Teaching Like That

The Beginnings of Teacher Education at Bank Street

Author: Jaime G.A. Grinberg Series: Counterpoints

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Description

This book provides the history of the first years of The Cooperative School for Student Teachers - now known as Bank Street College of Education - a progressive teacher education program. Jaime G. A. Grinberg uses a broad range of documents, including oral histories, to understand and explain the beginnings of this program during the 1930s in New York. The Bank Street program, created and directed mostly by women, was an innovative, alternative, and inspiring case of teacher preparation. Providing detailed descriptions of classes taught by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Teaching Like That highlights the curriculum for teacher preparation, progressive concepts of teaching and learning, and institutional characteristics. Courses in teacher education, the history of education, women studies, and curriculum and teaching will find a great source of information in this book.

Critic Reviews

“Jaime G. A. Grinberg's book provides rich insight into this model institution during its formative stage in the 1930s. Those of us in education schools like to pledge allegiance to the creed of pedagogical progressivism, but the staff of Bank Street in its early days zealously applied these ideas to the practice of teacher preparation, revealing just how rarely our own programs actually do so. (David Labaree, Professor of History of Education, Stanford University, and Vice President, History of Education Division, American Educational Research Association) Jaime G. A. Grinberg's book is a valuable and long-overdue case study of how cultural, political, and professional forces were negotiated in the early years of Bank Street. Thorough documentation supports his thesis that its initial independence from certain political and bureaucratic forces (being neither a credentialed nor a credentialing institution) allowed Bank Street to pursue a relatively free and open inquiry into teacher education, to develop pedagogical practices informed by that inquiry, and ultimately to construct a distinctive conception of teacher education. Such detailed historical and sociological studies of classrooms, schools and colleges of education that illuminate connections among school experience, gender, social class, and community issues are scarce in the literature. Grinberg's discoveries have important implications for contemporary educational administration, educational policy, and teacher education, particularly within the progressive tradition. (Maughn Gregory, Director, Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, and Associate Professor of Educational Foundations, Montclair State University)”

About the Author

The Author: Jaime G. A. Grinberg is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Faculty Advisor to the New Jersey Network for Educational Renewal at Montclair State University. He received his Ph.D. in curriculum, teaching, and educational policy from Michigan State University. He is the author of numerous book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries, and he has also published in Spanish. He has taught and lectured in the United States, Argentina, Mexico, and Israel.