Angela Cozart is a teacher of teachers. Since 1998, she has been helping prepare tomorrow's classroom leaders at the College. Cozart, an associate professor of teacher education, took a few minutes from her busy class schedule to share her thoughts about education, magic bullets and buttercream frosting.
What advice do you give those students interested in teaching? Loving children is important, but it's not enough. We must have a solid foundation in our content areas and know how to teach that content. We must also understand the impact of culture, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status upon learning and teaching. Teaching is not just standing in front of a class and delivering information.
You have studied educational pedagogy around the world. What countries are most innovative in their approaches? From my experience, the U.S. is the most innovative. When we went to China, they very much wanted us to teach in the "American" style. They wanted interaction, collaborative work, graphic organizers, critical thinking, etc. Strategies that we have been using here for decades were considered innovative there.
If you had the power to fix education, how would you do it? My answer has two parts, but both parts have to do with perception.
First, I would change the perception society has of teachers. The vast majority of teachers are worthy of our highest respect. Who else in society would lock themselves up in a room for seven hours a day with 20-30 children, all from different backgrounds? At the end of the day, teachers open those doors and our children come out - in one piece - with added knowledge about history, mathematics, languages, science, etc.
Second, I would make every politician have to teach two weeks at a school. Politicians would come to understand what schools are really like. They would think twice about budget cuts and the legislative pedagogical decisions they make. Yes, they would have to eat the school breakfast and lunch, do bus duty, administer standardized tests and grade homework. At the end of the two weeks, students would be assessed to see if they actually learned anything during that time. If they fail their test, the politician would give back his/her two weeks' salary (the large one earned as a politician, not the small substitute teacher pay) to the school.
Of course, I'm attempting some humor here - there are no magic bullets, but I do wish that those who make pedagogical decisions had a better background in education. I wish they knew more about working with children in poverty, human growth and development, children with disabilities, working with limited supplies and teaching with technology.
What's your comfort food? Cake with buttercream frosting. Well, really, the cake is just an excuse to get to the buttercream frosting. If I had my way, cakes would be 1 inch tall and have about 5 inches of buttercream on top! 