Preparando profesores.pdf

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CHAPTER ONE

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Introduction
John Bransford, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Pamela LePage

o a music lover watching a concert from the audience, it would be easy to believe that a conductor has one of the easiest jobs in the world. There he stands, waving his arms in time with the music, and the orchestra produces glorious sounds, to all appearances quite spontaneously. Hidden fromthe audience—especially from the musical novice—are the conductor’s abilities to read and interpret all of the parts at once, to play several instruments and understand the capacities of many more, to organize and coordinate the disparate parts, to motivate and communicate with all of the orchestra members. In the same way that conducting looks like hand-waving to the uninitiated, teaching lookssimple from the perspective of students who see a person talking and listening, handing out papers, and giving assignments. Invisible in both of these performances are the many kinds of knowledge, unseen plans, and backstage moves— the skunkworks, if you will—that allow a teacher to purposefully move a group of students from one set of understandings and skills to quite another over the space of manymonths. On a daily basis, teachers confront complex decisions that rely on many different kinds of knowledge and judgment and that can involve high-stakes outcomes for students’ futures. To make good decisions, teachers must be aware of the many ways in which student learning can unfold in the context of development, learning differences, language and cultural influences, and individualtemperaments, interests, and approaches to learning. In addition to foundational knowledge about these areas of learning and performance, teachers need to

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2 PREPARING TEACHERS FOR A CHANGING WORLD: WHAT TEACHERS SHOULD LEARN AND BE ABLE TO DO
know how to take the steps necessary to gather additional information that will allow them to makemore grounded judgments about what is going on and what strategies may be helpful. Above all, teachers need to keep what is best for the child at the center of their decision making. This sounds like a simple point, but it is a complex matter that has profound implications for what happens to and for many children in school. The importance of preparing teachers to exercise trustworthy judgment basedon a strong base of knowledge is increasingly important in contemporary society. Standards for learning are now higher than they have ever been before, as citizens and workers need greater knowledge and skill to survive and succeed. Education is increasingly important to the success of both individuals and nations, and growing evidence demonstrates that—among all educational resources—teachers’abilities are especially crucial contributors to students’ learning (see, for example, Ferguson, 1991a; Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain, 2000; Wright, Horn, and Sanders, 1997). Furthermore, the demands on teachers are increasing. Not only do teachers need to be able to keep order and provide useful information to students, they also need to be increasingly effective in enabling a diverse group ofstudents to learn ever more complex material and to develop a wider range of skills. Whereas in previous decades teachers were expected to prepare only a small minority for the most ambitious intellectual work, they are now expected to prepare virtually all students for higher-order thinking and performance skills once reserved for only a few. To meet the expectations they now face, teachers need a newkind of preparation—one that enables them to go beyond “covering the curriculum” to actually enable learning for students who learn in very different ways. Programs that prepare teachers need to consider the demands of today’s schools in concert with the growing knowledge base about learning and teaching if they are to support teachers in meeting these expectations. This volume was developed in...