The Article

David Labaree, professor in the Department of Teacher Education, examines an old and enduring problem in the long history of trying to create an effective and respected system for preparing teachers: that teaching is an enormously difficult job that looks easy. 

Discussion

Labaree explores the roots of the gap between the reality and the perception of learning to teach by first spelling out some of the characteristics of teaching that make it such a difficult form of professional practice. He then examines key elements in the nature of teaching that make the process of becoming a teacher seem so uncomplicated. Among the factors Labaree highlights as making teaching such a difficult practice is the fact that students must be willing to learn what the teacher is teaching, and students are only present in the classroom because they are compelled to be there. Teaching, unlike other professions, also requires teachers to actually manage an emotional relationship with students but there is no guidebook for how to accomplish this. “Like other practioners in the professions of human improvement, teachers have to work things out on their own, without being able to fall back on standards of acceptable professional practice such as those that guide lawyers, doctors, and accountants.” Then there is the problem of chronic uncertainty about the effectiveness of teaching. “The technology of teaching,” Labaree writes, “is anything but certain, and teachers must learn to live with chronic uncertainty as an essential component at their professional practice.” Despite the difficulties inherent in teaching, the profession is generally seen to be relatively easy even among teacher candidates. The reasons are many. Labaree cites such factors as the apprenticeship of observation, which means that prospective teachers have spent a great deal of time as students observing teachers ply their trade. “Their apprenticeship of observation shows them a lot about what teachers do but almost nothing about why they do it.” Another factor is the perception that the substantive skills and knowledge that teachers possess are thoroughly ordinary. An additional factor is that a good teacher is in the business of making himself or herself unnecessary, “of empowering learners to learn without the teacher’s help.”  That is very different, Labaree writes, from lawyers or doctors, who guard or ‘mystify’ their knowledge. For Labaree, all these factors help explain why teaching and learning to teach look easy. “Teachers and teacher educators put themselves in positions that diminish their own status and power in order to enhance the capacity and independence of their students.  This distinctive mode of professional practice helps explain much of the disdain that both professions must endure, but at the same time this quixotic selflessness also endows teachers and teacher educators with just a hint of frayed nobility.”

For More Information

Labaree, D. F. (2000). On the nature of teaching and teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 3(51), 228-231.

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