I was enrolled in the Concurrent Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Education (Con-Ed) program at Queen's University in the first year of a major overhaul -- for the first time, the experience and background of an applicant would be balanced in importance with academic achievement. It was one of the hardest programs to gain entry to in those days, as only 1 in 8 applications were approved straight out of high school.
Without those changes I would not have been accepted. Period. My marks were decent (an 80.3% average in my OAC courses, just good enough to be named an Ontario Scholar), but hardly outstanding for a Queen's applicant. However, my experience was off the charts in comparison to most people trying to get in, and that was the great equalizer. Had I applied the year before, when marks were the only determinant of entry, I wouldn't have even been given a second look.
What the Con-Ed program administrators had figured out was this: a brilliant mathematician can never clearly explain to a struggling C+ student how to apply complex concepts the scholar understands with little difficulty. In fact (as I found out later, when I had to teach math after I graduated), the student who fought for a B all the way through school is a far better math teacher, because they understand what it means to struggle and have handy tips and tricks to overcome some of the difficulties such students encounter with the subject matter.
In Con-Ed you take education courses throughout undergraduate studies, then spend the final year at teacher's college with a reduced course load. A Con-Ed student also has the opportunity to have supervised practica throughout their first degree program, usually in May. This allows a prospective educator (known as teacher-candidates) the chance to practice what they learn, work in a school environment, and figure out if this profession is really for them. A few of my classmates realized through this process that they were in the wrong field, and they switched programs. This is a good thing for the education system as a whole.
Everybody's an expert on teaching because everyone attended school. There is nothing more irritating as a teacher than dealing with people who think they can do the job better than the obviously inadequate person teaching their future physicist/Olympic athlete/doctor/lawyer/insert-six-figure-earning-career-here. My retort is simple -- if teaching was so easy, then why aren't you doing it yourself?
Oh, right, it's a ridiculously challenging, all-consuming, stressful and under-appreciated profession. It requires empathy, subject matter knowledge, attention to detail, the patience of Job, a good sense of humour, irony, self-control, excellent instincts, the ability to work alone, the ability to work collaboratively, public speaking and facilitation skills, sacrifice and an unrelenting belief in the students they see every day in all manner of mood and temperament.
That's why spending an extra year in school makes absolutely no difference to the quality of education your students will receive. An extra year in university will fatten institutional coffers but will not additionally expand the brains of teacher-candidates. Ultimately, a teacher makes it or not in the crucible of day-to-day work with students. The profession demands of its best practitioners intangible skills that the technocrats in the Ministry of Education and Training will never be able to quantify. One year is quite enough to learn the basics, then be thrown to the wolves.
The idea of two years of teachers' college is not going to improve the quality of our teachers. Attracting quality people to the profession is the only way to deal with that issue. And it's best addressed through modifying admission requirements rather than keeping teacher-candidates in school (and in debt) longer.
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