In regard to #2:
Yes, they should. However, a number of schools more or less require them to take one course on teaching-often housed inside their own department, rather than in collaboration with the teacher colleges.
If you’re talking about graduate training, I can agree in part. I’ll be honest; I don’t know how much Bloom’s Taxonomy-ish stuff I could take. I don’t know
at all about grad students in virtually every department taking multiple education classes.
When I was a grad student TA (back when pterodactyls flew the skies), we had to take a two-semester departmental class our first year during which we learned to calibrate grades and deal with various pedagogical and behavioral issues that came up, and that was really enough. You’ve got to get out there and do it to learn.
While every program has an abundance of courses prospective professors must take, and time is a costly premium, I would like to think that this continues to privilege research rather than pedagogy. That's something I can understand. I mostly prefer a gifted scholar then moving toward teaching, rather than the other way around. The consequence of this, however, is that they will continue to be weak in teaching, unless otherwise incentivized to grow as a pedagogue.
Regents and legislatures just love to hear about teaching excellence awards, but the truth remains that research and publishing--gaining the attention and respect of one's peers and securing funding--remains the priority. Some institutions, BTW, do strongly encourage their faculty, and especially their Nobel and NSA and Fullbright winners, to teach an intro course just to keep their hand in, and I think this is very wise.
I'll take another example to kind of make my point. In the teacher education programs, there's a set course load prospective teachers take. Out of all the pedagogy (including theory) these pupils receive, they will typically be only required to take one course on students with disabilities. Given that at least 10% of the student body have disabilities of some sort, and in each of their classrooms there will be a few under this demographic, they only get one course.
So this would have to be a damn good course, right? Well not really. They typically are a poor man's version of an Abnormal Psych course, without the benefits of a psychology-oriented professor. That means you might get to know about disability diagnosis categories (even though it's in the book, they aren't particularly worried "that you get it"), but they aren't going to help you figure out what are some damn good orientations and strategies for teaching students with different needs. So you kind of get a lackluster orientation toward a sub field of psychology and you don't get any practical employment of what may or may not have been discussed in class.
But you’re forgetting all the in-house training and webinars and conferences and newsletters in which accommodations and classroom management and etc. are addressed. And colleges and universities have disability offices that serve to meet special needs and issue written accommodations which professors must sign.
Granted, much of a teacher program's internal course loads consist of poor derivatives that can be found elsewhere (including teacher technology courses), but that's for another time.
So what happens is that these new (or even master's students) teachers end up having little to no clue how to actually prepare themselves for a classroom environment that *will* happen in every year they teach.
So what do we expect will happen when they are in the classrooms teaching? You guessed it. "Over their heads."
Again, the only way to learn how to do it is, in my opinion, to do it.
If we are to revitalize higher education's act of teaching and mentoring young (and old) minds for their future, we need to give more thought to preparing them to do so.
But right now, we are rightly concerned about their work as scholars. That realm has much need for reform as well, but it is often a (or the) central component to their jobs. Achieving balance will need to be thought out in the (likely) decades ahead.
For some scholars teaching is an onerous responsibility simply because it's a drain on their time (depending, of course, on the field and whether the prof has grad-student graders). They aren't going to achieve tenure through teaching. These days those who are interested in improving their classroom performance do have many opportunities to do so and gain professional development credits for doing so. (I'd like to say something here about the continual technology training, but you're right; this is a topic for another thread.)
