Teaching is the purposeful imparting of information or skills or both to another individual or to a group. Whereas an individual can learn without a teacher, a person cannot teach without a student. There is some debate as to whether teaching also implies learning. Does a student have to learn for teaching to have taken place? Historically, teaching has not been defined in this restrictive manner; the teacher was thought to be responsible for the quantity and quality of material covered and the way in which it was presented. Students have been held responsible for learning. Recent accountability movements, however, have placed a larger measure of the responsibility for student learning on the teacher. Some definitions of teaching now imply that students must learn in order for teaching to have taken place.

The concept of teaching can be greatly broadened to include computers, textbooks, or educational television. Generally speaking, however, the word teacher refers to human beings, whether they be parents, scout leaders, or classroom teachers. The teacher may use various technologies as aids in instruction, but it is nonetheless the human teacher who makes the decisions concerning the content and the means by which instruction is delivered.

The range of classroom teachers is broad, indeed. There are preschool teachers, elementary, secondary, and higher education teachers, as well as teachers in industry and teachers of teachers. Teaching can impart information about how to ride a bike, how to fill in an employment form, or how to interpret a passage from Shakespeare. The number of individuals involved in teaching far exceeds that in any other profession.

There are several essential requirements for teachers, whatever they are teaching: they must know the material they are to teach, they must be able to organize and articulate the material in a manner understandable to the student, and they must manage the students in order to maintain student attention on the learning task.

This article will focus on teaching as a human endeavor. Specifically, it will concentrate on the career and conditions of, preparation for, and practice of teaching.

CAREER CONDITIONS AND TEACHER EDUCATION

Complaints about the quality of teaching are not new, but they became especially loud in the late 1970s and during the 1980s. Many and consistently negative comments have been documented concerning U.S. teacher effectiveness and instructional methods during the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. Both urban and rural areas complained about the lack of effectiveness and commitment of teachers, although the rural districts had greater trouble than urban areas in retaining their teaching force. While teachers are now staying in the profession for longer periods than ever before, complaints about their quality persist. "Never before in the nation's history has the caliber of those entering the teaching profession been as low as it is today," wrote Emily Feistritzer in a major Carnegie Foundation report in 1983 on the conditions of teaching.

Two types of solutions aimed at improving the quality of teaching have dominated 19th- and 20th-century policy discussions. One concerns improving the conditions of teaching; the second, lengthening and improving the quality of teacher education.

Poor Conditions.

While many articles decry the conditions of teaching today, in most parts of the world teaching has not traditionally been an occupation that receives adequate support. Salaries are low: in the United States, for example, beginning salaries of teachers, adjusted for 12 months, are lower than those for any other field requiring a bachelor's degree, and they top out sooner and at a lower level than other college-degree-level occupations. Classrooms are often crowded, materials and supplies outdated or nonexistent, and in certain schools and locales teachers are threatened with physical violence. Public esteem for teachers and schools is low, at least as it is reported in the media and various public surveys--although parents of children in school are happier with the schools than is the general public.

With few exceptions around the world (Japan being one), teaching has for some time been a female occupation. Some writers, including the pioneer U.S. feminist Susan B. Anthony, have suggested that the lower-than-deserved status and salaries of teachers are additional instances of discrimination against women. Teaching, consequently, was not an occupation that one stayed in year after year. Some women quit to get married and have children, and other teachers left teaching to pursue more lucrative occupations. At the present time, school districts are having especial difficulty attracting and retaining math and science teachers because the salaries in related occupations, such as computer programming, are luring prospective and practicing teachers away from education.

General U.S. teacher shortages were highlighted in 1985, when New York City and Georgia and other states recruited abroad for teachers, and Miami searched the northern states. It was estimated that 1.3 million new teachers would be needed in the United States by 1990. At the same time, some observers saw American teachers on the threshold of catching up on pay. New Jersey in 1985 became the first state to adopt a state-wide minimum for teachers' salaries.

Associations of and for Teachers.

The low salaries and poor conditions of teaching created the ideal atmosphere for the formation of teachers' associations designed to provide a unified voice for the establishment and protection of employment rights for teachers, and to improve salaries and other conditions. In almost every country of the world, there is at least one dues-collecting teacher organization to which members belong, voluntarily or not.

Two rival organizations sprang up in the United States. The earlier one (1857), the \TNational Education Association\t (NEA), is a loosely organized group of local, state, and national organizations that includes both administrators and teachers in its membership. Many teachers viewed the involvement of both teachers and administrators in the NEA as conflict of interest; administrators who make decisions about teachers' salaries might not be willing to work for increased teachers' salaries. The \TAmerican Federation of Teachers\t (AFT), a teacher-only labor union formed in 1916, fought for the right to create bargaining units in school districts. The AFT unabashedly works to obtain higher teacher salaries and better conditions for teachers; it has called strikes. As administrators began forming their own associations (such as the American Association of School Administrators) and as teachers began to dominate the organizations, the NEA moved closer to the AFT in demanding higher salaries and better treatment of teachers in such matters as evaluations and tolerating strikes.

Numerous education associations in the United States lobby for their members' rights and best interests. Teacher educators, for example, have theirs--the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the Association of Teacher Educators; vocational educators have several, as do speech and hearing therapists, teachers of mathematics, and school volunteers. College professors have the \TAmerican Association of University Professors\t. At times, these organizations press for policies that are not in the best interest of the AFT and NEA memberships. Due to the large membership of the NEA and AFT, however, they are probably the most powerful of all education organizations. Recently, they both have become more involved in supporting politicians whose philosophies match their own.

Teacher Preparation.

During the 19th century few state or local regulations existed concerning the education-level prerequisite to becoming a teacher. Often, when a student finished a grade level, she or he turned around and taught it the next year. Few teacher training institutions existed, and those which did were often associated with and at the level of secondary schools. From 1900 on, during the period of such influential theorists as John \TDewey\t and Edward L. \TThorndike\t, teacher education was steadily lengthened and improved to the point that four-year, degree-granting programs, specializing in teaching, were established. These normal schools were initially designed for prospective secondary rather than elementary teachers; in the United States, as around the world, requirements for secondary teaching have, until recently, exceeded those of elementary teaching. In the United States, state legislation began to mandate the educational requirements for becoming a teacher. In 1946, 20 states mandated a bachelor's degree for elementary teaching; by the 1970s, all states required the degree. By the mid-1980s, about half of all U.S. teachers held degrees beyond the bachelor's.

Most teacher-preparation programs consist of subject matter and general liberal arts courses, as well as specialized pedagogical courses. In some places, a student is expected to earn a B.A. degree before entering the teacher education program. More generally, however, the prospective teacher receives a B.A. in teaching. There is an inherent tension between the academic and pedagogical requirements. Some recent reform proposals, for example, suggest that teachers should take more subject-matter courses and skip the pedagogical courses. Others argue that prospective teachers should spend more time in practical application experiences before entering the profession.

Nonetheless, the pedagogical programs, broadly speaking, are remarkably similar around the world. Methods courses prepare students to teach specific subject matter areas; courses in teaching and learning specialize in generic teaching skills and \Tlearning theory\t and assessment theory; foundations courses prepare students for the intellectual, social, and cultural settings in which schooling has been and is taking place, and practice teaching provides students with supervised teaching experiences in classrooms.

In the United States approximately 40% of a prospective secondary school teacher's college preparation is devoted to general liberal arts education, 40% to the specific subject matter area she or he is going to teach, and 20% in professional studies. The figures for elementary education are: 40% general liberal arts, 15% in other liberal arts, and 45% in professional studies.

In most countries the national government controls the accreditation of the teacher-education institutions and the certification of the graduates. In the United States all the states control the certification of the graduates, but not all control accreditation. Instead, there is an independent, nongovernmental national association that provides accreditation to those institutions which apply and pass the review. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) cannot require an institution to submit itself to a review, but its member institutions graduate 87% of school personnel.

Recent concern with the quality of U.S. teacher education has spawned a number of reform suggestions. One harks back to the notion of a fifth or sixth year, or a master's degree in teacher education, in which students would enter the teacher education program only after receiving a bachelor's degree. Another is the notion of continuing supervisory support for teachers into the first several years of teaching, variously called internship or beginning teacher programs.

Changes in teacher education around the world precede, mirror, or follow the patterns within the United States. The patterns, however, are similar. For example, a committee report in 1897 in England called for teacher preparation for secondary school teachers to follow the receipt of a bachelor's degree. This reform was considered and much later implemented in California. In many places in the world, secondary school teachers are still receiving much more education than elementary. For example, in some countries in Africa, elementary school teachers require only one or two years of additional training following their own elementary education.

TEACHING METHODS AND AIDS

Teaching is a highly complex occupation. It has been described in terms of very different types of roles. For example, teachers are executives, supervising students and planning programs within the workplace. Teachers manage time, material, knowledge, and students. They are expert communicators with their students as well as with parents and other adults within the school, and they are decision makers, making numerous decisions in one class period, often simultaneously and "on their feet." They also have a series of lesser roles such as lunchroom and school-bus monitors and as file clerks.

In their basic role as instructors, teachers have a number of methods for involving their students in the content of the curriculum. The most popular, by far, is the lecture technique. Excluding lab periods, approximately 90% of college teaching is lecture technique. The figure is somewhat lower at the secondary level, and lower still in primary-school classrooms. Secondary teachers also rely extensively on seatwork, during which students work at their desks on an assignment, and teachers circulate to answer questions or sit at their own desks and correct the seatwork. Many teachers in secondary and sometimes postsecondary classes use discussion sessions to stimulate their students' interest, and to assess their grasp of the material. Discussion sessions go beyond the usual question-and-answer sequences that accompany lectures, because they are meant to help students extend their knowledge through higher-level thinking.

Grouping of students within the classroom occurs primarily at the elementary level. This organizational arrangement places students together in two or more groups in the classroom to improve the learning conditions for those students. For example, most early elementary reading teachers place their students in two to three groups. Grouping in reading places students of the same achievement level together to enable the teacher to more easily work with them. Grouping, however, is becoming more popular in other subjects, and for other purposes. Cooperative learning groups, for example, place students of different abilities in the same group, and the students within that group tutor each other on assignments. These programs have been shown to be effective in raising students' achievement as well as improving their social skills and attitudes toward one another.

Another method that is increasing in popularity is the use of simulations, particularly for adults learning different types of skills. Simulations attempt to create conditions as close to the real situation in which the individual will be performing the skill as possible. For example, some teacher-education programs include sequences in which one student will teach a lesson to his or her fellow students who are posing as elementary or secondary students. Airline pilots log many hours on flight simulators, and driver-education courses are beginning to involve simulation computer work. Simulations are not effective for general education, because the setting in which the skill or information will be used is not known.

Until recently the use of technology in teaching has been minimal, indeed. Technological aids include the textbook, chalkboard, wall posters, and material for specialized courses such as science equipment for labs and sewing machines for domestic science courses. The overhead projector, an example of an audiovisual teaching aid, has increased somewhat in popularity, but it is not a standard item in most classrooms. Educational technology has not made great inroads into the classroom. Innovations such as educational television and \Tteaching machines\t have often found their way into dusty school closets. (See also \Tprogrammed learning\t.)

One exception appears to be the computer, although it is not yet clear whether school computers will end up in a special room called a computer lab, in the classrooms, or elsewhere. It is certain that computers are in students' homes, and they are finding their way in ever-increasing numbers into the classrooms. Initially, computers were used to provide students with extra practice in subjects such as math. Called computer-assisted-instruction (CAI), these programs appeal to the students and do at least as well as teacher instruction in raising student achievement.

While CAI is still in practice, computers are also being used for other purposes. Teachers and principals use them to maintain information about their students. Computers are used as a tool in helping students learn a skill such as writing, and some computer programs actually teach students a new skill or piece of knowledge. Many of the programs are in the form of games to help motivate students. It is unclear, however, whether the students actually learn skills beyond performing the game, or the degree to which teachers need to be involved in the process to ensure that students learn what was intended.

The major problems with computers in the schools are (1) extensive staff development is required to help teachers learn to use computers; (2) the software has not kept up with the capacity of the machines or the interests of the students. Many programs are simply electronic page-turners. \TVirginia\t \TRichardson\t KOEHLER

Bibliography: Cuban, Larry, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890-1980 (1983); Feistritzer, Emily, The Condition of Teaching: A State by State Analysis (1983); Hopkins, David, and Reid, Ken, eds., Rethinking Teacher Education (1984); Howey, Kenneth, and Gardner, William, eds., The Education of Teachers: A Look Ahead (1982); Lortie, Dan C., The Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (1975); National Educational Association, Prices, Budgets, Salaries and Income (1983); Sarason, Seymour, The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change, 2d ed. (1982); Shulman, Lee, and Sykes, Gary, eds., Handbook of Teaching and Policy (1983); Whitrock, Merle, ed., Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3d ed. (1985).

See also: \Tcurriculum\t; \Teducation\t; PRESCHOOOL \Teducation\t; \Tprimary education\t; \Tsecondary education\t; \TUnited States, education in the\t