The learning recession might be caused by a teaching recession
Good evidence shows that we’re stuck in a “learning recession.” We also need to consider the likelihood of a connected recession in something indispensable to student learning, namely effective teaching.
I often invite audiences to identify the same missing word in three eerily similar quotes by reputable educators over two decades. Each laments the gradual disappearance of something central to effective schooling. By the second quote, most of the audience correctly guesses that the missing word is indeed teaching.
The most recent example comes from author and consultant Michael Sonbert, whose observations in thousands of classrooms demonstrate that, however hard they work, “teachers aren’t teaching.” That is, they rarely provide explicit, sustained, whole-class lessons.
Instead, they’re more prone than ever to facilitate—to have individuals or groups complete assignments on screens or worksheets, often at their own (sometimes dawdling) pace. Sonbert dubs this shift the “biggest trend in teaching today.” It is tacitly confirmed by the photos that dominate education publications, which illustrate the pervasiveness of group activities involving crayons and colored markers.
None of my audiences balks at these findings.
Alarmed by this trend, a superintendent and assistant superintendent in Connecticut did some digging and reported their findings in an article titled “What’s Missing in Teacher Prep.” They made two discoveries. First, that their teachers had graduated from 17 different pre-service programs. Second, that none of them had received any “practical experience” in the most vital elements of instruction—like “checking for understanding.”
Similarly, in a Fordham Institute piece in 2020 called “Training teachers to fail,” two Minnesota teachers decry the preparation they received from two well-known ed schools. “Oddly enough,” they write, “we were not trained in how to actually teach” (their emphasis). They were warned, moreover, not to be seen “at the front of the room” during observations. Good thing, as they received “minimal to nonexistent training in effective whole-group instruction.”
