Inside Teacher Education Challenging Prior Views Of Teaching And Learning

Learning to teach is complex. Teacher candidates begin a preservice program with powerful tacit assumptions about how teachers teach based on lengthy apprenticeships of observation over many years as students. Virtually all teacher education programs provide a mixture of coursework and classroom experience. Much has been written about the theory-into-practice approach in teacher education, an approach that assumes teacher candidates who have been provided with instructions about how to teach will be able to recall and apply them in a school setting. In reality, teacher candidates report considerable difficulty enacting theory in practice, to the point that many question the value of coursework. This book takes an in-depth look at five future teachers in one teacher education program, analyzing and interpreting how they and their teacher educators learn from experience during both coursework and practicum experiences. Many assumptions about the complex challenges of teaching teachers are called into question. Is the role of a teacher educator to synthesize research-based best practices for candidates to take to their field placements? Does the preservice practicum experience challenge or reinforce a lifetime of socialized experiences in schools? Must methods courses always be seen by most teacher candidates as little more than sites for collecting resources? Where and how do candidates construct professional knowledge of teaching? The data illustrate clearly that methods courses can be sites for powerful learning that challenges tacit assumptions about how and why we teach.

Teachers Who Teach Teachers is a major contribution to an emerging literature in which teacher educators are beginning to explore the new challenges facing those who care about the quality of teaching in schools and in teacher education programmes. In this volume the contributors consider the personal development of both new and experienced teacher educators, illustrating just how strongly teacher educators are influenced by their visions and by the challenge to prove themselves in the university setting. They look at ways in which teacher educators have acted to promote their own professional development and study their own practices, including writing as a tool for reflection. Finally the contributors take a broader look at the professional development of teacher educators and the challenge to all teacher educators to consider the tension between rigour and relevance.

This book disseminates original research on learning in and from practice in pre-service teacher education. Authors such as Lederman and Lederman describe the student teaching practicum (or work-integrated learning [WIL]), which is an essential component of pre-service teacher education, as the ‘elephant in the room’. These authors note that 'the capstone experience in any teacher education programme is the student teaching practicum… [a]fter all, this is where the rubber hits the road'. However, many teacher educators will agree that this WIL component is sometimes very insufficient in assisting the student teacher to develop their own footing and voice as a teacher. This is the ‘gap’ that this research book addresses. Most of the chapters in the book report empirical data, with the exception of two chapters that can be categorized as systematic reviews. WIL is addressed from various angles in the chapters. Chapter 6 focuses on research related to what makes Finnish teacher education so effective, and in Chapter 4 researchers of the University of Johannesburg disseminate their findings on establishing a teaching school (based on Finnish insights) in Johannesburg. Chapter 3 highlights the challenges faced in open-and distance learning teacher education contexts. Several of the chapters disseminate research findings on alternative interventions to classic WIL, namely, where “safe spaces” or laboratories are created for student teachers to learn and grow professionally. These could either be simulations, such as software programmes and avatars in the intervention described in Chapter 2; student excursions, as the findings in chapters 5, 7 and 10 portray; or alternative approaches to WIL (e.g. Chapters 11 and 12). The book is devoted to scholarship in the field of pre-service teacher education. The target audience is scholars working in the fields of pre-service teacher education, work-integrated learning, and self-directed learning. The book makes a unique contribution in terms of firstly its extensive use of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory as a research lens, and secondly in drawing on various theoretical frameworks. Both quantitative and qualitative research informed the findings of the book.

This book presents thirty-one accounts by final-year pre-service teachers, providing guidance and insights for less advanced teacher education students, and illustrating the use of life history and narrative stories as methods for pre-service teachers to explore educational issues in classroom practice. This life-history approach identifies those political, economic, and social forces that have impinged on the individual at different points in their life and contributed to the process of changing their identities. These stories are not written by established specialists in the areas they deal with, but instead by novice teachers at the beginning of their paths towards mastering the intricacies of teaching and learning in school settings. As such the book provides a mentoring framework and a means of helping pre-service teachers share their valuable experiences and insights into aspects such as how to manage practicum requirements. It helps establish a supportive relationship among pre-service teachers, providing them with access to valuable peer experiences. In addition it helps pre-service teachers make sense of their own practicum experiences and reflect on their own beliefs and professional judgement to develop their approaches and solve problems in their own classroom practice.

This book presents a duoethnographic exploration and narrative account of what it means to be a teacher educator today. Adopting a narrative approach, the book presents different personal, political and institutional perspectives to interrogate common challenges facing teacher education and teacher educators today. In addition, the book compares and contrasts the teacher education landscapes in Australia and the UK and addresses a broad range of topics, including the autobiographical nature of teacher educators’ work, the value of learning from experience, the importance of collegiality and collaboration in learning to become a teacher educator, and the intersection of the personal, professional and political in the development of teacher educator pedagogies and research agendas. Each chapter combines personal narratives and research-based perspectives on the key dimensions of teacher educators’ work that can be found in the literature, including self-study research. Readers will gain a better understanding of the processes, influences and relationships that make being a teacher educator both a challenging and rewarding career. Accordingly, the book offers a valuable asset for university leaders, experienced and beginning teacher educators, and researchers interested in the professional learning and development of teacher educators.

This study demonstrates the power of deliberate and explicit attention to teacher candidates' prior views of teaching and learning. Focus-group and individual interviews of five individuals document their development of professional knowledge in response to the experiences of a physics methods course and their practicum placements in an 8-month preservice teacher education program. This study also explores and interprets the development of a teacher educator's professional knowledge through a collaborative self-study between the teacher of the methods course and the researcher. While teacher candidates can readily mimic surface-level features of teaching that they have witnessed over many years, they have rarely considered the complex pedagogical decisions made by teachers. This study demonstrates that teacher candidates' prior views of school can be challenged and extended by carefully enacting a pedagogy of teacher education that contrasts with the cultural tradition of teaching as telling. Such a pedagogy helps candidates develop authority over teaching and learning experiences in ways that facilitate the construction of principled knowledge about teaching grounded in personal experiences. As explained in the literature review, a purely propositional view of teachers' professional knowledge cannot explain how individuals learn to teach. Epistemological arguments about the role of experience in shaping professionals' knowledge-in-action frame the qualitative analysis of interview data. One focus-group interview and five individual interviews were conducted at four points in the preservice program; Atlas.ti software facilitated identification of patterns and metaphors in the verbatim transcripts of the 24 interviews. The changing metaphors used by participants reveal the ways in which their understandings of teaching and learning developed through their preservice program. The pedagogy of teacher education enacted in the physics methods course had a major positive influence on the five participants. Although all had the same learning opportunities during the course, each candidate constructed a unique way of thinking about teaching and learning and developed different messages from the way they were taught. Some focused on how they would later enact the active-learning pedagogies they experienced; others focused on broader issues of teaching and learning. Each candidate also valued the relationship of mutual trust that developed between the professor and the class. Three principles for guiding preservice teacher education emerge as broad conclusions to the study. First, tensions experienced by teacher candidates during the practicum cannot be expected to challenge the dominant culture of schooling. Second, providing a coherent set of learning experiences within a methods course can encourage teacher candidates to confront and revise their assumptions about teaching and learning. Third, collaborative self-study can provide a powerful way for teacher educators to focus on enacting pedagogies that help candidates to identify, reframe, and extend their assumptions about teaching and learning.

Designed to help student teachers develop an approach to teaching that is both theoretical and practical, this text focuses on key aspects of teaching rather than trying to "cover the waterfront." Based on extensive research on teachers’ views, their own long experience as teacher educators, and other sources, the authors recommend 7 priorities for teaching and teacher education: program planning pupil assessment classroom organization and community inclusive education subject content and pedagogy professional identity a vision for teaching Each chapter deals in turn with one of these priorities, using a common format. Activities throughout help readers understand what the priority means in both theory and practice. This text is a companion to the authors’ 2009 book for teacher educators, Priorities in Teacher Education: The 7 Key Elements of Pre-Service Preparation. By making these 7 priorities and related knowledge explicit, it helps student teachers to acquire essential knowledge and skills, to understand the teaching/learning process more fully, and above all to be as prepared as possible for the demanding work of teaching.

What do teachers learn 'on the job'? And how, if at all, do they learn from 'experience'? Leading researchers from the UK, Europe, the USA and Canada offer international, research-based perspectives on a central problem in policy-making and professional practice - the role that experience plays in learning to teach in schools. Experience is often weakly conceptualized in both policy and research, sometimes simply used as a proxy for 'time', in weeks and years, spent in a school classroom. The conceptualization of experience in a range of educational research traditions lies at the heart of this book, exemplified in a variety of empirical and theoretical studies. Distinctive perspectives to inform these studies include sociocultural psychology, the philosophy of education, school effectiveness, the sociology of education, critical pedagogy, activism and action research. However, no one theoretical perspective can claim privileged insight into what and how teachers learn from experience; rather, this is a matter for a truly educational investigation, one that is both close to practice and seeks to develop theory. At a time when policy-makers in many countries seek to make teacher education an entirely school-based activity, Learning Teaching from Experience offers an essential examination of the evidence-base, the traditions of inquiry - and the limits of those inquiries.