he roots of teacher preparation and education run 150 years deep at Duke--deeper than the name, deeper almost than the school itself. In 1851, Union Institute was re-incorporated as Normal College, and the school began awarding degrees for teaching in the public schools. Normal, under the leadership of Braxton Craven, was one of the first chartered institutions in the country for teacher preparation and became renowned as one of the outstanding teacher-training colleges in the South.

In 1859, Normal College became Trinity College, continuing its tradition of teacher preparation. When Trinity became Duke University in 1924, the Indenture of Trust by which James B. Duke established his vision of the new university placed teacher training among the school's primary missions: "I advise that the courses at this institution be arranged first with special reference to the training of preachers, teachers, lawyers, and physicians, because these are most in the public eye, and by precept and example can do most to uplift mankind."

During the nearly eighty years since that charter, the status of education at Duke and on the national stage has gone through several permutations. The Department of Education existed for decades; in the 1960s, it began to offer a Master's of Arts in Teaching degree. In 1982, during a period of "retrenchment," the department became instead the Program in Education and the M.A.T. languished until 1989, when it was resurrected as a program of the Graduate School.

The directors of those two programs, David M. Malone Ph.D. '84 of the Program in Education, which prepares undergraduates for teaching at the primary and secondary levels, and Rosemary Thorne of the M.A.T. program, which prepares teachers for secondary education, spent several hours discussing education in its various forms, from teacher preparation at Duke to teacher induction in the public schools, and many issues that face educators today. And finally, they revealed a new direction for education at Duke.

150 Years of Teacher Preparation

How committed is Duke to the idea of teaching teachers to teach?

MALONE: That sentence in the indenture says a purpose of the university is preparing teachers.

THORNE: And that will always be a part of Duke. There will always be discussions of how Duke ought to go about that, and how much emphasis Duke will place on that. I don't see a resurrection of a huge department of education ever at Duke.

MALONE: Nor a need for one.

There's a wonderful group of Duke faculty who, during their time at Duke, have been extremely supportive and insistent that Duke stay involved in teaching. They helped keep teacher preparation alive at a time when it might have been thought that Duke really didn't need to devote resources to it.

How close did Duke come to that point of not devoting resources to teacher education?

THORNE: There was a time, not that many years ago, where there was some thought that the university would quit preparing teachers at the undergraduate level. But I don't think at any time during the past 150 years has there been any thought of Duke getting out of the business of preparing teachers altogether.

MALONE: Right. It was more a matter of what degree of resources are going to be allocated. That's not true just at Duke--that's true at a lot of places. If you look at UNC at Chapel Hill, right now they have no undergraduate secondary teaching program.

THORNE: They've moved to all-M.A.T.

MALONE: In some ways, Duke was in sync with some national trends.

MALONE: One of the things that's been missing for the last fifteen or twenty years or so is that the program in education hasn't been as well integrated with the research and scholarly mission and academic mission of Arts and Sciences as it needs to be.

THORNE: But that's changing.

So the programs are smaller--they're not a "School of Education" or even a department--but, qualitatively, where do you stand?

MALONE: We're producing students who we think are going to be excellent teachers, and have proven to be excellent teachers.

THORNE: I don't want to take anything away from any graduate from Duke's former Department of Education, but we've never produced better teachers than we're producing now.

Teaching Teachers to Teach

Teaching is so much more than standing in front of a classroom and lecturing. What do teachers-to-be have to learn?

MALONE: When we think about how we design a curriculum to teach students to become teachers, we start with awarenesses the students might not have, understandings they might not have. Not only about how children learn, but their own private theories about what teaching is. Both of us have probably spent an awful lot of time in our programs trying to get at these presuppositions that Duke students have about teaching and learning and growing up and developing. A liberal-arts education does a lot to kind of expose all those theories, misconceptions, and assumptions that students make about teaching.For instance, when they use terms like "covering the material." When we're talking about what a good teacher does, they'll say, "Well, she certainly covers all the material that's part of the course." I like to propose the difference between "covering" and "discovering." The idea of good teaching isn't about covering the material, it's about helping students to discover it. In order for them to be great teachers, they're going to have to do a whole lot more than cover the material.

THORNE: Teachers are responsible for student learning, not just responsible for delivering the information.

MALONE: Let me throw something out on that, Ro. I remember one time visiting a classroom, and I asked the teacher how things were going. She said that things had been going slowly and she was a little bit behind, but now they were going better because there had been a good number of students absent because of the flu, and the fact that they were absent enabled her to catch up in terms of the amount of material that she could cover because there were fewer people there, fewer questions, fewer interruptions.

THORNE: There's a whole lot that you have to have to be a good teacher, a whole litany of knowledge you have to have. But you also have to have a connection with your students.

MALONE: One of the questions I'll try to reflect back to almost anybody I see who comes and asks me about being a teacher: Have they had any good teachers themselves? I know the answer is going to be yes, that they've had personal experience with the impact that a good teacher can have, and in some ways they want to have that same impact as a teacher themselves.

THORNE: In my graduation speech every year, I tell my class that society will never reward teachers in the way that they should be rewarded, either with respect or with monetary reward. But then I tell them, and I firmly believe this, that there is no more important calling. That a teacher has more power to end human suffering than does a doctor, to lift the human spirit than does a minister, and to change civil rights, to change our public discourse, than does a politician or an attorney. Teachers are much more powerful in what they do every day than any of those persons. And there truly is no more important profession.