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Working with Communities to Explore and Personalize Culturally Relevant Pedagogies: Push, Double Images, and Raced Talk
Within this article I describe, with the help of my masters in education (MEd) students who are also my coresearchers, the results of a year-long, cooperative inquiry aimed at exploring and making concrete the ways in which cultural and political knowledge can be explored, understood, and personalized as prospective teachers begin to develop culturally relevant approaches. This work is not intended to describe a model or define a single style, nor do we make any claims that what is described can be linked to improved achievement. What we do attempt to communicate is how a group of prospective teachers, as participants and students of a particular African American community context, begin to develop bicultural competency and personalize cultural and political knowledge in an effort to develop culturally relevant pedagogies.
Do Professional Development Schools Reduce Teacher Attrition?: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study of 1,000 Graduates
This article describes the findings from a study of professional development schools (PDS) and traditional student teaching elementary education graduates between 1996 and 2004. Specifically, the effects of teacher preparation experiences on persistence in elementary education employment were examined. The study involved mining previously collected data on teacher candidates, their entry into teaching on graduation, and their subsequent persistence in teaching. The findings indicate that even when controlling for important student background and cognitive characteristics, education in a PDS appears to significantly foster graduate's entry into and persistence in teaching. The effect sizes, although statistically significant, were small to moderate.
Bridging the University-School Divide: Horizontal Expertise and the “Two-Worlds Pitfall”
Research on teacher learning consistently documents the disjuncture between the practices beginning teachers encounter in university teacher preparation courses and those they reencounter in the K-12 classrooms in which they learn to teach. As preservice teachers enter teaching, they gravitate toward conventional K-12 practices, dismissing those endorsed by the university as impractical. In this article, the authors delineate the concept of horizontal expertise and document how its production and use can address this "two-worlds pitfall." Drawing on the authors' work creating a cross-institutional collaborative, they identify three processes central to the production of horizontal expertise in teacher education: the exchange of tools, the negotiation of social languages, and argumentation. They then trace its use across the university and school settings to show how horizontal expertise can rescript mentoring and expand dialogic practices in the university. The authors conclude by identifying the challenges of developing horizontal expertise in teacher education.
Highly Quantified Teachers: NCLB and Teacher Education
In this article the author looks at the impact NCLB is having on teacher education programs, focusing on three major areas: who is entering teacher preparation programs; the experience they have while they are in those programs; and the experience they have while in the schools as student teachers. The increased focus on testing to determine who can teach (despite a lack of research supporting this policy) is both pushing out and alienating potential teachers whose strengths and interests don't show up on tests, and/or who don't believe that this is the best way to serve the public school students. This emphasis treats teachers like they are incapable of making good decisions based on their knowledge of curricula, kids, and human development. NCLB pressures teacher education programs to violate what they know and believe about teaching and learning, and to perpetuate an unethical system of privilege and inequality.
Ideological Success, Educational Failure?: On the Politics of No Child Left Behind
Most educators in the United States have had to confront the changed reality brought about by the federal reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, commonly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This represents a set of initiatives that can radically transform the federal role in policing and controlling core aspects of education in general and teacher education. Using a number of key volumes that have been written to either criticize or support major components of NCLB, I provide a critical reading of the assumptions behind NCLB and point to a number of its key negative implications for educational policy and practice. In the process, I point to areas where educators might look for more critically democratic alternatives.
Student Engagement in the Teaching and Learning of Grammar: A Case Study of an Early-Career Secondary School English Teacher
This article reports a study of coauthor Laura Wright as she learned to teach secondary school grammar in four settings: university teacher education program, student teaching, her first job, and second job. Data for her university program came from Laura’s journals and projects from her course work. Data from student teaching and her first job included interviews and field notes from observations and interviews and self-reports by Laura of teaching conducted on other occasions. Information from her second job came from self-reports by Laura. The data were analyzed using a system that identified the pedagogical tools Laura employed and the attributions she made for learning how to use them. The data suggest that Laura sought to teach in ways that students found engaging, meaningful, enjoyable, and relevant. How she was able to make grammar instruction fit this goal varied according to the setting in which her instruction took place.
Repositioning Students in Initial Teacher Preparation: A Comparative Descriptive Analysis of Learning to Teach for Social Justice in the United States and in England
Discussions of learning to teach for social justice generally focus on the social commitments, institutional structures, course content, and pedagogical processes that support prospective teachers. Missing from this array of foci is a consideration of how school students are positioned within teacher preparation and how their positioning and participation can inform prospective teachers’ preparation to teach for social justice. In this article, the authors present a comparative descriptive analysis of two projects, one based in the United States and one based in England, that provide opportunities through which prospective secondary teachers are prepared to teach for social justice through direct dialogue with secondary students focused on issues of teaching and learning.
Preparing Teachers to Learn from Teaching
The authors propose a framework for teacher preparation programs that aims to help prospective teachers learn how to teach from studying teaching. The framework is motivated by their interest in defining a set of competencies that provide a deliberate, systematic path to becoming an effective teacher over time. The framework is composed of four skills, rooted in the daily activity of teaching, that when deployed deliberately and systematically, constitute a process of creating and testing hypotheses about cause-effect relationships between teaching and learning during classroom lessons. In spite of the challenges of acquiring these skills, the authors argue that the framework outlines a more realistic and more promising set of beginning teacher competencies than those of traditional programs designed to produce graduates with expert teaching strategies.
Accumulating Knowledge Across Self-Studies in Teacher Education
This article examines the issue of strengthening self-study research in teacher education by consciously situating individual studies within coherent research programs on particular substantive issues. Although acknowledging the positive professional development impact of self-study on teacher educators, this article calls for more closely connecting the self-studies of teacher educators to the mainstream of teacher education research so that the voices of practicing teacher educators are incorporated into syntheses of research on particular aspects of teacher education. The article rejects the dualism of research either contributing to greater theoretical understanding or to the improvement of practice and argues that self-study research should attempt to work on both goals simultaneously.
Navigating Sites for Narrative Inquiry
Narrative inquiry is a methodology that frequently appeals to teachers and teacher educators. However, this appeal and sense of comfort has advantages and disadvantages. Some assume narrative inquiries will be easy to design, live out, and represent in storied formats in journals, dissertations, or books. For the authors, though, narrative inquiry is much more than the telling of stories. There are complexities surrounding all phases of a narrative inquiry and, in this article, the authors pay particular attention to thinking about the design of narrative inquiries that focus on teachers’ and teacher educators’ own practices. They outline three commonplaces and eight design elements for consideration in narrative inquiry. They illustrate these elements using recently completed narrative inquiries. In this way, the authors show the complex dimensions of narrative inquiry, a kind of inquiry that requires particular kinds of wakefulness.
Researching Teacher Education Practices: Responding to the Challenges, Demands, and Expectations of Self-Study
This article explores the nature of self-study of teacher education practices by examining what self-study is and how it might be conducted and reported. In working through these ideas, the article makes an argument for the need for learning through self-study to be documented in ways that might not only be accessible to others but also meaningful for their practice in teaching about teaching. Although the term self-study suggests a singular and individual approach to researching practice, the reality is that self-studies are dramatically strengthened by drawing on alternative perspectives and reframing of situations, thus data, ideas, and input that necessitate moving beyond the self. Moving beyond the self also matters because a central purpose in self-study is uncovering deeper understandings of the relationship between teaching about teaching and learning about teaching. This article argues a need for these deeper understandings to be developed in ways that enhance an articulation of a pedagogy of teacher education.
Searching for the Next Generation of Teacher Educators: Assessing the Success of Academic Searches
In light of a documented shortage of candidates for teacher education faculty positions, this article explores the academic labor market for teacher education faculty using job announcements from the Chronicle of Higher Education and a survey of search chairs to examine the qualifications sought. The authors conclude that the demand for teacher educators is high and the pool of qualified candidates in less than adequate in terms of number of applicants as well as quality. Ads at all types of institutions favored generalists with a terminal degree and K-12 teaching experience, with research universities predictably searching for research experience. The authors discuss implications of various elements of the search process for schools and colleges of education.
Exploring the Efficacy of the Cook School District Simulation
Cook School District is a Web-based simulation designed to allow teacher candidates an opportunity to explore connections between their actions as teachers and the learning and engagement of simulated students. The simulation provides a setting in which to practice the processes inherent in teacher work sample methodology (TWSM). The outcomes of TWSM include analyzing the context in which teaching and learning will occur; identifying outcomes to be learned; designing and administering a pretest to evaluate prior knowledge; designing and delivering instruction, differentiating curriculum, instruction, and/or assessment as appropriate; and postassessing student learning to determine the "value added" or teacher effects on learning and engagement. Quasi-experimental research demonstrates the efficacy of the simulation to (a) improve scores on a real teacher work sample, (b) improve field-based lesson teaching performance, and (c) affect users’ perceptions of their skillfulness and valuing of concepts underlying teacher work sample methodology.
Teaching African American English Forms to Standard American English-Speaking Teachers: Effects on Acquisition, Attitudes, and Responses to Student Use
Many U.S. students speak nonstandard forms of English, yet dialect issues are slighted in teacher education programs and literacy courses. In this study, classroom teachers who spoke Standard American English (SE) were familiarized with seven syntactic features characterizing African American English (AAE). Three approaches to instruction based on a cognitive view of self-regulated learning were compared: exposure to the features by reading AAE text (E); exposure plus explanation of dialect transformation strategies (ES); and exposure, strategy explanation, and guided practice transforming sentences from SE to AAE (ESP). On posttests, all forms of instruction improved teachers’ knowledge and positive attitude toward AAE. However, ESP instruction proved more effective in teaching teachers how to translate sentences into AAE and to use AAE in writing stories. Results support the value of implementing self-regulated learning theory and reveal effective ways to teach dialect features to teachers so they can help AAE-speaking students learn SE.
The Lost Boys (and Girls): Readers in Neverland
Using published research studies, writings of experts in the literacy field, and anecdotes from the author’s own experiences, this article examines the reading motivation and disposition of preser-vice teachers and suggests ways that children’s literature courses positively affect both. Ideas of social modeling, constructivist course design, and the role of influential teachers are also discussed. The title is derived from the classic book, Peter Pan and Wendy, and hints at the possibility that future generations of readers may be "lost" if teacher preparation programs do not consider and promote positive reading dispositions.
A Conversation of Many Voices: Critiques and Visions of Teacher Education
(No abstract is available for this citation)Knowledge and Vision in Teaching
The author challenges the role of knowledge in teaching by pointing out the variety of issues and concerns teachers must simultaneously address. Teachers use two strategies to manage their multidimensional space: They develop integrated habits and rules of thumb for handling situations as they arise, and they plan their lessons by envisioning them unfolding as a drama might. It is entirely unclear where or how knowledge enhances teachers’ visions, but it is very clear that visions depend on a strong sense of purpose, direction, and momentum. Most teacher educators try to foster visions in their students, but their interest in vision creates two problems. First, it places them in conflict with their university brethren who expect to see them promulgating knowledge. Second, the particular vision they embrace is too narrowly progressive; it ignores many concerns that teachers try to juggle in their practice and many societal ideals for education as well.
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