Home page » John I. Goodlad (1921– )

Published: 28-06-2011, 04:26

John I. Goodlad (1921– ) - American Education

Educator / founder and longtime director of the Center for Educational Renewal, a major force for educational reform in the United States during the last two decades of the 20th century. Based at the University of Washington’s College of Education in Seattle, the center was founded in 1985 to implement Goodlad’s premise that reform of U.S. public schools hinged on reform of teacher education.
“We have treated teacher education shabbily for 150 years,” said the Canadian-born Goodlad, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where his mentors and colleagues included such pioneers in education as Benjamin Bloom and MORTIMER ADLER. The author of the monumental and highly acclaimed study of American schools A Place Called School (1984), Goodlad contended that American society viewed teachers “more as baby-sitters than as pedagogical experts.” The study, which took eight years and was based on more than 27,000 interviews, was considered the most comprehensive examination of American public schools ever made.
Assisted by 43 researchers, Goodlad found a “gap between the rhetoric of individual flexibility and creativity” in American educational goals and “the cultivation of these in our schools. . . .” He determined that American schools and classrooms actually “condition them [students] in precisely opposite behaviors—seeking ‘right’ answers, conforming, and reproducing the known. . . .” Goodlad proposed several reforms, including smaller schools, with no more than 300 students and a dozen teachers. Where small schools were impractical, he called for division of large schools into “houses” of 100 elementary pupils or 160 high school students. He called for children’s primary education to begin one month after their fourth birthday and for secondary education to end at 16—an age range he described as a “very stable period.”
He condemned ability grouping and the “prevailing wisdom that mixed classes sink to the lowest common denominator. What we found was the mixed classes were more like the high track than the low track in terms of content, teaching practices, student enthusiasm and teacher expectations.” He urged high schools to require all students, even those in vocational education, to take a core curriculum in the humanities and sciences, and he recommended that schools adopt TEAM TEACHING as a standard approach to education.
Goodlad’s study was published just as the U.S. Department of Education was releasing a shocking study entitled A Nation At Risk, in which the NATIONAL COMMISSION ON EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION had concluded, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Goodlad’s study went beyond a mere confirmation of the commission’s findings. It proposed a program of remediation that, along with proposals from a study entitled High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, became the core of a nationwide educational reform movement that continues to this day.
A teacher at every grade level from first grade through advanced graduate work, Goodlad served as professor of education and dean of the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, before founding the Center for Educational Renewal in 1985. Author of 20 books and more than 200 articles in journals and encyclopedias, Goodlad proposed reforming teacher education in much the way medical school education was reformed early in the 20th century, by moving it from the university campus into teaching hospitals that meshed theory and practice. Outlined in his book Teachers for Our Nation’s Schools (1990), Goodlad proposed establishing “centers of pedagogy” for teacher education. Such centers would use carefully selected practice schools, operated jointly by the school of education and the school district, to train future teachers, to develop teaching innovations and to study learning processes. Goodlad laid out 19 postulates as essential for first-rate programs. After completing a prescribed preeducation curriculum, comparable to premedical education, prospective teachers would enter a three-year teacher-education program, culminating with a year of semester-long internships in two practice schools.
Within five years of its founding, Goodlad’s Center for Educational Renewal had grown into a major force for education reform in the United States, having received applications from 260 teacher- training institutions—about one-fifth of all those that prepare teachers—to become pilot “centers of pedagogy” along the lines he prescribed. Almost every state was considering Goodlad-suggested reforms in state university–based teacher training programs, most of which had remained relatively unchanged since the 19th century. (See also education reform.)
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