Initiating and Sustaining a Culture of Inquiry in a Teacher Leadership Program (original) (raw)
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2016
How can teacher educators initiate and sustain a culture of inquiry among participants in a graduate program? This was the core issue in the design of a new Masters degree program that emphasized teacher leadership. As the faculty discussed desirable fea-tures of the program, agreement emerged that the core courses should build teachers ’ capacities to inquire into their own teaching practices and student learn-ing. Because inquiry was seen as a central component of teacher education, professional development, and school improvement (Valli, 2000; van Zee, 1998), program faculty placed high priority on modeling a culture of inquiry in program design and publicly Linda Valli and Emily H. van Zee are associate professors in the
Making the turn: Fostering an inquiry stance in teacher education
In this article, the authors describe how an examination of teacher candidate inquiry projects led to an examination of their own experiences as teacher education practitioner-researchers and competing narratives about education research. They describe how in the process of doing research, they came to recognize how their experiences and methodological decisions impacted the process of their inquiry and the implications they could claim. Through a review of abstracts for inquiry projects created over the past ten years by interns in a professional development school English education program, they explore how the grand narrative of educational research may affect the meaning of inquiry and how this may have implications for teacher education. They argue for pragmatic approaches that foster an inquiry stance in teacher candidates as a way to position future educators as autonomous knowledge-makers who have a prominent role in education research.
Inquiry in Teacher Education: Competing Agendas
Teacher Education Quarterly, 2005
School-based practitioners and university-based teacher educators do not necessarily agree about what is important in pre-service teacher education. The perennial tensions between what prospective teachers learn in the academic environment and what they learn in field placements have been studied by Dewey (1904), Wehlage (1981) and Cannella and Reiff (1994). Controversies continue about the extent to which theories are useful in preparing students for the complexities of classroom life. To address the lack of connection between theory and practice, a number of recent reforms in teacher education have included inquiry-based programs and/or new types of education courses (Darling-Hammond, 1994), which encourage student teachers to be reflective problem solvers and change agents. Additionally, student teachers have been encouraged to be critical consumers of professional research (Zumwalt, 1982) as well as generators of their own knowledge (Cochran-Smith, 1991). Pre-service teachers need to connect and expand their professional knowledge by examining their own understandings of teaching and learning (Olson, 2002). Wodlinger (1996) argues that these experiences increase teachers' sense of autonomy and control of educational priorities and
Teacher-Scholars as classroom leaders: The power of inquiry
2018
The graduate special education programs affirm the competence of every individual, equal access to quality education, and social justice as the critical tenets of the program’s inclusive philosophy (Beliefs, Special Education Division, 2015). How do we prepare teachers to be leaders of their classrooms, providing a quality education for all? There are many “strategies” available to special education teachers; inquiry provides educators a means to enrich their teaching by collecting practice-based evidence of the efficacy of their instruction. The design and implementation of an inquiry project based on classroom practices is a requirement in educator licensure graduate programs. The purpose of this teacher action research is to deepen connections between theory and practice as well as reinforce and expand knowledge of teaching skills and instructional strategies to support the inclusion of all students in classrooms (Stringer, 2014). Engaging in inquiry promotes the teacher candid...
The Value of Teacher Research: Nurturing Professional and Personal Growth through Inquiry
2000
nyone who has ever been a teacher knows that teaching is a complex, challenging, and often uncertain process. There are no absolute answers for how best to teach young children. However, research has shown that students of teaching tend to believe there is some set of "right answers" to the problems of teaching, and they hold fast to the image of teachers as consumers and disseminators of information (e.g., Stremmel et al. 1995). If there is one thing confirmed by both the professional literature on teaching and the anecdotal experiences of many teacher educators, it is the assertion that teaching is more than technique (Schön 1983; Ayers 1993; Cochran-Smith & Lytle 1999). Teaching is a process involving continual inquiry and renewal, and a teacher, among other things, is first and foremost a questioner (Ayers 1993; Hansen 1997). The conventional and restricted vision of the teacher as technician-consumer and dispenser of other people's knowledge-has been reinforced, however, by No Child Left Behind and its focus on high-stakes accountability and standards-based instruction (Liston, Whitcomb, & Borko 2007). Nevertheless, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) suggest that the narrow notion of teacher as technician has been a catalyst for the current teacher-as-researcher movement in the United States. This movement has helped reunite two complementary and natural sides of teachingreflection and action (thinking and doing). The teacher research movement also has helped teachers reclaim inquiry as a legitimate means of gaining knowledge and insights about teaching and learning. In this article, I paint a more promising and encompassing view of teaching as an inquiry process, a view that sees teachers as researchers who take seriously the study of self with the aims of bringing about
Activating Teacher Energy Through "Inquiry-Oriented" Teacher Education
1982
In an inquiry-oriented teacher education program, proSpective teachers are encouraged to examine the origins and consequences of their actions and-settings in which they work. Many of the characteriRtics ofthe elementary student teaching program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison are similar to this approach. During the students' 15-week field experience program, taken concurrently with a weekly half-day seminar, Students conduct field-based inquiries under the direction of supervisors who are graduate students. The primary purpose of the seminar is to broaden students' perspectiv.res and have them engage in reflective analyses of everyday occurrences': Students are encouraged to adopt a critical posture toward both the university and the school components of the field experiencc and to examine and debate issues and problems from diverse and multiple perspectives. Once in a work setting, the inquiry-oriented approadh can help alleviate teacher stress caused by a sense of loss of control over professional responsibilities. This "deskilling" process can be halted by empowering teachers with the ability to reflect upon, confront, and change job-embedded and structural sources of discomfort. Atthe University of Wisconsin,.the inquiry-oriented approach has required that pedagogy and classroop practices exemplify the quality of inquiry that is sought. Consequently, student teachers, cooperating teachers, supervising graduate students, and faculty are playing an increasingly greater role in determining the direction of their program. (FG)
Teachers as researchers: developing an inquiry ethic
Teacher Development, 2003
This article explores the process through which teachers go as they engage in teacher research that attempts to answer 'burning questions' about their practice. It reports on the experiences of 45 in-service teachers enrolled in an MA in Education program as they develop an inquiry ethic while engaging in research projects that require them to collect and analyze data, interact with instructors and peers, engage in dialogue surrounding inquiry, and draw conclusions from their data collection and analysis during a semester-long course. Based on data collected over a two-year period, the authors attempt to pose a framework for the development of such an ethic, positing the dimensions of the stance that teacher researchers demonstrate as they begin to view themselves as part of the ongoing dialogue between theory and practice. It further describes the nature of each dimension as well as the products of the teacher research projects.
Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice
As faculty of an educational leadership doctoral program (EdD) aligned with the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) principles, we acknowledge the importance of inquiry to develop scholarly practitioners. Applying the tenet of Inquiry as Practice, our EdD faculty critically examined the doctoral curriculum to explore ways to effectively prepare our doctoral students to learn and apply research methodology meaningfully. This essay details how the review of our research curriculum led to a pedagogical and curriculum redesign of our research seminar series. This revised research seminar series culminates in a course offered every fall/spring semester in the final two years of the program and intentionally has different faculty members teaching each course. We have utilized a backward design to create the themes/content of these seminar courses to better prepare students for their dissertation research.
Science Education, 93(2), 322-360. (2009)
Inquiry is seen as central to the reform of science teaching and learning, but few teachers have experience with scientific inquiry and thus possess very naïve conceptions of it. One promising form of professional development, research experiences for teachers (RETs), allows teachers to experience scientific inquiry in the hopes that these experiences will then translate to inquiry in the classroom. As intuitively pleasing as these programs are, scant evidence documents their effectiveness. For this study, four secondary science Correspondence to: M. Blanchard; NO SILVER BULLET FOR INQUIRY 323 teachers were followed back to their classrooms following a 6-week, marine ecology RET. The research employed qualitative and quantitative data collection to answer these questions: What were the teachers' initial conceptions and enactment of classroom inquiry, and how did they change after the RET?; How did changes in the nature and use of questions highlight changes in inquiry enactment?; and How were the teachers' changes linked to the RET and are there changes that cannot be explained by the RET experience? Teachers who entered the program with more sophisticated, theory-based understanding of teaching and learning were more apt to understand inquiry as a model and to use classroom-based inquiry throughout their teaching following the program. Implications for professional development are discussed. C 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 93:322 -360, 2009 Lotter et al. (2007) point out the importance of both pre-and postdata on the teachers who are involved in professional development if we are to understand the changes in teachers' conceptions and enactment of inquiry that are engendered through such programs.