Negotiating Discourses of Learning to Teach: Stories of the Journey from Student to Teacher (original) (raw)

Teacher Education at the Crossroads: Burning Questions That Just Won't Go Away

2012

Worldwide, the call and the need for highly qualified teachers is relentless, perhaps greater than any time in our history, and, concomitantly, the pathways to becoming a highly qualified teacher are more diverse than ever before-the traditional university model, alternative certifications, on-line programs, and standardized tests waiving course work have an unprecedented presence. It is hardly news there is a crisis in recruiting and educating future teachers. This is in addition to the crisis of retaining the teachers we currently have: 20% of new teachers leave the profession within their first three years; 50% of them in urban districts alone. Therefore, it is estimated that over the next ten years the United States will need over two million teachers (Guggenheim, 2004). So, not only are we producing too few teachers, those who do enter the teaching profession are often ill prepared for the challenges associated with an increasingly rigorous and testdriven curriculum and an also increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse student population. These challenges are further intensified by instructional conditions marked by a scarcity of resources. Finding new sources and strategies for recruiting teachers, while helping existing teachers stay committed to the profession will be no easy task as conflict among various constituencies escalates. Schools of education today face pressure to improve from all directions. A flurry of new studies challenges their ideological bias and low admissions standards. Critics now question their very existence, with competition from fast-track routes to certification threatening their long-held monopoly on training teachers. The soul-searching has accelerated in the United States with the Federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, which demanded a "highly qualified" teacher-state certified, with a bachelor's degree and proven knowledge of subject-in every classroom by the end of the 2005-06 academic year (Hartocollis, 2005). How has the US reacted to the challenge? Teacher Magazine (August 5, 2007) has explored already existing alternatives to teacher recruitment and preparation focusing on fast tracks to certification. Prospective teachers across South Carolina, for example, have an opportunity for a new shortcut to getting certified to go into classrooms. The program targets career changers and can certify would-be public and private school teachers in all 50 states. The Passport to Teaching program was approved by state legislators in 2007 and can get people into classrooms faster than the traditional four-year college route. South Carolina was the seventh state to approve a streamlined fast-track certification program from prospective public school teachers. The program requirements for being certified as a teacher vary among states. Teacher candidates using the program in South Carolina can be certified to teach after passing two tests and being mentored for 10 months. More importantly, their training requires no in-classroom experience or coursework. The example from South Carolina highlights the state of Teacher Education in the country: state departments of education and local school boards are looking for a quick fix and are not planning educational policies in view of the changing demographics of school population and the teaching profession. In order to not only prepare but retain teachers in the profession and offer 66 Alter & Naiditch-At the Crossroads them the necessary support to develop and improve their teaching skills, more long-lasting solutions are needed. Schools of education have long established themselves as think-tanks where ideas or suggestions on how to approach our educational challenges are generated. However, they do not seem to have demonstrated concrete solutions, either. In fact, schools of education today have the additional challenge of proving themselves still relevant and necessary. Moreover, according to Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, schools of education also need to be made accountable for student achievement (address on October 22 nd , 2009, at Teachers College). In this article, we identify some critical areas regarding teacher education that need to be addressed by any institution responsible for educating teachers. We outline some of the paradoxical pressures that constitute the context for this crisis in teacher education and specify the kinds of basic questions that need systematic answers in terms of what teachers might be expected to know. These questions serve as a worldwide call for teacher educators to provide evidencebased programs that employ the knowledge needed to be a teacher as the basis for actually educating a teacher. We examine the example of one school of education and how it has shown that adapting to local needs and circumstances without having to alter the essence of your work can be an effective strategy in keeping your program meaningful and up-to-date. We also raise a number of questions that we believe reflect the evolving nature of the field of teacher education and remind us that there is much more involved in becoming and preparing teachers than our current teacher education programs would like to think.

"I Didn't Realize How Hard It Would Be! " : Tensions and Transformations in Becoming a Teacher

This study explores the experience of becoming an elementary teacher in an educational climate where standardization and accountability increasingly affect what happens in classrooms across the country by following two beginning teachers. Specifically, this longitudinal study in which two first-year teachers’ stories are analyzed and restoried explores the tensions involved in becoming a teacher. This research, which focuses on the transition from student to teacher, illuminates the multiple discourses beginning teachers must negotiate as they determine the kind of teacher they will become. Based on the findings, recommendations are provided for how teacher education programs can better prepare beginning teachers, particularly those operating in reductive classrooms and forced to implement standardized curriculum. These implications for practice include (1) encouraging preservice teachers to be thoughtfully adaptive by creating and revising clear visions, (2) consciously creating zones of contact in which preservice teachers gain practical experience navigating competing discourses, and (3) critically examining field placements for preservice teachers.

Shaping New Models for Teacher Education

Teacher Education Quarterly, 2010

American teacher education is stuck in an unproductive and dysfunctional pattern, not unlike the American domestic automobile industry. American teacher education programs graduate thousands of newly certified teachers each year, hut the evidence that even half of the new graduates are dynamic and capahle teachers is weak. The reputations of the teacher education programs through which they pass are poor, both within the academic community and in the field of K-12 education. Tinkering to improve at the margins of university-based teacher education has not worked. The time has come for dramatic, fijndamental change in the way we prepare the teachers of America's fifty-five million school children. The dramatic change needed will require a redefinition of teacher education, taking it beyond preservice preparation to include the ongoing support of teachers throughout their professional lives. Further, teacher education should be situated at the nexus between universities and schools-^the place where theory and practice can come together. And finally, making these fiindamental changes in teacher education will require that teacher educators in both school and university settings have the benefit of the type of ongoing professional development that research has shown to be essential

Research That Illuminates Enduring Dilemmas in Teacher Education

Journal of Teacher Education

This issue contains a collection of six papers which, while they address quite distinct issues in teacher education, are connected by important historical and conceptual "glue." It is this glue that we highlight in this editorial. Three of the six papers were selected from manuscripts submitted in response to a call for scholarly papers on "historical and contemporary issues in teacher education," that is, papers that describe connections between past and present issues in the field. Although not submitted in response to this call, each of the remaining three papers also address issues aligned with one of the dilemmas in teacher education identified by Schneider (2018), in his paper, "Marching forward, marching in circles: A history of problems and dilemmas in teacher preparation." In particular, each of the papers addresses some aspect of the dilemma that teacher preparation programs face in their efforts to prepare all teacher candidates to teach all students across all contexts in a short and relatively inexpensive way. Together, the papers in this issue can help us consider strategies for making progress on this dilemma in defensible, reproducible, and generative ways.

Critical Issues in the Curriculum of Teacher Education Programs

1991

Teacher education programs rarely help teachers develop those attitudes and skills that will enable them to identify and speak out for that which they know and value. This research reports on a preservice program based on the assumption that by systematically requiring teachers both to reflect on their own practice and to seek out and respond to the reflections of other teachers, teacher education programs can help teachers develop their own professional voice and that of their colleagues. This paper describes the evolution of ne researcher's own voice and the theoretical considerations irom which the research emerges. These considerations relate to the social context of teaching-the structure of the school, the culture of teachers, and the concept of teaching as gendered labor. In addition, the paper discusses a preservice curriculum designed and implemented in response to the perceived need for teacher education programs to help teachers develop a professional voice and the methodology through which the response to this curriculum was studied. The data indicate that the development of a teachers' voice can be enhanced by appropriate teacher education curriculum and methodology. Implications for teacher education are discussed. Thirty-one references are listed.

A Personal Response to those Who Bash Teacher Education

Journal of Teacher Education, 2000

To each of a dozen common charges against formal programs of teacher education a personal response is made. Among other responses, it is argued that contextual knowledge of classrooms and schools is crucial for novice teachers; raw intelligence is insufficient for accomplished teaching; and as in other fields, accomplished performance will develop—if it ever develops—only over many years of effortful, deliberate practice. It is argued that programs of teacher education can offer the novice teacher the findings, concepts, principles, technologies, and theories from educational research that are relevant to teaching and learning, as they are provided to other professionals before they enter their fields of practice. It is concluded that high-quality teacher education programs are profoundly challenging, indispensable, inaugural components in the development of accomplished performance by teachers.