Chapter 12 Teaching Is Not a Profession: How General and Special Education Teacher Education Have Failed

Traditionally, preservice teacher education has been conducted in college and university classrooms and has relied heavily on what Shulman (1992) called “the twin demons of lecture and textbook” (p. 1). This educational model neglects the importance and strength of preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching and content (Nietfeld & Enders, 2003; Putnam & Borko, 2000) and has been termed a transmission model in which teaching is telling (McLeskey & Waldron, 2004; Russell, McPherson, & Martin, 2001). The type of knowledge conveyed is considered to be declarative (Sternberg, 1999) or formal (Lundeberg & Scheurman, 1997) and is derived from theory and comprised of facts, concepts, and rules. Whitehead (1929) and more recently Bransford, Brophy, and Williams (2000) reported that this type of knowledge tends to remain inert and is unlikely to be retrieved in the very circumstances that call for its use.