of teacher preparation will not only contribute to better teaching in the classroom in the short and long terms, but also help reduce the high rate of attrition in teaching. In past decades, some reforms have attempted to promote the quality of teacher education, but unfortunately the results are, as Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden note, not “straightforward” (p. 54). The reason is that “the plethora of policies has sometimes worked in contradictory ways” (p. 54). Under these circumstances, it is of great importance to come up with well thought out policies related to accreditation of teacher education programs; use of licensing standards; and recruitment, induction, and retention of beginning teachers. With respect to teacher preparation program accreditation, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden make a list of ten so-called “rigorous” (p. 59) criteria, and advocate that the federal government, states, and institutions should incorporate them into program evaluation and also should motivate programs to adopt the curriculum recommendations described in the book. Even more, they argue for the development of high-quality teacher preparation programs in poor urban and rural communities that attract local residents and provide a pipeline from preparation to hiring. Regarding licensure examinations, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden point out three serious problems: testing knowledge and skills that are almost irrelevant to teaching practice, using low or even no cut scores, and having inconsistent requirements across states. One major reason is that there has been no “consensus on a core curriculum upon which to build a rigorous test” (p. 62). To solve the problems, they put forward two suggestions to Congress. First, Congress should sponsor an independent professional authority to work with state professional standards boards and licensing authorities to develop a national performance-based testing program that assesses the body of knowledge, skills, and dispositions presented in the volume through actual demonstration of teaching practice. Second, Congress should adopt strategies to make sates accept such assessments. In the last section, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden begin with the assumption that teacher shortages are caused by two major reasons: the uneven allocation of teachers across schools, districts, and regions; and the high attrition rate of beginning teachers. As a response, they contend that the federal government should supply large-scale service scholarships and forgivable loans to teachers who prepare to teach in shortage areas and go to locations with high needs. Furthermore, they suggest that states and the federal government should support high quality induction programs which will help new teachers improve teaching and stay in the classroom. Such programs, lasting at least one year, should include the following characteristics: trained mentors who are expert teachers with regular time to coach and model, reduced teaching loads, and sound performance assessment to guide teaching. These policy recommendations struck me as clear, concise, comprehensive, and inspiring. Policy-makers would do well to heed them. Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden also seem to think that, without a core curriculum for teacher preparation across the whole U.S., these policies will probably not work effectively. My biggest concern here is with whether the core curriculum proposed in the report is convincing enough for most teacher educators to accept. Given its significance, I think that the two co-editors need to work with contributing writers more to refine the core curriculum and make it more unified and coherent. They also might need to keep asking questions, suggestions, and comments from other scholars, teacher educators, and the like. Finally, the book is written in “a broad brush, fairly pragmatic approach that is a little light on some matters” (Dinham, 2006, p. 96). Apparently, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden want it to reach a large audience: student and beginning teachers, teacher educators, policy-makers at different levels, and the like. For this reason, those who like detail and complexity might be disappointed with this report and will want to read the more comprehensive one: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World. References Cochran-Smith, M. (2004). Ask a different question, get a different answer: the research base for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 55(2), 111-115. Darling-Hammond, L., & Baratz-Snowden, J. (Eds.). (2005). A Good Teacher in Every Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers our Children Deserve. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Darling-Hammond, L., & Bransford, J. (Eds.). (2005). Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and be Able to Do. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Dinham, S. (2006). Review of "A good teacher in every classroom". Australian Journal of Education, 50(1), 95-96. NCAC. (2006). Comprehensive New Framework for Teacher Education. Retrieved January 16, 2007 from http://www.teach-now.org/newsdisp.cfm?newsid=72 NEA. (May 24, 2005). NEA Reaction to National Academy of Education Publication "A Good Teacher in Every Classroom: Preparing the Highly Qualified Teachers Our Children Deserve". Retrieved January 16, 2007 from http://www.nea.org/newsreleases/2005/nr050524a.html Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14. About the Reviewer Hailing Wu is a doctoral student in teacher education at Michigan Sate University.