Innovative Practices in Teacher Preparation and Graduate-Level Teacher Education Programs (original) (raw)
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Innovative Practices in Teacher Preparation and Graduate-Level Teacher Education Programs, 2018
This chapter illustrates the complex web of increasingly authentic experiences in a teacher preparation program. In particular, the chapter focuses on how guiding design principles inform signature pedagogies that extend teacher candidates’ experiences beyond the coursework and fieldwork experiences in which pre-service candidates typically engage. These signature pedagogies—disciplinary practices, video club, rehearsals, live actor simulations, and residencies—are shaped by the guiding principles of attention to a novice teacher developmental trajectory, commitments to learning in and through practice, and attention to equity and access to learning opportunities in educational contexts. The chapter argues that teacher preparation programs ought to regularly (re)visit the design principles, values, and commitments as they are situated in the social and political context of education to move closer to the promise of a high-quality education for all.
Developmental Trajectories, Disciplinary Practices, and Sites of Practice in Novice Teacher Learning
Innovative Practices in Teacher Preparation and Graduate-Level Teacher Education Programs
This chapter illustrates the complex web of increasingly authentic experiences in a teacher preparation program. In particular, the chapter focuses on how guiding design principles inform signature pedagogies that extend teacher candidates' experiences beyond the coursework and fieldwork experiences in which pre-service candidates typically engage. These signature pedagogies—disciplinary practices, video club, rehearsals, live actor simulations, and residencies—are shaped by the guiding principles of attention to a novice teacher developmental trajectory, commitments to learning in and through practice, and attention to equity and access to learning opportunities in educational contexts. The chapter argues that teacher preparation programs ought to regularly (re)visit the design principles, values, and commitments as they are situated in the social and political context of education to move closer to the promise of a high-quality education for all.
Examining teacher preparation and on-the-job experience: The gap of theory and practice
International Journal of Research Studies in Education, 2020
Teacher education programs are increasingly critiqued for their limited relationship to student teachers' needs and for their limited impact on practice. Many appeals are heard for a radical new and effective pedagogy of teacher education in which theory and practice are linked effectively. Teacher education programs need to bridge the "gap" between coursework and the realities of pre-service fieldwork and in-service teaching. Pre-service teachers need to experience coherence and integration among their courses, and between their coursework and fieldwork. It is more likely that practicing in real classroom settings can play a relatively more important role in helping teachers develop their noticing awareness and skills; certain kinds of their professional identities; and contextually-appropriate classroom management strategies and techniques; and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).
Teacher education in practice: Reconciling contexts, practices, and theories
European Journal of Special Needs Education
This paper reports findings from an 18-month qualitative study that followed the experiences of nine teacher residents, their site professors, site coordinators, clinical teachers and principals in three professional learning schools. The study examined the tensions that emerged as teacher preparation theory intersected with the context-bound realities of daily life in schools and the political constraints that diminish possibilities for inclusive education. The paper addresses implications for teacher preparation programmes by reporting how teacher residents negotiated their understanding of and commitment for inclusive education through three themes: (a) critical reflection as an emergent practice, (b) whose learning, and (c) the trouble with behaviour. Interpreting these themes has implications for programmatic designs in teacher preparation. (Contains 1 table and 2 notes.)
The Intersection of Theory and Practice in Teacher Preparation Courses
Journal of instructional research, 2019
Brandon Juarez, Grand Canyon University motivated the teacher educator to consider an alternative path to andragogically approaching course content. Thus, the teacher educator grappled with the process of transitioning theories of the content to application-based andragogy. The intersection of theory and practice came to fruition in one teacher preparation course. To this end, the teacher educator set out to foster a learning environment that yielded safety and trust for pre-service teacher candidates to participate in simulations throughout class sessions. In this summary, the teacher educator illuminates innovative and practical teaching practices, solutions to overcoming obstacles, and how this approach can be utilized in other curriculum and content areas.
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
Learning to Teach: Practice-Based Preparation in Teacher Education. Special Issues Brief
2016
Learning to teach is not easy. Effective teachers have knowledge and skill sets that less effective teachers do not. This type of instructional expertise does not come from engaging in observation of teaching or from reading about the philosophy of teaching alone. It is developed through careful practice coupled with constructive feedback. For teacher candidates to learn to be effective, they need high-quality opportunities to practice. These opportunities, although informed by research, are often difficult to integrate due to intensive emphasis on coursework and challenges with finding highquality placements in the field. Educator preparation programs (EPPs), their faculty, and the local districts can work collaboratively to incorporate the essential features of practice-based opportunities within and across EPPs to structure coursework and field experiences that cultivate the skills that candidates need as beginning teachers. EPPs and their faculty work with local districts to fully incorporate effective, deliberate, practice-based opportunities within both campusbased coursework and field experiences that encompass the features of deliberate practice: practice that is sequenced, coherent, and scaffolded over time and coupled with coaching, feedback, and reflection. This Special Issues Brief from the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform (CEEDAR Center) and the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders (GTL Center) outlines essential features for providing high-quality, structured, and sequenced opportunities to practice within teacher preparation programs. This brief is intended to support states, districts, and EPPs that are striving to prepare and support excellent teachers by: ¡ Showcasing several teacher preparation programs wherein faculty have enacted innovative strategies to embed practice-based opportunities into existing coursework and field experiences that more closely connect with the realistic demands of today's classrooms. ¡ Strengthening understanding of several practice-based approaches, informed by the science of learning, which have been found to increase beginning teacher candidates' capacity for teaching. ¡ Identifying potential action steps that EPPs, districts, and states can take to improve candidates' opportunities to practice. The brief is intended for use by EPPs, districts, and state education agencies (SEAs). The information and considerations presented will be especially useful for EPP faculty engaged in transforming programs and for state policymakers in rethinking program approval requirements.
This article, inspired in part by the Levine report that criticizes teacher education programs in the United States for being out of touch with practices that work in real classrooms, is a self-study that explores the rift between educational theory, particularly theory that pushes for social constructionist, child-centered approaches to teaching, and teaching practices in majority African-American, inner-city schools. The authors conducted this year-long self-study to answer the question: What could the college's education program do to improve preparation for teaching in inner-city schools? Through their year-long collaboration in a middle-school writing classroom in an inner-city charter school, the authors examined what a prospective teacher learned in his education program that helped and hindered him and then explored how the successful approaches he developed as a new teacher could be incorporated into the college's preservice program.
The Professional Educator, 2015
Recent calls for a shift to clinically-based models of teacher preparation prompt a research focus on the quality of classroom experiences in which pre-service teachers engage and the level to which theory and practice connect to inform those experiences. Developing a theoretical framework to conceptualize an approach to this work is an essential step in teacher preparation reform. Linking Dewey's (1933, 1938) work on reflection with empirical studies on pre-service teachers' reflection practices, and with Vygotsky's notion of a "knowledgeable other," we propose an approach to conducting clinical practice through a theoretical framework. Based on these frames, we argue that the role of the university "supervisor" must shift from one of observation and immediate feedback to one of deep analysis and coaching within the frame of the content being taught. From this, we offer insight on how to further develop both theory and practice within the teacher preparation reform movement and support preservice teachers as they develop "warranted assertabilities" from their practice. "What does having an experience amount to unless, as it ceases to exist, it leaves behind an increment of meaning, a better understanding of something, a clearer future plan and purpose of action: in short, an idea?" (Dewey, 1933, p. 154) Teacher education is in the midst of a monumental pedagogical shift that disconnects teacher preparation from its history of isolated instruction of theory and pedagogy to embedded preparation for use of theory in real-world contexts (NCATE, 2010). This shift is essential given the increasingly complex and diverse nature of K-12 classrooms and is due in part to the recent release of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) Report of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Learning (2010). In it, teacher educators are urged to turn teacher preparation "upside down and shift away from a norm which emphasizes academic preparation and course work loosely linked to school based experiences…[and] move to programs that are fully grown in clinical practice and interwoven with academic content and professional courses" (p. ii). The emphasis on increasing opportunities for high-quality clinical preparation is tied to educators' attempts to parallel the field of medicine, thus recognizing teaching as an academically taught clinical practice profession requiring the same theory to practice connections needed in preparing doctors (AACTE, 2010). It is