A. President of the United States
B. Brain surgeon who operates on your cerebral tumor
C. Civil engineer who designs the bridge you drive across every day
D. Defense attorney when you are charged with a crime you didn't commit
E. Education professor who teaches teachers how to teach.
See what I mean?
It's not easy for a busy teacher to keep up to date on new developments in educational philosophy or teaching methods. Many teachers rely on the same methods that worked for them when they were in school ten or twenty years before, or the methods that worked for their education professors when the professors were in school thirty or forty years before. Of course those methods worked for them. These were children who decided they wanted to be teachers when they grew up.
It's not easy for a busy teacher to keep up to date on new developments in educational philosophy or teaching methods. Many teachers rely on the same methods that worked for them when they were in school ten or twenty years before, or the methods that worked for their education professors when the professors were in school thirty or forty years before. Of course those methods worked for them. These were children who decided they wanted to be teachers when they grew up.
Teachers don't have much opportunity to get together to talk and learn from each other about best practices. When I taught, I naively thought we would have such exchanges of ideas at faculty meetings, but I soon learned that those were mostly when the principal droned on and on about attendance statistics and teachers tried to sit in the back and catch up on their own paperwork. Too many teachers see each other as competition, and if they have reputations for being better than their coworkers, they may not want to share their secrets of success. So-so teachers rarely have the chance to leave their own classrooms to visit model teachers' classrooms, because they're busy all day, and arranging for a substitute to come in and relieve them for an hour has its own share of headaches. Principals have too many pressing demands on their time to spend more than a few minutes in any teacher's room every year evaluating that teacher's professional skills, and few districts now have the funds for professional development support staff. Students, especially by the time they reach ninth or tenth grade, probably have a better understanding of what a good teacher does than any new teacher. Parents, if they have friends and family who have also raised children, might well get more useful feedback on what they're doing wrong or how to be more effective than a teacher gets.
Of course none of this should be taken to mean that teachers don't know anything. Teachers don't know everything, as we may expect they should, but they know a lot. One thing teachers need to study at every university I know about is developmental or cognitive psychology. There are a number of different theories of psychology, usually at odds with each other, that help teachers understand how the brain works, how it develops, how children learn, what their needs are at any given age, and what happens when their needs aren't met. A good university lets its education students explore and discuss all of these theories. Because teachers learn about universal human needs, they can make judgments that go beyond "What my cousin Danny had trouble with." Teacher know better than to ask seven-year-olds to live up to the same expectations they have of seventeen-year-olds, even if they might not all know better than to ask seventeen-year-olds to live up to the expectations of seven-year-olds.
Here is some information about one theory of developmental psychology.
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