Alan R. Tom – författare

Explores the shortcomings of teacher education and proposes design principles for rethinking teacher preparation. Establishes a reform agenda for teacher education faculties.Alan Tom is among the best at relating important issues in teacher education and a critical reading of the literature with his own professional experience. This book is ambitious. It lives up to the claim of examining political and institutional problems along with conceptual and intellectual ones. This is something few teacher educators attempt and is a critical area to open up for sustained analysis.Drawing upon events from his career as a teacher educator, Alan R. Tom candidly analyzes the predominant criticisms of teacher education and rejects the common tendency to infer the teacher education curriculum from such ideas as metaphors for teaching or knowledge. He proposes eleven design principles to serve as a reform agenda including creating programs capable of self-renewal, having faculty model the desired image and skills of teaching, and rethinking the sequence of practice and theory. Each principle identifies a differing dimension for the conceptual and structural redesign of teacher preparation. Four specific change strategies are evaluated as well: task force, top-down, piloting, and family style. The low status of teacher educators and the excessive regulation of teacher education are also examined, as is the failure to give adequate attention to the administrative organization for teacher education.

Most of us agree that moral issues matter, but how do they fit into the context of our schools? Since A Nation at Risk, most educators and policymakers have focused on the academic dimensions of schooling governed by standards and testing. This timely book explores the ways that committed K–12 educators have attempted to make the moral visible in American schooling over the past 25 years. The authors look at their efforts, using an analytic framework that distinguishes five possible ways that the moral and the academic can be related in schooling.Book Features:A useful survey of moral education that enables the reader to arrive at personal judgments about the value and weaknesses of various approaches.Case studies that illustrate the moral education of students, the moral component of teachers’ work, and the moral dimensions of school structure.A mixture of philosophical analysis and attention to school practice suitable for courses and accessible to teachers, administrators, policymakers, and parents.