This review has been accessed  times since September 1, 1998
Tom, Alan R. (1997). Redesigning Teacher Education. Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.
Pp. 295
$59.50 (Cloth)
ISBN 0-7914-3469-9
$19.95 (Paper)
ISBN 0-7914-3470-2
Reviewed by Patricia Ashton
University of Florida
September 1, 1998
Is significant and
enduring reform of teacher education
possible? The continual failure of efforts to improve teacher
education including the recent "rise and stall" of the Holmes
Group initiative (Fullan, Galluzzo, Morris, & Watson, 1998)
raises doubts about whether the obstacles to lasting reform will
ever be overcome. In Redesigning Teacher Education, Alan R.
Tom reviews his experiences as a teacher educator and
administrator over more than thirty years in three institutions
and offers eleven principles designed to overcome the obstacles
to enduring reform in teacher education. The principles reflect
Tom's understanding that reform of teacher education is a
multifaceted problem requiring a comprehensive approach that
encompasses change in the characteristics and work of teacher
educators as well as change in the organizational settings in
which teacher educators work and in the links between schools and
universities. The material in this book, by Tom's own admission
is "loosely connected" (p. 12), a mix of personal narrative,
conceptual analysis, and argument in support of the adoption of
his eleven principles.
In his introduction
Tom recounts the chronic problems of
teacher education that many others have described: the low status
of teacher education in the university that is manifested in
larger teaching loads than other professors of education, the
lack of adequate funding for the clinical component of teacher
education, the difficulty of bridging the chasm between arts and
sciences faculty and teacher educators, the discontinuity between
schools and universities, the need to give more attention to the
career-long development of teachers, the number of stakeholders
with conflicting goals, the fragmentation of programs and low
morale that results from the departmental organization of schools
of education, inadequate attention to the strategies needed for
successful reform, and teachers educators' vulnerability to
externally mandated "quick fixes" and fads. Recognizing that all
these issues must be addressed concurrently if teacher education
reform is to succeed, Tom draws on his work in staff development
and teacher education administration to identify principles he
believes can help teacher educators overcome these chronic
problems.
In Chapter 1, Tom
describes the experiences in his career
that led him to question traditional practices in teacher
education and to propose alternative approaches. Tom did not
enter teaching through a traditional undergraduate program.
Following master's work in history, he decided to become a high
school teacher rather than complete a doctoral program in
history. In preparation, he had one term of postbaccalaureate
study in education followed by a paid internship in which he
taught four-fifths of a load in collaboration with an experienced
teacher with whom he combined classes several times a week. This
experience led him to doubt the widely held assumption that
preservice teachers need to be inducted into teaching gradually.
After a year and
a half of high school teaching, Tom
returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to complete a
doctorate in curriculum and instruction. In 1966, he accepted a
position in education at Washington University to work on a
curriculum implementation project with teachers interested in
trying new social studies curricula. During that experience the
high school teachers resisted theoretical analysis of the
curricula and consistently based their curriculum decisions on
how they believed their students would react. Although
disappointed by the teachers' concrete approach to thinking about
curriculum, Tom concluded that curriculum development efforts
must take into account teachers' practical reasoning and concern
for students' responses, and he applied that principle in the
design of a six-week summer workshop for social studies teachers.
Each day began with two hours of teaching by some of the four to
eight teachers on a team. The entire team then discussed the
morning's teaching. After lunch the team planned the next day's
lesson. These teachers responded more positively than the
teachers in the previous project to the analytical discussion of
assumptions and theoretical issues because the discussions were
grounded in their classroom teaching. Tom concluded that this
approach was a "powerful model of staff development," even though
the teachers rated the theoretical discussions as the least
valuable experience in the workshop. He cites his work with these
social studies teachers as "the most potent episode of my
professional life" (p. 29).
In 1972, Tom became
the coordinator of clinical training at
Washington University and experienced firsthand the typical
frustrations of the teacher education administrator in a research
university: the faculty's lack of interest in supervising student
teachers and the under funding of teacher education. Since 1983
Tom has held a variety of administrative roles, serving as
department chair at Washington University from 1983 to 1988 and
administering teacher education programs at the University of
Arizona and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. From
these experiences Tom learned that reform in teacher education
must involve more than curriculum revision. It requires reform of
faculty reward structures, administrative support of
collaborative planning involving all the faculty in the program,
and budgetary authority vested in the program, with faculty
influence over budget decisions.
Both the strength and
the weakness of this book is its
grounding in Tom's personal experiences. From his firsthand
experiences Tom offers insights into the nature of successful and
unsuccessful reform strategies. However, the most influential
experiences in his career took place from 1966 to 1988 at an
elite private university--Washington University in St. Louis. In
fact, he does not recount in any detail his experiences at the
two large state universities where he has served as a teacher
education administrator. Although he recognizes that reflections
on one's personal history can lead to idiosyncratic thinking, Tom
does not explore how his unique experiences may have influenced
his recommendations for change in teacher education. My
contrasting experiences, beginning with preparation in a
traditional secondary education program at a large state
university and including 20 years of work as a teacher educator
and educational psychologist involved in the planning and
implementation of a five-year elementary education program at the
University of Florida, lead me to question a number of the
structural principles Tom proposes, which I will discuss later in
this review.
In Chapter 2, Tom
reviews the criticisms that teacher
education courses are (a) vapid, (b) impractical, (c) fragmented,
and (d) muddled (lacking direction). Tom concedes that all the
criticisms seem valid except for the claim that education courses
are vapid. To counter that criticism Tom cites two recent surveys
suggesting that most teacher education students believe that
their courses are at least as rigorous as non-education courses.
Tom then evaluates three popular reform proposals--the academic
model advocated by liberal arts and sciences professors among
others, the teaching effectiveness model based on process-product
research, and the collaboration model championed by John Goodlad-
-for their potential to address the four criticisms of teacher
education courses. Tom concludes that, while none of these models
adequately addresses all the criticisms, Goodlad's (1990) version
of the collaborative model is the best hope for the professional
education of teachers. Its focus on developing links among
professors of education, practitioners, and arts and science
professors in light of a vision of the role of teacher education
in a political democracy addresses the criticisms of
fragmentation and lack of direction.
In Chapter 3, Tom attributes
the failure to reform teacher
education to a process he calls "curriculum development by
`implication'" (p. 70) in which teacher educators assume that a
key idea or ideas can serve as the foundation for developing a
teacher education program. In this process a set of skills,
knowledge, assumptions, and/or values are identified from which
the program content is inferred. Tom examines the problems with
this approach by describing three instances of curriculum
development by implication: (a) the knowledge base approach based
on process-product research, (b) the cognitive mediational
approach, and (c) Tom's (1984) own conception of teaching as a
moral craft. Tom concludes that all three approaches are limited
in their range of content and in the connections between the
approach and the curriculum based on the approach. He argues that
an alternative is needed that is grounded in the recognition that
teaching is an uncertain activity that requires teachers to
question assumptions and consider new approaches to curriculum.
To meet the need for
creative and open-ended planning, Tom
offers an approach he calls design by principles, and in Chapters
4 and 5 Tom presents a set of conceptual and structural
principles to guide teacher educators in their efforts to
redesign teacher education. He chose principles because they
provide direction without prescribing specific actions in the
hope that they would give teacher educators the impetus and
insight needed to design innovative programs. Implicit in his use
of principles is the belief that there is no one best program of
teacher education, that excellence in teacher education can take
various forms. Tom points out that the structural and conceptual
principles are equally important and should be considered
concurrently. Recognizing that he is not the first to conceive of
program design by principles, Tom cites Goodlad's (1990) nineteen
postulates as a recent example. He notes that Goodlad's
principles are focused more on the context of teacher education,
whereas his principles focus more on the curriculum. Tom sees his
principles as a combination of reasoned argument and hypotheses
and Goodlad's principles as moral imperatives deduced from
rational argument.
Five of Tom's principles
are conceptual, dealing with the
purposes and content of teacher education: (1) The faculty and
curriculum should model the images and skills that the faculty
wants students to acquire; (2) the concept of teaching underlying
the program should include a moral as well as a technical
dimension; (3) the faculty's conception of subject matter should
be explicit and embedded in instruction; (4) multiculturalism
must be made explicit and integrated throughout the program; and
(5) continuous renewal must be integral to the program. These
principles are generally accepted by teacher educators and are
included in the standards of the National Council for the
Accreditation of Teacher Education.
Tom's six principles dealing
with structural issues present
procedures for carrying out teacher education. These principles
are more controversial than the conceptual principles so I will
consider each in some detail.
In defense of Principle
6 (the program should be brief and
intense), Tom argues that distributing the program over several
years in a step-by-step fashion bores students and contributes to
their belief that the curriculum is vapid, impractical, and
fragmented. He stresses that the brief approach is more
consistent with the life of today's teachers and that students
who do not survive the intense experience would probably not
survive in today's classrooms. Year-long master's programs are
one example of this compression. Other alternatives that Tom
suggests include short courses that require students to work in
schools while examining their beliefs about teaching.
Tom seems to assume that extended programs are necessarily
"unengaging and uninspiring" (p. 135). Undoubtedly, given the
testimonies of teachers, many teacher education programs deserve
this criticism, but a well designed extended program consisting
of the challenging experiences Tom believes are necessary to
stimulate the development of a pedagogical perspective (see
Principle 9) need not merit his description of "plodding
rationality" (p. 135).
In support of this
principle, Tom notes that the need for
extended time lacks empirical support. It is true that compelling
evidence for the need for time does not exist in the research on
preservice teacher education, but research on cognitive and moral
development indicates that changes in epistemological beliefs
require powerful interventions extending over considerable time
(Kitchener & King, 1990). This finding is supported in recent
research efforts to change the epistemological beliefs of
practicing teachers (Feiman-Nemser & Remillard, 1996). As Tom
points out in his discussions of Principle 1 (the need for
faculty modeling), Principle 3 (making the faculty's view of
subject matter explicit), and Principle 7 (developing a
pedagogical perspective), students' views of pedagogy must
undergo significant change during their program if they are to
develop a professional perspective on teaching. A brief, intense
program may be sufficient to induce such change in mature
students like Tom in elite private institutions, but such a
program is likely to be overwhelming and too short to enable
typical elementary education students in large state universities
and small colleges to learn to deal with the complexities of
today's elementary classrooms.
My first reaction to
Principle 7 (replace as quickly as
possible beginning teachers' tendency to view teaching in terms
of past experiences with a pedagogical perspective) was to wonder
why Tom considers development of pedagogical thinking a
structural principle, but he explains that the development of
pedagogical thinking is unlikely without a structural arrangement
to support it. For example, Tom criticizes initial inductive
experiences such as tutoring or observing in classrooms as
"pallid imitations of teaching" (p. 136) incapable of disrupting
students' old habits of thinking about education. Believing that
teacher educators should challenge students' traditional beliefs
about the nature of knowledge and learning and stimulate them to
seek new approaches, Tom in this principle focuses on identifying
structural arrangements that will build students' awareness of
the uncertainties of teaching and their commitment to the moral
responsibilities of teaching. To accomplish this goal, Tom
recommends that teacher educators develop intense initial
experiences such as a summer teaching experience for incoming
students or courses that focus on the analysis of personal
conceptions of teaching and the development of pedagogical
thinking. Tom also suggests that methods courses could be taught
concurrently with student teaching to facilitate the development
of a pedagogical perspective. He cautions, however, that in
planning challenging experiences teacher educators must ensure
that the experiences are not too disruptive and that support is
provided that enables students to develop a pedagogical
perspective. The problem is that when this principle is enacted
together with Principle 6 (short, intense programs), it may be
impossible to provide sufficient support, because development of
a pedagogical perspective requires time to reflect and experiment
with ideas.
Principle 8 (integrate
theory and practice throughout the
program) is grounded in Tom's belief that the study of
professional knowledge separated from practical experience is
ineffective. He argues that expecting students to "stockpile"
knowledge for future application ignores the context-dependent
nature of professional knowledge and the difficulty that students
have in understanding the complex connections between theory and
practice. To better integrate theory and practice Tom recommends
either requiring teaching practice at the beginning of the
program or using "situational" teaching, that is, introducing
professional knowledge early in the program and then reteaching
it later when relevant to a teaching situation encountered during
student teaching. Although I agree that adoption of this
principle is essential to the success of teacher education
programs, the two approaches Tom recommends seem inadequate.
Situational teaching seems inefficient and the "sink-or-swim"
induction experience is risky for novice teachers and their
students. A more gradual induction in which prospective teachers
have time to develop lessons that are based on their emerging
epistemologies and that they teach, evaluate, and re-teach will
provide sufficient disruption to foster understanding of the
complex relation between theory and practice as well as develop
mature pedagogical thinking.
In Principle 9 (replace
horizontal with vertical staffing),
Tom challenges the traditional organization of teacher education
programs in which professors independently teach their specialty
leaving integration of the course work to the students. The
result, he asserts, is fragmented and inconsistent curricula and
superficial coverage of content. To address these problems, Tom
recommends that faculty become responsible for more than one
course or experience in the program and plan and teach in
interdisciplinary teams. This principle is of particular concern
because it reflects an increasingly prevalent attitude among
teacher educators that instruction by specialists necessarily
leads to fragmentation and shallow coverage. Depriving students
of instructors with specializations in the course work could lead
to more superficial coverage rather than less. It seems to me
that the problem of fragmentation could be addressed by having
specialists plan and work together on teams rather than by simply
eliminating specialists. Having specialists involved in more than
one experience could add greater depth to the program.
In Principle 10,
(group students into cohorts), Tom
reiterates Lortie's (1968) belief that socialization into a
profession requires a shared ordeal. Although research on teacher
education cohorts is nonexistent, Tom concludes from his personal
experiences that cohorts are a "powerful intervention" (p. 153)
with the potential for offering students' mutual support in the
development of professional commitment and self-confidence. He
cautions, however, that cohorts can impede professional
socialization when students reinforce each other's doubts and
resist program goals. Consequently, shared ordeals must be
designed with the risks and benefits carefully considered.
Principle 11,
(reallocate the resources for teacher
education so that more are directed to the first years of
teaching) is grounded in Tom's conviction that research has
yielded few context-free generalizations but has produced
literature that is relevant to the professional development of
practicing teachers. Tom believes that allocation of funds to the
professional development of beginning teachers would be possible
from funds saved by requiring fewer field placements and
supervisors in short preservice programs as proposed in Principle
6. Obviously agreement with this principle depends on one's
acceptance of that principle. Given the current under funding of
teacher education, it seems foolhardy to divert funds to
inservice programs when resources are too limited to have much
impact on teachers' professional development. Not surprisingly,
Tom reports that this principle has encountered more objections
from colleagues than any other principle.
In Chapter 6 Tom
evaluates four change strategies (task
force, top-down, pilot, and family-style) on the basis of his
personal experiences and knowledge. He notes that the advantages
of the task force include the possibility of developing more
effective working relationships among the various groups involved
in teacher education and creating innovative structures and
content. He points out, however, that task forces often consist
of many members not typically involved in teacher education,
resulting in disjointed ideas that ignore the content of teacher
education and the financial and practical constraints of teacher
education. He also cautions that reforms usually fail when task
forces are disbanded after submitting their report, because they
are unable to redress the weaknesses in their proposal.
Top-down strategies refer to administrative initiatives to
improve programs or external regulations imposed on programs.
Although administrative initiatives have the potential to
stimulate reform, Tom concludes that their success tends to be
short-lived, as faculty tend to resist administrative regulation
of their activities.
Tom identifies the
strengths and weaknesses of two types of
pilot programs--comprehensive and sector pilots. A comprehensive
pilot refers to testing a program wide reform with a portion of
the faculty and students. It allows interested faculty the
opportunity to create a program. Sector piloting refers to
testing one part of a program with all students and faculty. Tom
concludes that if program development becomes a process of self-
renewal, pilot programs become unnecessary.
Tom favors "family-style change" in which faculty meet
continually to discuss change. Although this approach worked well
for Tom and his two colleagues in planning the professional
semester of the secondary education program at Washington
University, he has found it less successful with larger groups
planning an entire program.
In his concluding chapter,
Tom considers barriers to change
in teacher education, including over regulation and lack of
status and power. He argues that the excessive regulation of
teacher education has damaged teacher educators' sense of
efficacy and led to passivity and lack of imagination about the
possibility of reform. To overcome these barriers Tom believes
that teacher educators must seek an alliance with the organized
teaching profession. Such an alliance would involve teachers in
the planning and governance of teacher education programs and
teacher educator activism in support of teachers. Tom ends this
chapter with an evaluation of four innovative organizational
structures in terms of their potential for (1) giving the teacher
education program control of its budget, (2) reducing
specialization in the teacher education faculty, (3) providing
links between the teacher education faculty and the liberal arts
and sciences faculty and teachers in the schools, and (4)
broadening the conception of teaching from a technical
perspective to include the moral dimensions of teaching. The four
structures he considers are (1) a school for teaching, (2) a
program faculty, (3) an interdisciplinary unit of education, and
(4) a center for pedagogy. Tom seems to believe that the center
for pedagogy based on Goodlad's vision of collaboration in
teacher education has the greatest potential for meeting his
criteria, yet he points out that it remains a relatively untried,
ideal model that will require extraordinary efforts if it is to
succeed.
Tom reminds us in his
concluding comments that teacher
educators share "the moral imperative to act" (p. 224). Even
though I think his recommendations to shorten programs and to
reduce faculty specialization are ill-advised, I believe that
Redesigning Teacher Education is an important resource for
teacher educators who accept the moral responsibility to act.
Readers may be disappointed that he has not provided more
concrete guidance in how to carry out reform, and it is unclear
whether adherence to the principles that Tom presents will lead
to significant and enduring reform. Despite these shortcomings,
he has shared important insights into the change process that
could help reformers avoid many of the pitfalls that have doomed
past reforms.
References
Feiman-Nemser, S., & Remillard, J. (1996). Perspectives on
learning to teach. In F. Murray (Ed.), The teacher educator's
handbook (pp. 63-91). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Fullan, M., Galluzzo, G., Morris, P., & Watson, N. (1998). The
rise and stall of teacher education reform. Washington, DC:
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
Goodlad, J. (1990). Teachers for our nation's schools. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Kitchener, K., & King, P. (1990). The reflective judgment model:
Ten years of research. In M. Commons, C. Armon, L. Kohlberg, F.
Ricards, T. Grotzer, & J. Sinnott (Eds.), Adult development
(Vol. 2, pp. 68-78). New York: Praeger.
Lortie, D. (1968). Schoolteacher. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Tom, A. (1984). Teaching as a moral craft. New York: Longman.
About the Reviewer
Patricia Ashton is a professor of educational psychology in the
Department of Educational Foundations at the University of
Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. Her areas of interest include
teaching, teacher education, and human development.
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