Improving Teacher Education Through Longitudinal Research: How studying our graduates led us to give priority to program planning and vision for teaching

Abstract

As pre-service instructors, we turned to longitudinal study of our graduates as a primary means of finding out how our courses could better prepare student teachers for the challenging early years of teaching. In addition, we used other self-study methods, notably regular feedback from student teachers during the program. The study of 22 graduates over their first three years of teaching revealed that program planning and vision for teaching were two especially important areas that were not adequately addressed in pre-service. In this paper we discuss how we changed our courses to be more effective in these areas.

Keywords:

• teacher education
• literacy instruction
• longitudinal research
• program planning
• self-study research

Acknowledgement

We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support of this research.