I never took a course in Pedagogy

Pedagogy  is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. 

I suppose that one of the 'benefits' of teaching at a Catholic high school is that I don't necessarily have to be certified like the teachers working in public schools.  During my trip to Barnes and Noble yesterday, I had a chance to take a peek into what it might mean to have gone to college for a degree in secondary education.  The reason I love going to that particular branch of B&N is that one gets to browse through textbooks.  I have not forgotten how expensive textbooks are, but yesterday's trip reminded me about the reality of buying books for school work.

In an expensive ($170) textbook about teaching routines, I encountered the terms that I've been reading about in the first (trade) book that I bought yesterday: Teaching Reading in Science.  In the college textbook, the discussion about these routines is much more involved than in the book I decided to buy, and I imagine that the coursework allows the prospective teacher a chance to fully examine and evaluate the routines being described, the routines that they are asked to learn while they are in 'teacher school.'



Probably the most difficult task being 'asked' of me now is to engage in my own personal, professional development, my own 'teacher school.'  I am taking what is in effect the equivalent of correspondence school as I read about these routines that I've practically never heard of, else perhaps heard about when mentioned in passing during a short in-service at SBP.  I should not feel so much difficulty in engaging in this task.  After all, in my previous profession, my very licensure required that I show proof of my ongoing education and professional development.  I remember scrambling for 'credits' whenever it was time to renew my physician's license.  It was logical and understandable that such ongoing development be a requirement in that kind of work.  As much as all of us value the work of being an educator, we must all be able to see the importance of similar ongoing professional development, continuing education, as we go about our task of being teachers.

Architects, engineers, accountants, psychologists, physicians, police officers: all of these who are involved in important work, all of them have to be involved in some sort of continuing education.  Teachers, too, must be responsible for engaging in this sort of work.

I write this so that I can persuade all my colleagues that the responsible thing to do is to continue to learn how to teach.  I have heard so frequently, even from my own mouth, about how frustrating it has become to educate some of our students at SBP.  If we continue to insist on using the same techniques and routines in our teaching, we have little chance of improving this situation.  It becomes easy to blame our students for their 'lack' of reading ability.  As I read more and more about what it takes, as proven in scientific studies, to teach a teenager how to truly read, I can understand that the responsibility rests equally on the the teachers to use evidence-based strategies and routines if we are to achieve our Middle States goals.

It begins with learning the vocabulary.  It's the teachers that have to learn it.  "Frayer Model" "Semantic Feature Analysis" "Anticipation Guide" "K-W-L" "SQ3R" "QtA Question the Author" "RAFT".  The list is much longer than this.  I, for one, have never learned what any of these terms mean, much less put them into use in my classroom.  It's time that I did.