What is the value of combining theory and practice?
Students find that the combination of practice and course work at the same time is very important. It’s hard to learn theoretical ideas in isolation, try to remember them for two years until you get to student teaching, and then all of sudden be put in a situation where you’re supposed to implement something you’ve never seen in practice. That doesn’t work. That’s the old model of teacher education. Now what you see are models that really put the two together and have a strong relationship between the university and the school so that the kind of practice that’s very student-centered, that really takes into account how students learn and how different students learn differently, is something that can be worked on while you’re also learning about the many knowledge bases that have to come together to produce that.
