Monday, April 11, 2016

Blogpost#7 what’s the ‘right’ pace for teacher preparation program


Fast pace might not the good fit for pre-service teacher education program; as the fast-pace mode is contagious. Upon graduation, new teachers have similar knowledge of the bare essentials of pedagogy and minimal teaching experience without the time to explore, and reflect on, their new professional roles in depth. This implicitly justified the reality that school life for students are super-saturated (to proceed from on expectation to another as fast as possible, to absorb and demonstrate specified knowledge through classroom instructions, assessments and evaluations), and that schools from K1-12 level to university level are mass-production assembly lines, from which graduated students have similar knowledge of the more-than-bare essentials of facts in a variety of subject areas, and minimal experience in KNOWLEDGE USE without the time to have deeper exploration and reflection on the facts. Since the experience in teacher education as a student is among the important components of the knowledge base of a teacher-candidate, if there was little time for teachers-to-be to open the mind unburdened by preconception, to think beyond the domain of technical interest and the delivery of curriculum, and to look beyond their familiar conception of the teaching and learning as an individual with 初心 (shoxin, trans., the beginner’s mind), it might be safe to say that the slow pace would probably not exist in the education philosophy of teacher-educators.

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