Overview
Letter from the Director
Dear Future Teacher,
The Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College recognizes what many studies have demonstrated: that the classroom teacher plays the most influential role in student learning in our schools. Important changes in public education will not be effected through state mandates in the form of high-stakes standardized tests. Success on tests is only one measure of a complex set of skills and knowledge that a graduating high school student should possess. Too often, students leave the public schools with diminished expectations about what education has to offer or a limited view of their own intellectual capacities. Our schools will change only through the critically directed efforts of teachers working within the system.
In the MAT Program, you will pursue rigorous graduate-level study, both within an academic discipline and in the field of education. As a student teacher, you will work in public classrooms alongside mentor teachers who are committed to realizing the best hopes of our schools. This partnership with public school teachers means that you will be helping, as a teacher and researcher, to answer urgent questions about the classroom. The questions are wide-ranging: What does it mean to think historically rather than just covering the “facts” of a designated curriculum? How do we help students think about mathematics as a way of understanding the world rather than as a set of problems to be solved by plugging values into appropriate algorithms? Why aren't all the students in a classroom involved in the provocative inquiry that is implicit in the study of biology or literature? How do we move students from simple ideas to complex analysis? What can we do to connect classroom learning to meaningful issues in the lives of students within the larger community? How can we engage reluctant students in the active construction of knowledge? How do we create situations that allow all students to move toward competence and mastery? Some of these questions are researchable, while others demand that we think differently about teaching and learning, creating new implementable designs for learning.
A successful teacher is not only knowledgeable in the practices of a discipline, but is also observant, reflective, analytical, and resourceful in the contexts of classroom practice. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has recently suggested that teaching is a “clinical profession.” Effective teachers must understand their academic field, recognize the needs of a range of individual students, and be capable of structuring environments and experiences that maximize learning. Bard College has a national reputation as a liberal arts college that emphasizes the best kinds of teaching. The MAT Program reflects this reputation: it fosters scholarship, intelligence, and creativity, qualities that are the hallmark of fine teachers.
In the MAT Program, we integrate theory and practice, study and application, through an active collaboration between the MAT faculty, public school teachers, and you, the MAT student. The emphasis, of course, is on what we, together, can do for the millions of students in the public schools. If this is your concern, if you see yourself as a teacher and a leader, then please join us in changing education.
Sincerely,
Ric Campbell, Director
The Master of Arts in Teaching Program
Bard College
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