Over the years, we've heard a good deal of criticism about the way teachers are trained in this country -- and often it's been richly deserved. Critics have generally split into two camps. One has maintained that the only thing necessary to be a good teacher is to know your subject matter. The other side has tended to de-emphasize subject matter and has talked instead about the importance of pedagogy and personal qualities, like loving children.
This has been a rather fruitless debate. Knowing a subject certainly doesn't mean you're going to be good at helping other people learn about it. We've all met or heard of mathematical geniuses who can look at a problem and come up with an answer in their heads to a classroom of kids, never mind two or three ways -- which is often what it takes. On the other hand, all the knowledge of child psychology and all the personal warmth in the world won't be enough if you don't have a solid grounding in the subjects you're trying to teach.
But I don't think the answer to this perennial debate is merely achieving a happy medium -- just enough teaching courses and just enough subject-matter courses. People learn their pedagogy, as well as their subject matter, largely from books and lectures. But learning the material is no guarantee that you will be able to apply what you've learned in a real situation. That's because teaching is also practical. It involves being able to bring you knowledge to bear on the problems that confront you in the classroom. And if you fail there, it doesn't matter how well you did in college.
Other professions recognize the importance of this practical component. The medical profession understands that honors in physiology and microbiology don't necessarily mean you'll do well when you try to diagnose what's wrong with a patient. That's why doctors do internships and residences. Now, some medical schools have gone well beyond this.
Last year, I described a visit I made to the McMaster University School of Medicine in Hamilton, Ontario. It's one of a number world-wide where students don't learn medicine through lectures. Instead, they start right out tracking clinical problems. Students meet in tutorial groups with a tutor who acts as a resource person. The tutorials are organized around major biomedical problems that can't be solved without understanding physical, biological and behavioral principles, how to collect data and how to evaluate evidence. And it's the students' responsibility, with faculty help, to figure out what they need to know to solve these problems and who to find it. So instead of memorizing the principles of each discipline and then trying to apply them years later, these students learn how the principles work by working through real-life problems from the first day of school.
Are students up to a system that demands this much of them? The students at McMaster raised this question themselves: They were sold on problem-based learning, but they wondered if it would work for everybody. What about students who depended on the structure and feedback of classwork and tests? Maybe the system would only work for selected students who were independent learners? I wondered myself But I've recently come across evidence that the system can work for a variety of students and produces results that far surpass those of traditional medical schools.
The case in point is Maastricht, a medical school in the Netherlands. It uses a problem-based approach similar to McMaster's, but because the Dutch government assigns students to medical school by lottery, the classes represent a random sample of students. Their achievement, however, is dazzling. When it comes to their knowledge of medicine, Maastricht students, on average, score higher on tests of anatomy (in which they have had no formal instruction) than residents trained in traditional medical schools. After seven years in school, 88 percent of students in Maastricht' s class of 197 4 had received diplomas in comparison with only 21 percent of students in other medical schools. And only 2 percent of Maastricht's students drop out in comparison with 18 percent in other medical schools.
A system that gets results as impressive as these deserves to be emulated. And Edwin Bridges at Stanford University is doing so in a new program for training principals. Why don't we try something like this with teachers? Instead of beginning with lectures and chapters in texts, why not fact students immediately with the kinds of problems they'll have to deal with in teaching -- like presenting Shakespeare's Othello to a class of diverse abilities.
And why not think about teaching our students in this way too? We know that being lectured to doesn't work for many kids. And we know that even for the ones who sit and listen and learn, the relationship between book knowledge and the real world is often difficult to understand. Kids ask, "What am I ever going to use this for?" In problem-based learning, they can tell immediately. And that's exactly what gaining knowledge is about.