With the on coming shortage of teachers, there has come a need to change the way we prepare our educators. SUNY’s Nancy Zimpher talks about how with this coming shortage, we have to prepare by giving supplies that our schools need and to make sure that the quality of these teachers are up to par. She says that the reason SUNY is interested in this issue is because SUNY prepares almost 5,000 teachers a year. There is an increasingly large number of students who come out of high school not ready for college. So instead of focusing on the quality of the students, she suggests we focus on the quality of the teachers, who can help these students whether their ready for college or not, hence the “K-12 challenge.” Zimpher believes that if we improve the quality of the teachers, then it will lead to students being ready for college once they graduate from high school. She also believes in diversifying the population of teachers in the education system, so that it can improve the quality of education for the student. With the notion that the student is at the center of this institution, her argument seems plausible, because it is in the benefit of the student. I believe that there is a correlation between the improvement of a teacher’s quality and the improvement of a student’s education.
http://chronicle.com/article/Video-Owning-the-K-12/236400
I found this article and post really interesting as it indirectly relates to my group’s city council proposal. We found that expecting the students to work with inefficient mentors would be an unfair way to bring them into the college atmosphere. I think that that notion parallels this issue. Bringing students into a classroom with an unprepared professor brings them at a disadvantage educationally. They will not receive the tools that they need to succeed in the class, nor will they receive the information necessary for them to succeed in the future. I definitely think that improving the quality of teachers is a brilliant idea, because it will balance out the inequalities between students that have prior knowledge on certain topics and students that do not. Each will be able to retain the same information in a successful way, which will make college more of an equal playing field. Many students are already lacking the proper resources to fully educate themselves, so getting rid of one of their obstacles would do wonders. I definitely have had experience with professors that have the heart to be great professors, but lack the experience to actually do so. I believe that training sessions would go a long way for those professors