Earlier this month, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation provided formal comments to the U.S. Department of Education about proposed changes to federal teacher preparation rules. Several Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows added their voices to the thousands of public comments that were submitted. WW Perspectives offers a sampling of some of those submissions in a series of posts. This is the second post in the series; other responses can be found here.

From Catherine Frazee, 2010 WW Teaching Fellow (Indiana):

What are we preparing teachers for—to teach according to the traditional and failed system in place run by administrators who dig in their heels to keep this failed system in place, so that we can then blame the teachers for failing to teach in a failed system? I recommend we ask a different question, one that rethinks not so much what we want students to learn, but why and how we want them to learn it. Maybe we should start by answering the question, “What is learning?”