Dear Shalom,
I agree that there are of course some untrained educators who are poor teachers and there are some trained teachers who are excellent educators. The opposite is also true at times.
Rav Kook explained that someone who fully plumbs the depths of Torah properly can receive wisdom and insight that sheds light on areas and even skills that are not directly related to Torah. Those who are on a more pedestrian level of Torah knowledge require separate courses of study in order to master other disciplines and areas of knowledge and skills unrelated to Torah. I think this may apply to the area of teaching as well.
I spent most of the first half of my thus far 25 year education career as an enthusiastic, well read, auto-didactic but basically untrained, uncertified, and undegreed teacher and I was a "rock star" according to many of my supervisors and my students as well as their parents. I had done some student teaching and studied one year in kollel prior to beginning my teaching career. I had also observed some stellar educators including my father and brother for decades who were star teachers in public school and business settings. Maybe teaching was in my genes.
My reason for becoming a teacher was not because I needed a job or because it was a way to continue my Jewish studies. I agree that those are bad reasons to become a teacher. I went into Jewish education to try and help kids get inspired, since I had not been inspired much when I was growing up. My secret was simply doing the opposite of what was done to me by some teachers that I disliked as a child in school growing up with knuckle rapping droning holier than thou approaches, and I was very successful with many of my students.
I have also worked with and hired teachers with graduate degrees in education from Ivy league colleges who have been mediocre classroom educators either because they had little classroom presence, couldn't engage or relate to students, were not clear expositors of ideas, were not deep thinkers, or because they were not world class scholars in their specific area of subject matter. As Heschel said, we need text people not just text books.
Today as a head of school I ideally hire passionate subject area experts who are trained masters in pedagogy but if that isn't possible I err to the side of hiring experienced educators with abundant people skills and overwhelming intellectual prowess instead of someone with a teaching degree. The exception to this is when hiring educators who know how to deal with atypical learners. In that scenario I err to the side of hiring someone having a high degree of training, expertise, experience, and mastery of the art of teaching.
You can't teach talent, either you have it or you don't. You can however rely on natural talent and stay at the same level for a long time or you can maximize the development of that talent and accelerate your growth as an educational practitioner. That said, I ultimately realized there were some holes in my teaching craft and I needed more wisdom, experience, and best practices, especially research based best practices in order to know how to reach more of my students.
After eventually earning a Masters degree in education from a University, my tool box and repertoire of strategies has grown significantly and I am more easily able to teach hard to reach students and advise other teachers about what works instead of engaging in a trial and error process.
Graduate level training and research also showed me how differentiating and including students who are not typical learners requires even more expertise than a standard education school will usually provide you. A current emerging trend is to combine education and special education training together such as is done at The University of Delaware and some other cutting edge forward thinking education schools.
Another underrated method for developing young teachers is by providing mentorship and apprenticing younger teachers with master teachers. My colleague Mark Smilowitz who is the creator of the excellent educator podcast series for this website credits his mentoring with a veteran Doctoral level educator with helping him refine his craft and hone his skills as an educator even after he had years of classroom experience and both Smicha and a Masters degree in education.
Shalom,
Elisha Paul
Learner in Chief
JHSC
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/05/2017 08:10PM by mlb.
