Paper Calls for Focus on High School Teachers

If high school students are to master the skills and knowledge they need to do well in college or good jobs, their teachers need to be up to the task. And that will require revamping teacher-training programs, according to a paper released last week.

In a brief called “Teaching for a New World,” the Alliance for Excellent Education calls on colleges of education to step up their training in adolescent literacy to ensure that all teacher-candidates are well versed not only in the subjects they intend to teach, but also in the reading-comprehension and writing strategies necessary for those subjects.

The alliance, a Washington-based group that focuses on improving high schools, also urges teacher-training programs to do better at producing teachers who have both deep knowledge of the content they teach and mastery of the best pedagogical approaches to teaching that material. That instructional challenge is colored by the age...