Preparing Teachers to Be Innovative

"One of the major dilemmas for teacher educators is whether to train students to teach according to the current, typical, or standard pedagogical practices in preschools and schools or to use updated innovative practices," observes Lilian Katz in her Introduction to the book Conversations on Early Childhood Teacher Education. "If we do the former, we would be in a situation in which we would be teaching students to use methods [teacher educators] often do not agree with. On the other hand, however, we could choose to prepare our students to use more modern, recently developed or innovative pedagogical approaches that we have good reason to believe would be more beneficial to the children....

"If student teachers are trained by their instructors to use innovative practices, they might be very discouraged when they begin their in-school experience, and they may feel totally unprepared for what they encounter in the real world. When it comes to teaching young children, developmentally appropriate teaching methods are more difficult to learn than formal traditional instructional methods. Such developmentally appropriate practices require careful observation and listening to the children and great sensitivity in responding to them."

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