[barry-cotter]

I taught kindergarten for five years and teach small groups and individuals at various levels now. Basic pedagogy is really, incredibly basic and the kind of stuff you pick up by experience relatively quickly even without formal instruction in it. More generally the economics of education literature shows that the only reliable determinants of teacher quality are subject matter expertise and teaching experience. Subject matter expertise is specifically not expertise in pedagogy because teaching qualifications have no discernible effect on students’ education whereas a Math teacher with a Math Master’s gets better results, or a Chemistry teacher with a Chemistry Master’s etc.

Seriously, consider what you’re saying. You’re saying that people without an education in pedagogy are unable to teach. Most of the parents reading this probably taught their children how to read before they got to school. The overwhelming majority of college faculty never have any training in teaching. Many, many people tutor without ever getting an M.Ed.

[notacoward]

Since you're sharing your experience, would you like to address the original claim that "professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale"? Or would that not suit the preferred narrative?

[barry-cotter]

I think that’s actually too kind to training and certification since it implies that they’re useful when dealing with students at scale. The main benefit from learning about pedagogy was not in the application, it was in knowing the jargon for talking to other teachers and sounding like a professional. What’s annoying is that the jargon U.K. and US trained teachers use differs slightly.

You get better at teaching by teaching, same way you get better at painting by painting or playing music by playing music. You’ll get better faster if you’re paying closer attention to your students and what you’re doing and things like having someone watch your lessons and critique them or reviewing video of your lessons yourself afterwards helps enormously. If you want to be play violin an encyclopaedic grasp of music theory is less useful than another hundred hours playing until you get over 1,000 hours at minimum. Ed school lecturers and professors are not noted for their excellent teaching despite their presumably excellent grasp of theory.

My experience could be unusual, obviously, but what’s very unlikely to be wrong is the literature on the determinants of teacher quality which does not reliably find any effect distinguishable from zero for teacher training or for experience over six years.

[burfog]

This confirms what another teacher told me: the training is garbage. He found it to be insane psychobabble that he could only tolerate while drunk. There was nothing useful. The teacher training did almost nothing to cover the key skill of classroom control. His fellow students were incompetent, spending most of their time partying. You could pass if you regurgitated the nonsense.