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The ability to teach at the college level and to teach at the middle/high school level are vastly different things. Even though strawberries and bananas are both fruits, it's hard to compare the two. Same thing here. College instructors tend to be highly knowledgeable, but in my (limited) experience, some are not that great at imparting that knowledge. They don't really need to be: they have a captive audience of motivated people who are paying a lot of money to be there. Compare that to the public school teacher who might have an unmotivated audience of people with varied intelligences and abilities, who may or may not want to be there.
I'm going to withhold judgement for now on whether this change is a good thing. I can see how it can be great for higher level and very specific courses, such as Shakespeare, calculus, government/economics, etc. But when you're talking about teaching lower level high school or middle school classes, I get concerned. All your knowledge will be utterly useless in a classroom full of discipline problems and students working well below grade level. This is where a having a few education classes would really come in handy. And I do mean only a few. I'm a former teacher and I have to say that all the really amazing things I learned as a teacher came from actually working in the classroom.

December 06, 2012 10:32 am on Indiana changes training requirements for new teachers

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