How People Learn:
Brain, Mind,
Experience, and School
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Part III: Teachers and Teaching
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8
Teacher Learning
The findings from
research on learning suggest roles for teachers that differ from their
roles in the past. Education reform efforts in the United States cannot
succeed without an effort to help teachers and administrators assume
these new roles (Darling-Hammond, 1997:154):
If teachers are to prepare an ever more diverse group of
students for much more challenging work--for framing problems; finding,
integrating and synthesizing information; creating new solutions;
learning on their own; and working cooperatively--they will need
substantially more knowledge and radically different skills than most
now have and most schools of education now develop.
This chapter considers
the kinds of learning opportunities available to teachers and analyzes
them from the perspective of what is known about ways to help people
learn.
Teacher learning is
relatively new as a research topic, so there is not a great deal of data
on it. But the research that does exist, generally in the form of rich
case studies, provides important information about teachers as they
attempt to change their practices. Our discussion of these cases is
based on the assumption that what is known about learning applies to
teachers as well as to their students.
We begin our discussion
by examining opportunities for teacher learning that are available to
practicing teachers. Some are formal; many others are informal.
Understanding teachers' opportunities for learning--including the
constraints on teachers' time--is important for developing a realistic
picture of possibilities for lifelong learning. In some cases,
teachers' opportunities for learning have been consistent with what is
currently known about ways to facilitate learning; in other cases they
have not (Koppich and Knapp, 1998).
After discussing
opportunities for learning, we examine the topic of teacher as learner
from the perspectives used in Chapter 6 to
characterize effective learning environments. We end with a discussion
of learning opportunities for preservice education--for college students
who are in programs designed to help them learn how to teach.
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OPPORTUNITIES FOR PRACTICING TEACHERS |
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Practicing teachers
continue to learn about teaching in many ways. First, they learn from
their own practice. Whether this learning is described as the
monitoring and adjustment of good practice or analyzed more completely
according to a model of pedagogical reasoning (Wilson et al., 1987),
teachers gain new knowledge and understanding of their students,
schools, curriculum, and instructional methods by living the practical
experiments that occur as a part of professional practice (Dewey, 1963;
Schön, 1983). Teachers also learn from their own practice through
different types of teacher research or "action research," such as
creating journals, essays, classroom studies, and oral inquiry processes
(Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993).
Second, teachers learn
through their interactions with other teachers. Some of this occurs
during formal and informal mentoring that is similar to apprenticeship
learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991; see also Little, 1990; Feiman-Nemser
and Parker, 1993). Formal mentoring occurs when an experienced teacher
takes a new teacher under his or her wing to provide insight and advice,
sometimes for state programs (Feiman-Nemser and Parker, 1993); informal
mentoring occurs through conversations in hallways, teachers' rooms, and
other school settings. Novices also learn through supervision by
department chairs, principals, and other supervisors.
To a small but
increasing degree, teachers are teaching other teachers through formal
inservice education. Administrators are beginning to recognize
expertise in their schools and districts and are encouraging teachers to
share that expertise as inservice presenters to their colleagues. Some
states, such as Massachusetts, even recognize the preparation for these
inservice programs as a form of professional learning for the presenters
and award them with "professional development points" for time spent in
preparing to teach, as well as time spent teaching their colleagues.
Teachers also teach
teachers outside of schools. Meetings of professional associations and
teachers' unions include numerous workshops and presentations in which
teachers share their knowledge with other teachers. Other examples
include the Physics Teacher Resource Agent Project of the American
Association of Physics Teachers and the Woodrow Wilson Fellows, in which
teachers are trained to provide workshops in instructional methods and
materials, as well as content, for other teachers (Van Hise, 1986).
Third, teachers learn
from teacher educators in their schools, in degree programs, and in
specific teacher enhancement projects that are often provided by
consultants. In the 1960s, teachers were trained in this way to use
behavioral objectives; in the 1970s, they were taught Madeline Hunter's
lesson structure; and currently, they are offered such topics as
constructivism, alternative assessments, and cooperative learning.
Teacher enhancement programs funded by federal agencies, such as the
National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, tend
to organize training by subject area and are often tied to innovations
in curriculum or pedagogy.
Fourth, many teachers
enroll in graduate programs. Some states require a master's degree or
continuing education to maintain certification, and most school
districts tie teachers' salaries to their level of education (Renyi,
1996). For the most part, teachers take graduate courses in education
rather than in the subject matter of their teaching because of the lack
of disciplinary graduate courses that are offered after school hours or
during the summer.
Finally, teachers also
learn about teaching in ways that are separate from their formal
professional work. They learn about intellectual and moral development
in their roles as parents. They learn about nondidactic forms of
instruction through such activities as coaching (Lucido, 1988) and other
youth-related work in their communities.
Because of the wide
variety of ways in which teachers continue to learn about teaching and
learning, it is difficult to generalize about or judge the quality of
the teachers' learning experiences. One fact is clear, however: there
are relatively few opportunities available if measured in financial
terms. Overall, there is minimal public investment in formal
opportunities for professional development for practicing teachers.
Most school districts spend only between 1 and 3 percent of their
operating budgets for professional development, even with salaries
factored in. This lack of investment in personnel is unheard of either
in leading corporations or in schools in other countries (Kearns, 1988).
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QUALITY OF LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES |
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Even when resources are
formally provided for teachers' continued development, opportunities for
effective learning vary in terms of quality. In this section we analyze
the quality of teachers' learning experiences from the perspectives on
learning environments discussed in Chapter
6--namely, the degree to which they are learner centered, knowledge
centered, assessment centered, and community centered (see Figure 6.1 in Chapter 6).
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Learner-Centered Environments |
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As noted in Chapter 6, environments that are learner-centered
attempt to build on the strengths, interests, and needs of the learners.
Many efforts to facilitate teacher learning fall short in this regard;
they often consist of required lectures and workshops that are not
tailored to teachers' needs. Two-thirds of U.S. teachers state that
they have no say in what or how they learn in the professional
development opportunities provided to them in schools (U.S. Department
of Education, 1994).
The importance of
learner-centered instruction can be illustrated by considering the case
of Ellen and Molly, two teachers at a progressive urban high school.
Ellen is a 25-year seasoned English teacher, a master at teaching
writing, opening doors to literature for all students, and creating high
standards for her students and ensuring that they achieve them. She is
a strong mentor to beginning teachers. For her continuing professional
growth, she craves meetings with other faculty members to develop
curriculum. This is how she experiences strong intellectual camaraderie
and maintains the interest and challenge she needs to keep vital in the
classroom. Ellen wants the stimulus of talking about the big ideas with
colleagues. She needs the adult interactions to balance and enhance her
student interactions.
In contrast to Ellen,
Molly is a second-year science teacher whose primary professional
concerns involve classroom management and how to develop and maintain
it. Molly must master these fundamentals before she can implement any
new approach to curriculum, instruction, and assessment. She needs to
see how to coordinate work on curriculum and assessment with the
development of norms and responsibilities in the classroom that help all
students learn. Obviously, Ellen and Molly have very different needs
for professional growth, for becoming better teachers.
It can be difficult to
meet the different needs of Ellen and Molly and all their colleagues.
In a study of the development and implementation of Minds on
Physics (Leonard et al., 1999a-f), it quickly became apparent to the
development team and the evaluators that they did not have the resources
available to tailor professional development to the needs of the
individual teachers (Feldman and Kropf, 1997). The 37 teachers in the
project taught at different levels (high school and community college),
in different settings (urban, suburban, and rural), had different
undergraduate majors and different amounts of graduate studies, and
ranged from new teachers to 30-year veterans.
Some projects provide
professional development opportunities that include different stages of
participation. The Wisconsin Teacher Enhancement Program in Biology
(WTEPB) provides teachers with multiple roles that change as they become
more expert in teaching science. Betty Overland, an elementary teacher
in Madison, went from avoiding the teaching of science to being "an
enthusiastic missionary for reform in science in the elementary schools"
(Renyi, 1996:51). She began by participating in a 2-week workshop.
This led to her involvement with the members of the biology department
at the University of Wisconsin, and she then borrowed their equipment
and invited their faculty to visit her class. The next summer she was a
facilitator for one of the classes offered to teachers by WTEPB, and she
continued to participate in other workshops and served as a facilitator
for others. Eventually, she found herself on a panel as an advocate for
a new science education program (Renyi, 1996).
Other ways of dealing
with diverse needs include encouraging teachers to form interest groups
around particular topics and projects (see, e.g., Cognition and
Technology Group at Vanderbilt, in press). New technologies provide
opportunities for communication and on-line learning that can connect
teachers with others who share their interests and needs (see Chapter 9).
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Knowledge-Centered Environments |
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As discussed in Chapter 6, effective learning environments are
knowledge centered as well as learner centered. Ideally, opportunities
for teacher learning include a focus on pedagogical content knowledge
(Shulman, 1966; see also Chapters 2 and 7), but many fall short of this ideal. For example,
the "knowledge" taught by teachers to teachers and supplied by
consultants is often not supported by research about learning (Barone et
al., 1996). In addition, workshops for teachers often focus more on
generic pedagogy (e.g., cooperative learning) than on the need to
integrate pedagogy with the content of various disciplines.
A case study of Mrs. O
illustrates the importance of helping teachers rethink their
disciplinary knowledge as well as their teaching strategies. She
attended several summer workshops that used the mathematics curriculum
Math Their Way (Baratta-Lorton, 1976); the workshops introduced
her to new teaching techniques. After the workshops she saw the
transformation of her practice as complete as she made some changes in
her teaching at the elementary school level that reflected the then-new
California mathematics framework. However, she stopped short of
rethinking her knowledge of mathematics and saw no need for additional
education.
Mrs. O's lack of
interest in continued learning seemed to be related to the nature of the
workshops that she attended (Cohen, 1990). For Mrs. O to accept the new
reform on a deeper level, she would have had to unlearn old mathematics,
learn new concepts of teaching mathematics, and have a much more
substantial understanding of mathematics itself. The workshops that
Mrs. O attended provided her only with teaching techniques, not with the
deep understanding of mathematics and mathematics teaching and learning
that she would need to implement the reform as envisioned by
policymakers.
Preliminary attempts to
educate teachers to use Minds on Physics (Leonard et al.,
1999a-f) also illustrate the difficulty of getting teachers to rethink
the nature of their disciplines. Teachers were provided with an in-depth
summer workshop, three academic year follow-ups, and contact with the
curriculum developers through mail, electronic mail, and telephone.
Even though the teachers changed their understanding of concepts, such
as constructivism, and learned new teaching methods, such as
collaborative group work, many of their fundamental beliefs about their
students and about the purpose of high school physics did not change.
For example, while the new curriculum focused on content organized
around big ideas as a way to engender deep conceptual understanding of
physics, the teachers believed that the purpose of their courses was to
provide their students with an overview of all physics because their
students would never take another physics course (Feldman and Kropf,
1997).
Several professional
development projects for teachers use subject matter as the primary
vehicle for learning; teachers learn how to teach a subject by focusing
on their own experiences as learners. Examples include SummerMath
(Schifter and Fosnot, 1993), the Bay Area and National Writing Project
(Bay Area Writing Project, 1979; Freedman, 1985a, b), and the Chicago
Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science (Stake and Migotsky, 1995).
In SummerMath, teachers solve mathematics problems together or actually
participate in authoring texts. Teachers also write cases about their
children's mathematics learning; this engages their own subject-matter
knowledge--or lack thereof--which leads them to struggle with their own
mathematics learning (Schifter and Fosnot, 1993).
In Project SEED
(Science for Early Education Development), elementary school teachers in
Pasadena were provided with opportunities to learn about science content
and pedagogy by working with the curriculum kits that they would be
using in the classroom. Teachers were introduced to content by
experienced mentor teachers and scientists, who worked with them as they
used the kits (Marsh and Sevilla, 1991).
It can be difficult for
teachers to undertake the task of rethinking their subject matter.
Learning involves making oneself vulnerable and taking risks, and this
is not how teachers often see their role. Particularly in areas like
mathematics and science, elementary teachers often lack confidence, and
they worry about admitting that they don't know or understand for fear
of colleagues' and administrators' reactions (see, e.g., Heaton, 1992;
Ball and Rundquist, 1993; Peterson and Barnes, 1996; Lampert, in press).
In addition, teachers generally are accustomed to feeling
efficacious--to knowing that they can affect students' learning--and
they are accustomed to being in control. When they encourage students
to actively explore issues and generate questions, it is almost
inevitable that they will encounter questions that they cannot
answer--and this can be threatening. Helping teachers become
comfortable with the role of learner is very important. Providing them
with access to subject-matter expertise is also extremely important.
New developments in technology (see Chapter 9)
provide avenues for helping teachers and their students gain wider
access to expertise.
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Assessment-Centered Environments |
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Environments that are
assessment centered provide opportunities for learners to test their
understanding by trying out things and receiving feedback. Such
opportunities are important to teacher learning for a number of reasons.
One is that teachers often don't know if certain ideas will work unless
they are prompted to try them with their students and see what happens;
see Box 8.1. In addition to
providing evidence of success, feedback provides opportunities to
clarify ideas and correct misconceptions. Especially important are
opportunities to receive feedback from colleagues who observe attempts
to implement new ideas in classrooms. Without feedback, it is difficult
to correct potentially erroneous ideas.
A report from a group
of researchers highlights the importance of classroom-based feedback
(Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1997). They attempted to
implement ideas for teaching that had been developed by several of their
colleagues at different universities. The researchers were very
familiar with the material and could easily recite relevant theory and
data. However, once they faced the challenge of helping teachers
implement the ideas in local classrooms in their area, they realized the
need for much more guidance. They knew many facts about the colleagues'
programs, but did not know how to translate them into action (see Chapter 2 for discussions of conditionalized expert
knowledge). Without extended opportunities for more information and
feedback, the researchers did not know how to proceed.
After several months,
the researchers and their teacher collaborators began to feel
comfortable with their attempts at implementation. The colleagues who
had developed the new programs visited the classrooms in the
researchers' city and provided feedback. There were numerous errors of
implementation, which could be traced to an inadequate understanding of
the new programs. The experience taught all participants a valuable
lesson. The colleagues who had developed the programs realized that
they had not been as clear as they should have been about their ideas
and procedures. The researchers experienced the difficulty of
implementing new programs and realized that their errors would have
remained invisible without feedback about what was wrong.
Certification programs
are being developed that are designed to help teachers reflect on and
improve their practice. Suggestions for reflection help teachers focus
on aspects of their teaching that they might otherwise have failed to
notice. In addition, teachers preparing for certification often ask
peers to provide feedback on their teaching and their ideas. Billie
Hicklin, a seventh-grade teacher in North Carolina, was one of the first
teachers to participate in the National Board certification process
(Bunday and Kelly, 1996). She found that the structured reflection that
was required for certification resulted in her making significant
changes in her teaching practices and in the ways that she interacts
with colleagues (Renyi, 1996).
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Community-Centered Environments |
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Community-centered
environments involve norms that encourage collaboration and learning.
An important approach to enhancing teacher learning is to develop
communities of practice, an approach that involves collaborative peer
relationships and teachers' participation in educational research and
practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Examples include the Bay Area Writing
Project (1979); the Cognitively Guided Instruction Project (Carpenter
and Fennema, 1992; Carpenter et al., 1989, 1996); Minstrell and Hunt's
(Minstrell, 1989) physics and mathematics teacher group; the Annenberg
Critical Friends Project; and Fredericksen and White (1994) "video
clubs," where teachers share tapes of lessons they have taught and
discuss the strengths and weaknesses of what they see.
As part of these
communities, teachers share successes and failures with pedagogy and
curriculum development. For example, the Annenberg Institute's critical
friends groups are led by a teacher/coach, trained in process skills and
diverse ways of looking at student work. The groups can be anything to
which the teachers agree, but usually involve issues of student
achievement, such as, "What is good work?" "How do we know?" and "How do
we develop shared standards for good work?"
Some communities of
practice are supported by school districts. For example, at the Dade
Academy for the Teaching Arts (DATA) in Florida, "extern" teachers spend
a 9-week sabbatical working with resident teachers, who have reduced
teaching assignments at neighboring Miami Beach High School. The
externs design their own programs, do research projects, and participate
in group seminars. In DATA, the community of practice is supported by
providing the extern teachers with sabbaticals, supporting the resident
teachers through reduced loads, and by giving the program a
home--portable classrooms next to Miami Beach High School (Renyi, 1996).
The notion of bringing
teachers together to review student work in a nonjudgmental fashion is
also embodied in the "Descriptive Review" (Carini, 1979). Again, the
central questions involve looking deeply at student work, not trying to
provide reasons (psychological, social, economic) that the student might
not be producing strong academic work. This approach often uses student
artwork to help teachers identify student strengths. Project Zero's
"collaborative review process" (Perkins, 1992) for teachers builds on
the descriptive review approach and adds some new elements as well, such
as a variety of computer networks for teachers. Examples of computer
networks include BreadNet, out of the Breadloaf Writing Project, LabNet
(Ruopp, 1993), and Mathline (Cole, 1996). Other ways to foster
collaboration include opportunities to score and discuss student essays
or to compare and discuss student portfolios (Wiske, 1998).
Collaborative
discussions become most valuable when two teachers are jointly involved
in sense-making and understanding of the phenomena of learning (e.g.,
Peterson et al., 1989). For example, in creating a new functions-based
approach to algebra teaching for all students, teacher colleagues at
Holt High School report how important for learning it was for two
teachers to "team" together in the same classroom and share decisions
(Yerushalmy et al., 1990). Every day these two algebra teachers had to
discuss and agree on what to do next. This joint decisionmaking
required reflection and discussion on the texts of specific algebra
problems, as well as discussion of students' understanding of functions,
as reflected in the classroom discussions and in students' writings.
Coming to joint decisions required these teachers to wrestle with issues
of mathematics and mathematics learning around their own specific
problems of practice as teachers, such as what constitutes valid
evidence for students' understanding in the specific day-to-day
situation.
Overall, two major
themes emerge from studies of teacher collaborations: the importance of
shared experiences and discourse around texts and data about student
learning and a necessity for shared decisions. These findings are
consistent with analyses of situated learning and discourse (Greeno et
al., 1996); empirical studies of high school teachers' use of
information in their work (Natriello et al., 1994), and models of
assessment as situated discourse around texts (Case and Moss, 1996).
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ACTION RESEARCH |
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Action research
represents another approach to enhancing teacher learning by proposing
ideas to a community of learners. Action research is an approach to
professional development in which, typically, teachers spend 1 or more
years working on classroom-based research projects. While action
research has multiple forms and purposes, it is an important way for
teachers to improve their teaching and their curricula, and there is
also an assumption that what teachers learn through this process can be
shared with others (Noffke, 1997). Action research contributes to
sustained teacher learning and becomes a way for teachers to teach other
teachers (Feldman, 1993). It encourages teachers to support each
other's intellectual and pedagogical growth, and it increases the
professional standing of teachers by recognizing their ability to add to
knowledge about teaching. Ideally, active engagement in research on
teaching and learning also helps set the stage for understanding the
implications of new theories of how people learn.
The teachers of the
Physics Teacher Action Research Group (PTARG) in the San Francisco Bay
area practice a form of collaborative action research called enhanced
normal practice (Feldman, 1996). In regular group meetings, the
teachers discuss their students' work. Between the meetings they try
out pedagogical and curricular ideas from the group. They then report
to the group on successes and failures and critically analyze the
implementation of the ideas. In addition to generating and sharing of
pedagogical content knowledge, the PTARG teachers came to deeper
understandings of their subject area (Feldman, 1993; see also
Hollingsworth, 1994, on work with urban literacy teachers).
Action research can
also be tailored to the level of expertise and the needs of the
teachers, especially if the teachers set the goals for the research and
work collaboratively. Because action research is a constructivist
process set in a social situation, teachers' beliefs about learning,
their students, and their conceptions of themselves as learners are
explicitly examined, challenged, and supported. When action research is
conducted in a collaborative mode among teachers, it fosters the growth
of learning communities. In fact, some of these communities have
flourished for as many as 20 years, such as the Philadelphia Teachers
Learning Cooperative and the Classroom Action Research Network (Feldman,
1996; Hollingsworth, 1994; Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993).
Unfortunately, the use
of action research as a model of sustained teacher learning is hampered
by lack of time and other resources. Teachers in the United States are
generally not provided with paid time for such professional activities
as action research. To provide that time would require financial
resources that are not available to most school districts. As a result,
teachers either engage in action research on their own time, as part of
credit-bearing courses, or as part of separately funded projects.
Typically, when the course is over or when the project ends, teachers'
formal action research ends. While teachers have claimed that they have
incorporated action research into their practice in an informal manner,
there is little research that has examined what that means.
The sustainability of
action research is also hampered by the difference between practitioner
research and academic research. If academicians are to encourage
teachers to do action research, they need to have models that fit the
temporal flow of school teaching (Feldman and Atkin, 1995) and rely on
forms of validity that are appropriate to research in the practical
domain (Feldman, 1994; Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993).
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PRESERVICE EDUCATION |
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Preservice programs
that prepare new teachers will play an especially important role during
the next few decades (Darling-Hammond, 1997:162):
The United States will need to hire 2 million
teachers over the next decade to meet the demands of rapidly rising
enrollments, growing retirements, and attrition that can reach 30% for
beginning teachers in their initial years . . . . [All] will need to be
prepared to teach an increasingly diverse group of learners to
ever-higher standards of academic achievement.
Most of the nation's
new teachers will come from teacher education programs that have
considerable structural variation. First, teacher education can be an
undergraduate major or a program that is in addition to an academic
major. Second, there can be an expectation that the program can be
completed within the traditional 4 years of undergraduate study or that
it is a 5-year or masters degree program as advocated by the Holmes
Group (1986). Third, programs for initial teacher preparation can be
university or college based or located primarily in the field. Finally,
programs can differ as to whether they are primarily academic programs
or whether their main purpose is certification or licensing.
While programs can vary
in these ways, they tend to have several components in common: some
subject-matter preparation, usually liberal arts or general education
for prospective elementary teachers and subject-matter concentration for
prospective secondary teachers; a series of foundational courses, such
as philosophy, sociology, history, psychology of education; one or more
developmental, learning, and cognitive psychology courses; methods ("how
to") courses; and a sequence of field experiences (see Goodlad, 1990).
What differs among the programs is the primacy of the different
components, the instructors' goals for their program and their courses,
and the attitudes and beliefs that students bring to them.
Four philosophical
traditions of practice have dominated teacher education in the twentieth
century (Zeichner and Liston, 1990:4):
1. an academic
tradition that emphasizes teachers' knowledge of subject matter and
their ability to transform that subject matter to promote student
understanding;
2. a social
efficiency tradition that emphasizes teachers' abilities to apply
thoughtfully a "knowledge base" about teaching that has been generated
through research on teaching;
3. a
developmentalist tradition that stresses teachers' abilities to base
their instruction on their direct knowledge of their students--their
mental readiness for particular activities; and
4. a social
reconstructionist tradition that emphasizes teachers' abilities to
analyze social contexts in terms of their contribution to greater
equality, justice, and elevation of the human condition in schooling and
society.
Although these
traditions can act as useful heuristics for understanding the guiding
principles of particular teacher education programs, it is important to
realize that most programs do not fit neatly within the categories
(Zeichner, 1981). And even though these traditions underlie teacher
education programs, students are often not aware of them explicitly
(Zeichner and Liston, 1990). The actual experiences of many prospective
teachers often obscure the philosophical or ideological notions that
guide their preparatory years, which color evaluations of the quality of
preservice experiences (see below).
The components of
teacher education programs--collections of courses, field experiences,
and student teaching--tend to be disjointed (Goodlad, 1990); they are
often taught or overseen by people who have little ongoing communication
with each other. Even when the components are efficiently organized,
there may be no shared philosophical base among the faculty. Moreover,
grading policies in college classes can undercut collaboration, and
students rarely have a chance to form teams who stay together for a
significant portion of their education (unlike the team approach to
problem-based learning in medical schools (see, e.g., Barrows, 1985).
Political factors have strong effects on teacher education. Many
"misguided regulatory intrusions" (Goodlad, 1990:189)--from schools,
colleges, accreditation boards, and state and federal departments of
education--have a negative effect on teacher education programs. The
regulations often interfere with attempts to develop coherent and
innovative programs that can prepare teachers to teach. The majority of
teachers are educated in state colleges and universities, the budgets of
which are controlled by state legislators and governors, and they teach
in public schools that are affected by local politics through school
boards, as well as by the same statewide influences (Elmore and Sykes,
1992). It is not surprising that these many forces do not lead to the
most innovative teacher education programs.
The National Commission
on Teaching and America's Future (1996) identified several problems with
current preservice teacher preparation programs:
- Inadequate time: 4-year undergraduate degrees make it difficult
for prospective elementary teachers to learn subject matter and for
prospective secondary teachers to learn about the nature of learners and
learning.
- Fragmentation: The traditional program arrangement (foundations
courses, developmental psychology sequence, methods courses, and field
experiences) offers disconnected courses that novices are expected to
pull together into some meaningful, coherent whole.
- Uninspired teaching methods: Although teachers are supposed to
excite students about learning, teacher preparation methods courses are
often lectures and recitation. So, prospective teachers who do not have
hands-on, "minds-on" experiences with learning are expected to provide
these kinds of experiences for students.
- Superficial curriculum: The need to fulfill certification
requirements and degree requirements leads to programs that provide
little depth in subject matter or in educational studies, such as
research on teaching and learning. Not enough subject-matter courses are
included in teachers' preparation.
The effects of these
problems can be seen in the complaints that preservice teacher education
students have about foundations courses that seem disjointed and
irrelevant to practice, or are "too theoretical" and have no bearing on
what "real" teachers do in "real" classrooms with "real" students. They
also complain that methods courses are time consuming and without
intellectual substance. When methods courses explore the theory and
research bases for instructional methods and curricula, the students
complain that they are not oriented enough toward practice.
These problems in
preservice education impede lifelong learning in at least two ways.
First, a message is sent to prospective teachers that research in
education, whether on teaching or learning, has little to do with
schooling and, therefore, that they do not need to learn about the
findings from research. Second, the importance of viewing themselves as
subject-matter experts is not emphasized to teachers--especially
teachers in the early and middle grades: they fall into believing the
old saw that "those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Teachers are
not encouraged to seek the knowledge and understanding that would allow
them to teach academically rigorous curricula.
Even teachers who
attend institutions that provide a strong preparation for teaching face
major challenges after they graduate. They need to make the transition
from a world dominated primarily by college courses, with only some
supervised teaching experiences, to a world in which they are the
teachers; hence, they face the challenge of transferring what they have
learned. Yet even with strong levels of initial learning, transfer does
not happen immediately nor automatically (see Chapter
3). People often need help in order to use relevant knowledge that
they have acquired, and they usually need feedback and reflection so
that they can try out and adapt their previously acquired skills and
knowledge in new environments. These environments--the schools--have an
extremely important effect on the beliefs, knowledge, and skills that
new teachers will draw on. It is the difficult transition, in Lee
Shulman's (1986) terms, from expert learner to novice teacher.
Many of the schools
that teachers enter are organized in ways that are not consistent with
new developments in the science of learning. The schools often favor
"covering the curriculum," testing for isolated sets of skills and
knowledge, and solo teaching, with limited use and understanding of new
technologies (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future,
1996). When student teachers enter their first classrooms, the
instructional methods, curricula, and resources can be very different
from the ones they learned about in teacher education programs. So
although prospective teachers are often anxious to begin their student
teaching and find it the most satisfying aspect of their teacher
preparation (Hollins, 1995), the dissonance between this experience and
their course work supports the belief that educational theory and
research have little to do with classroom practice.
Most new teachers are
required to "sink or swim" in their initial teaching placement (National
Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996:39). New teachers are
often given the most challenging assignments--more students with special
educational needs, the greatest number of class preparations (some
outside of their field of expertise), and many extracurricular
duties--and they are usually asked to take on these responsibilities
with little or no support from administrators or senior colleagues. It
is not surprising that turnover among new teachers is extremely high,
particularly in the first 3 years of teaching.
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CONCLUSION |
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Teachers are key to
enhancing learning in schools. In order to teach in a manner consistent
with new theories of learning, extensive learning opportunities for
teachers are required.
We assume that what is
known about learning applies to teachers as well as their students. Yet
teacher learning is a relatively new topic of research, so there is not
a great deal of data about it. Nevertheless, there are a number of rich
case studies that investigate teachers' learning over extended time
periods and these cases, plus other information, provide data on
learning opportunities available to teachers from the perspective of
what is known about how people learn.
Much of what
constitutes the typical approaches to formal teacher professional
development are antithetical to what research findings indicate as
promoting effective learning. The typical workshops tend to occur once,
deal with decontextualized information, and often do not resonate with
teachers' perceived needs. By contrast, research evidence indicates
that the most successful teacher professional development activities are
those that are extended over time and encourage the development of
teachers' learning communities. These kinds of activities have been
accomplished by creating opportunities for shared experiences and
discourse around shared texts and data about student learning, and focus
on shared decisionmaking. The learning communities of teachers also
allow for differing kinds of background training and for variations in
their readiness to learn. Successful programs involve teachers in
learning activities that are similar to ones that they will use with
their students.
Many learning
opportunities for teachers fall short when viewed from the perspectives
of being learner, knowledge, assessment, and community centered. But
there are examples of successful programs that appear to fit these
conditions quite well. Many programs for preservice teachers also fall
short of providing the kinds of learning experiences suggested by new
developments in the science of learning. They need well-defined goals
for learning, beliefs about how people learn that are grounded in
theory, and a rigorous academic curriculum that emphasizes depth of
understanding.
While the flaws of
preservice and inservice programs have serious consequences for how well
teachers are prepared to begin teaching, they may also significantly
affect teachers' lifelong learning and development as professionals. In
particular, the dissonance between what is taught in college courses and
what happens in classrooms can lead to later rejection of educational
research and theory by teachers. This is due, in part, to the ways in
which they have been taught in the disciplines and how their colleagues
teach. Although teachers are urged to use student-centered,
constructivist, depth-versus-breadth approaches in their education
classes, new teachers often see traditional teaching approaches in use
at the college level and in the classroom next door. Beginning teachers
are especially influenced by the nature of the schools in which they
begin their teaching.
Successful learning for
teachers requires a continuum of coordinated efforts that range from
preservice education to early teaching to opportunities for lifelong
development as professionals. Creating such opportunities, built out of
the knowledge base from the science of learning, represents a major
challenge, but it is not an impossible task.
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