TEACHING

the profession of those who give instruction, expecially in an elementary or secondary school or a university. Members of the teaching profession usually must meet certain basic requirements: the criteria vary from country to country but generally include going through processes of formal education or training, acquiring specialized knowledge in a particular subject area, securing certification or validation as members of the profession, and maintaining standards of performance that are continually redefined and expanded by the profession. Professional responsibilities vary from country to country and according to the age level taught. General areas of responsibility include active, and sometimes conflicting, roles in the school as well as in the community. Parent substitute, confidant, disciplinarian, community leader, and acceptable behaviour model are a few of the roles that teachers are expected to fulfill. Approximately two-thirds of the world's teachers are women, the great majority being employed on the elementary level. Teachers in modern societies are usually protected in their positions after a period of satisfactory service. Once they have achieved tenure, their jobs are guaranteed unless proof of incompetence or moral laxity is established. Of the three groups of teachersdefined by level as elementary, secondary, or universityuniversity teachers continue to enjoy the greatest advantages of all aspects of the profession, including higher salaries; advanced social status; mobility (because of the usual absence of licensing requirements); relative academic freedom in curriculum planning, teaching methods, and choices of textbook and other teaching materials; and membership in exclusive national and international professional organizations. These distinctions are due in large part to the greater measure of required higher education and the selectivity at this level. There are further demands on most of these professionals for continuous research and publication, which may or may not be directly related to their responsibilities as classroom teachers. The teaching profession is a relatively new one; in some societies the occupation has still not attained professional status. Traditionally, parents, elders, religious leaders, and sages were responsible for teaching children how to behave, how to think, and what to believe. Adults shared in common activities with children who gradually acquired the knowledge, myths, and general teaching of their culture. Later, teachers were often those young people who had been successful as students; they learned their craft by observing and practicing the methods of their own teachers. Germany introduced the first formal criteria for the education of teachers in the 18th century, setting examples for other countries and paving the way for the establishment of a real profession. Further development came in the 19th century as society became more industrialized and the concept of schooling became more universal. The amount of preparatory or preservice training required of teachers today varies from country to country and in some cases is still very limited. However, most teachers in developed countries today are university graduates. For prospective elementary and secondary teachers, a program of study usually includes a basic general education with emphasis on a specialized academic, cultural, or vocational course; the study of educational principles; and a series of professional courses combined with practical experience in a typical school setting. Certification requirements reflect the diversities among various countries: England and France, for example, set national standards for teacher certification; whereas, in the United States, Canada, and Australia, requirements are determined by the individual states or provinces. In-service training includes all aspects of continued teacher education such as attending courses, lectures, or seminars, reading newsletters and educational journals, and taking individual programs offered in specific educational institutions. Teachers are often required to show evidence of participation in such in-service programs. In the 20th century, not only was teacher education upgraded but efforts to gain professional recognition increased: teachers began to view themselves as educators and organized in an effort to improve their status, their working conditions, and the overall quality of educational offerings. The early professional associations were organized according to school type or particular subjects. Such groups later coalesced into national organizations, so that today most countries have at least one major association or union to which membership is often obligatory and members usually pay dues. A movement toward international federations of elementary and secondary national associations resulted in the formation of two competing international groups: the World Federation Teachers' Unions represents the national associations from Communist countries, while the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession includes members of national associations from the non-Communist countries. the profession of those who give instruction, especially in an elementary or a secondary school or in a university. Measured in terms of its members, teaching is the world's largest profession. In the late 20th century it was estimated that there were 30,000,000 teachers throughout the world. Though their roles and functions vary from country to country, the variations among teachers are generally greater within a country than they are between countries. Because the nature of the activities that constitute teaching depends more on the age of the persons being taught than on any other one thing, it is useful to recognize three subgroups of teachers: primary-school, or elementary-school, teachers; secondary-school teachers; and university teachers. Elementary-school teachers are, by far, the most numerous worldwide, making up nearly half of all teachers in some developed countries and three-fourths or more in developing countries. Teachers at the university level are the smallest group. The entire teaching corps, wherever its members may be located, shares most of the criteria of a profession, namely (1) a process of formal training, (2) a body of specialized knowledge, (3) a procedure for certifying, or validating, membership in the profession, and (4) a set of standards of performanceintellectual, practical, and ethicalthat is defined and enforced by members of the profession. Teaching young children and even adolescents could hardly have been called a profession anywhere in the world before the 20th century. It was, instead, an art or a craft in which the relatively young and untrained women and men who held most of the teaching positions kept school or heard lessons because they had been better-than-average pupils themselves. They had learned the art solely by observing and imitating their own teachers. Only university professors and possibly a few teachers of elite secondary schools would have merited being called members of a profession in the sense that medical doctors, lawyers, or priests were professionals; in some countries even today primary-school teachers may accurately be described as semiprofessionals. The dividing line is unprecise. It is useful, therefore, to consider the following questions: (1) What is the status of the profession? (2) What kinds of work are done? (3) How is the profession organized? Additional reading General works on teaching include A.M. Carr-Saunders and P.A. Wilson, The Professions (1933, reprinted 1964), a standard work; and Marvin C. Alkin (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Research, 6th ed., 4 vol. (1992), containing summary articles on teachers in the United States under various headings. The Statistical Yearbook, published by UNESCO, includes the latest data on teachers throughout the world. Other useful reference books include Review of Research in Education (annual); Merlin C. Wittrock (ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd ed. (1986); Michael J. Dunkin (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Teaching and Teacher Education (1987); W. Robert Houston (ed.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (1990); and Margaret C. Wang, Maynard C. Reynolds, and Herbert J. Walberg (eds.), Handbook of Special Education, 4 vols. (198791). Journals on teachers and teaching include Teaching and Teacher Education (bimonthly); Educational Researcher (9/yr.); Teaching Education (semiannual); and Journal of Teacher Education (5/yr.). Academe (bimonthly), includes reports on salaries and academic freedom of teachers in higher education.Matters of legal interest to teachers are discussed in Mark G. Yudof, David L. Kirp, and Betsy Levin, Educational Policy and the Law, 3rd ed. (1991); Martha M. McCarthy and Nelda H. Cambron-McCabe, Public School Law, 3rd ed. (1992); E. Edmund Reutter, Jr., The Law of Public Education, 4th ed. (1994); and Stephen R. Goldstein, E. Gordon Gee, and Phillip T.K. Daniel, Law and Public Education: Cases and Materials, 3rd ed. (1995). A different approach is taken by Louis Fischer, David Schimmel, and Cynthia Kelly, Teachers and the Law, 4th ed. (1995). The impact of legislation on educators internationally is covered in Witold Tulasiewicz and Gerald Strowbridge (eds.), Education and the Law (1994). Wayne J. Urban, Why Teachers Organized (1982), details the history of the teacher union movement; and Martin Lawn (ed.), The Politics of Teacher Unionism (1985), deals with the political aspects. Works on the teaching profession are Amitai Etzioni (ed.), The Semi-Professions and Their Organization: Teachers, Nurses, Social Workers (1969); Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (1976); Carnegie Forum On Education And The Economy, Task Force On Teaching As A Profession, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century (1986); and Burton R. Clark (ed.), The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings (1987).Teaching in the United States has been treated historically in such classic works as Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 18761957 (1961); Merle L. Borrowman (ed.), Teacher Education in America: A Documentary History (1965); Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (1935, reprinted 1978), a landmark book describing the ideas of educators who together formed the value base of American educators; Frances R. Donovan, The Schoolma'am (1938, reprinted 1974); Willard S. Elsbree, The American Teacher: Evolution of a Profession in a Democracy (1939, reprinted 1970); Paul H. Mattingly, The Classless Profession: American Schoolmen in the Nineteenth Century (1975); and Nancy Hoffman, Woman's True Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (1981). A good collection of documents from the major historical sources informing Western education may be found in Majorie B. Smiley and John S. Diekhoff, Prologue to Teaching (1959). Resources on the teaching of African-Americans include James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 18601935 (1988); W.E.B. Du Bois, The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 19061960 (1973), ed. by Herbert Aptheker; and Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933, reissued 1992). Margret A. Winzer, The History of Special Education: From Isolation to Integration (1993), details developments in the United States from the 18th century on. Additional histories, most with critical content, are David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 18201980 (1982); Barbara Finkelstein, Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century United States (1989); Donald R. Warren (ed.), American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work (1989); Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms: 18901980, 2nd ed. (1993); and Robert A. Levin, Educating Elementary School Teachers: The Struggle for Coherent Visions, 19091978 (1994).The teacher and teaching in the school context are covered in these fundamental sources: Michael J. Dunkin and Bruce J. Biddle, The Study of Teaching (1974, reissued 1982); Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (1975); and John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School (1984), and Teachers for Our Nation's Schools (1990). The international character of the development of mass schooling is emphasized in John W. Meyer et al., School Knowledge for the Masses (1992). Ann Lieberman (ed.), Building a Professional Culture in Schools (1988); Susan J. Rosenholtz, Teachers' Workplace (1989); and Thomas L. Good and Jere E. Brophy, Looking in Classrooms, 6th ed. (1994), treat the professional and local environment. Teacher knowledge and knowing are discussed in the articles in Elliot Eisner (ed.), Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing (1985); Maynard C. Reynolds (ed.), Knowledge Base for the Beginning Teacher (1989); and Frank B. Murray (ed.), The Teacher Educator's Handbook: Building a Knowledge Base for the Preparation of Teachers (1996). Some early sources on methods of teaching are David P. Page, Theory and Practice of Teaching (1847, reprinted 1969); and Boyd Henry Bode, How We Learn (1940, reissued 1971).Teaching approaches are represented in Freema Elbaz, Teacher Thinking: A Study of Practical Knowledge (1983); William J. Bennett, What Works: Research About Teaching and Learning (1986); Gary D. Fenstermacher and Jonas F. Soltis, Approaches to Teaching, 2nd ed. (1992); and Wilbert J. McKeachie, Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, 9th ed. (1994). Special foci are addressed in Margo Culley and Catherine Portuges (eds.), Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching (1985); Beatriz Chu Clewell, Bernice Taylor Anderson, and Margaret E. Thorpe, Breaking the Barriers: Helping Female and Minority Students Succeed in Mathematics and Science (1992); and James J. Gallagher, Teaching the Gifted Child, 4th ed. (1994). Cooperative learning is the subject of David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson, Learning Together and Alone: Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Learning, 4th ed. (1994); and Shlomo Sharan (ed.), Handbook of Cooperative Learning Methods (1994). Rachel Hertz-Lazarowitz and Norman Miller (eds.), Interaction in Cooperative Groups (1992), seeks understanding of cooperative interactions within school contexts.Additional references on contemporary issues of interest for teaching include Lee S. Shulman and Gary Sykes (eds.), Handbook of Teaching and Policy (1983); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987); Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools (1992); Peter Schwartz and Graham Webb, Case Studies on Teaching in Higher Education (1993); Gillian Klein, Education Towards Race Equality (1993); and Janice Streitmatter, Toward Gender Equity in the Classroom (1994).