make changes which will facilitate its operation (formative evaluation). Premature summative evaluation of the proposed program should be avoided. It is not within the scope of this document to deal in detail with specific skills which the intern should master during his training program in the schools. Earlier in our discussion, we suggested some types of skills which may be included in a preclinic experience. These kinds of skills should be further developed during the internship. We see the internship as an extension of the preclinic experience. While we will not further delineate the specific skills which should comprise the internship program, we will suggest some general guidelines for structuring an internship experience. The specific skills which the master teacher wishes the trainee to acquire should be delineated as clearly as possible in performance terms before instruction begins.47 The trainee should know exactly what skills he will be required to master before he can become a practicing teacher. The trainee should be required to demonstrate his mastery of these skills in a classroom setting before he can successfully complete the internship. The levels of skills mastery and the conditions under which the intern will be required to demonstrate mastery should also be made explicit prior to instruction. The intern should not be required to attain certain grades or to complete his internship within a specified period of time. He should be held accountable only for mastering the skills which have been identified and should be given as much time as necessary for him to do so. As much as possible the internship experience should be individualized; an intern who needs special help in mastering a specific skill should be able to get it. Learning modules are a series of activities designed to help the trainee acquire specific teaching skills.48 These are being developed in some of the experimental teacher education programs, such as those at the University of Washington49 and the University of Houston, and are a promising tool which can help a trainer to make his instruction more personalized. Structuring an internship program along the guidelines which we have suggested will be a demanding task. It will be difficult to specify in performance terms every skill which an intern should master and even more difficult to formulate valid criteria for determining 47This discussion is based on ideas contained in Stanley Elam, A Resume of Performance-Based Teacher Education: What is the State of the Art? (Washington, D.C.: AACTE, 1972). 48w. Robert Houston et al., Developing Learning Modules (Houston: University of Houston, 1971). 49College of Education Faculty, A Mini-Report on Performance-Based Teacher Education (Seattle: University of Washington, 1972). when he has successfully mastered them. Elam notes some of the difficulties which will plague any performance-based teacher-training program: "There is a danger that competencies that are easy to describe and evaluate will dominate performance-based teacher education, hence a special effort will be needed to broaden the concept and to emphasize more divergent, creative, and personal experiences. Also, there are important political and management problems."50 The designers of a competency-based teacher-training program will have to think hard about these questions. The difficulties which this approach to teacher education poses should not force us to abandon it. It is always difficult to create and to manage something that is worthwhile. Performance-based training programs, like all of the suggestions which we have made in this essay, should be rigorously tested in pilot programs and situations. No matter how appealing it appears, no idea should be massively implemented until it has been tested and proven successful. The ultimate measure of whether anything works in education is whether it results in higher student achievement. We should implement testing designs to determine whether teachers who are trained in the kind of program we recommend are better teachers than students trained in traditional programs. The only way to get this kind of information is to measure the achievements of students who have been taught by teachers trained in both types of programs. It will take longitudinal studies and serious effort to do this kind of evaluation. The teacher training program which we have proposed is schoolbased rather than university-based. While the public school would assume basic responsibility for the training of teachers, the university would serve as a supportive agency. It would provide technical services, training for teacher trainers (master teachers), and would conduct basic and applied research on instruction which would be used to improve the quality of classroom teaching. The university would focus on the formulation of theories of instruction and the testing of these theories. The university would also provide the prospective teacher with the theoretical frameworks he will need to intelligently interpret student behavior and to analyze the teaching process. preclinic experience would be centered in the university. The university, because of its human and other resources, would also design and implement plans to evaluate various pilot programs in teacher education. We believe that the type of program which we have tried to describe would not take the university out of the business of teacher education. It would assign to it a role which it has the resources to successfully attain. In other words, the roles that we have delineated for both the university and the public schools are the roles which they are best equipped to fulfill. 50Elam, op. cit., pp. 6-7. Many of the criticisms which have been made about teacher education result from the fact that the public expects the university to do more than it is capable of doing. The university is partly responsible for such high public expectations; it has promised to do much more than it has the resources and ability to do. The university should serve primarily to create and test knowledge. Other institutions, such as the public schools, must assume a larger responsibility for the training of people to use and apply this knowledge to solve societal problems. To the extent that the university becomes involved in activities which are removed from basic and applied research, it will become less effective in performing its historic mission. Chapter 8 REFORM AND THE CULTURE OF THE SCHOOL by William Drummond University of Florida Social scientists define "culture" as learned behavior and results of behavior shared and transmitted by people in a society. Such a definition includes nonmaterial ideas, thoughts, feelings, actions and beliefs as well as material products such as tools, clothes, houses, etc. The term "society" is defined as a localized population which persists over time in order to accomplish certain ends.1 Obviously schools are an instrument of society: they transmit the culture of the society. But schools also may be conceived and studied as small societies in themselves. As small societies, schools develop subcultures of their own selecting--consciously and unconsciously--elements of the culture of the larger society and also creating through experience cultural objects, norms, traditions, rituals, etc., unique unto themselves.2 The central thesis of this paper is that the culture of the school is a powerful influence on the performance achievement of children and that the school's culture is manipulatable by those who have vested power and authority over schools. This essay will attempt to answer eight questions: (1) What is known about the culture of the school in (2) How do norms and rituals get started in a school? (3) What do norms and rituals do for those who work in a (4) (5) When, under what conditions, for what purposes should Can school norms and rituals be changed? 1George F. Kneller, Educational Anthropology: An Introduction (New York: Wiley, 1965), p. 4. 2Jules Henry, "A Cross-cultural Outline of Education," Current Anthropology, Vol. I, No. 4 (July 1960), pps. 267-305. |