What Is Good Teaching?

By Arthur Wise, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Stephen Klein

Teacher quality: It's what makes the difference in student performance. In order for K-12 students to meet new, higher expectations, teachers will need more extensive clinical education oriented to real-world practice. What's needed is a better system to ensure that teachers are ready for the challenges that await them.

However, the history of teaching in the United States requires that we address the question, "What do teachers need to know and be able to do?'' by first answering a prior question: Is there anything teachers need to know or be able to do? The view of teaching as semiskilled work requiring little more than basic literacy skills and the ability to follow guidelines encapsulated in texts and curriculum materials is a time-honored one. From popular cartoons illustrating teaching as a simplistic and mind-numbing activity to teacher-proof materials that assume teachers' activities can be easily programmed by directives about what to do when, the image of teaching as requiring little knowledge or skill is widespread.

Policymakers exhibit their ambivalence about a knowledge base for teaching by regularly enacting loopholes to licensing that require no teacher education. This ambivalence is the most obvious in the long-standing practice of emergency licensure in nearly all states and the recent enactment of alternative routes to teacher certification in a majority of states. Some of these alternative certification programs require little more than a few weeks of preparation before entry into the classroom, where close on-the-job supervision is supposed to...