Column: The Whiteboard Jungle: Teacher credentialing programs often interfere with a new instructor’s natural ability

If one wants to attract the most talented people to teaching, the recipe is to make teaching attractive.

But that recipe concocted by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing is not what is happening in teacher training programs. Gordon Ramsay, where are you?

This week, I drove out to Cal State Northridge for a three-hour late-afternoon meeting with other cooperating teachers (those who work with student teachers), a rare chance to share triumphs and challenges of assisting up-and-coming instructors.

Instead of having a forum with free-flowing conversations, we were corralled into three separate pull-out sessions on new strategies introduced in credential courses.

One was on how to differentiate instruction, one on how to incorporate UDL and another on MTSS.

What, you don’t know what UDL and MTSS stand for? Neither did I until that evening.

The initialisms stand for Universal Design for Learning and Multi-Tiered System of Supports. Has quite a ring to them, as in “my head is ringing with more education gobbledygook.”

Now I know what my teaching has lacked over the past 28 years.

Instead of recruiting vibrant people to the profession, allowing them to flourish with their natural ability, credential programs often tamper that energy with endless training on the latest learning strategy du jour.

They keep demanding things of teachers that sucks away the joy of working with young people.

More of “be sure you do this, this and this,” instead of exploring the wonder of working with kids.

They keep laying on more work for the student teacher to do, as if it isn’t stressful enough to require student teachers to work for nothing for a whole year while taking several courses in the evening.

When I asked what requirements were removed to make room for the new ones, the facilitator looked stumped.

The demands of the profession rise as positions in math, science and special education remain vacant.

Much of this nonsense is coming from the state. In fact, there is a new mandate from the commission that all cooperating teachers have 10 hours of training to ensure they are qualified to work with student teachers.

So, for those of us who have been doing it for years, none of that experience evidently counts.

Funny how that was never a requirement before.

In fact, usually the way a credential program finds cooperating teachers at school sites is by contacting the districts who then email the administrators who then email teachers with an “anybody want to do this” query. Experience and quality not necessary.

Here is where the state should step in and expect that the cooperating teacher has a certain amount of ability working with or training other teachers.

But to come up with a random 10 hours of training along the lines of UDL and MTSS is BS. Even the credential folks are at a loss on how to pay people for the required amount of training.

Frankly, I can’t see how a young person full of beans survives intact after going through the shredder of a teacher-training program without losing heart.

A teacher who sparks learning in young people does so not because of MTSS but because that individual connects in a human way that can’t translate into a topic on a college syllabus.

I asked my current student teacher if she is getting any sense of enjoyment from any of her classes. She said only one professor inspires her. That’s not enough, and not the way to attract people to teaching.

On a side note, the cooperating teachers were paid $50 for the three-hour workshop and travel time to and from Cal State Northridge. That breaks down to $16.66 an hour. Just another reason to earn a teaching credential.

BRIAN CROSBY is a teacher in the Glendale Unified School District and the author of “Smart Kids, Bad Schools” and “The $100,000 Teacher.” He can be reached at www.brian-crosby.com.