Defining an Ideal Teacher Education Program1

Program standards can take many different forms, as the history of the NCATE attests. One reason they take so many forms is that members of a field often disagree among themselves about what constitutes either essential minimums or ideal maximums. Because many standards are intended to guarantee minimum safeguards, they tend to focus on minimum requirements. When they aim higher, they often settle on uninteresting ideas--those on which an entire field can agree. The problem is further complicated in teacher education because the enterprise itself has always been viewed with skepticism outside the field. The received wisdom among policy makers and the lay public is that teaching is a self-evident practice, learned mainly in the doing. All one needs is subject matter knowledge and experience. Under the received wisdom model of teacher learning, teachers must learn the subject matter they will teach, typically by studying liberal arts in college, and then must develop and refine their techniques, typically through their own experience. In this model of teacher learning, the formal study of teaching--that which is typically provided in teacher-education courses--contributes only a small part, if anything, to teacher learning. This received wisdom often contributes to policies that restrict the proportio