Experts at Being Novices: What New Teachers Can Add to Practice-based Teacher Education Efforts

ABSTRACT

Understood as one approach to enacting a practice-based pedagogy of teacher education, core practices (CPs) have in the last decade become part of the discussion in general teacher education, and within particular content areas. CPs are viewed as practices that are essential to student learning and critical to novice teachers’ (NTs’) early career success. However, while these pedagogies may serve as an important scaffold to NT learning, their impact on NT practice is still mostly unknown, and efforts to develop practice-based pedagogies have largely been led by researchers, with little direct involvement by PK-12 practitioners. In this paper, we argue that more intentional and purposeful involvement of NTs in the development, selection, and refinement of CPs generates greater potential to support NT practice. Drawing upon observations of NT practice, interviews, and transcripts from meetings of our collaborative team of NTs and teacher educators, we illustrate how engaging NTs as knower-learners can contribute to the development of more responsive pedagogies of teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Core practices
• practice-based teacher education
• beginning teachers
• English language learners
• dialogic

Acknowledgments

We are deeply thankful to the teachers, administrators, students, and schools involved in this study, without whom this work would not have been possible. We also gratefully acknowledge the thoughtful and insightful feedback of Drs. Francesca Forzani, Elham Kazemi, Judy Sharkey, Francis Troyan, and Linda Valli on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Bullock (2011) defines propositional knowledge as “research-based knowledge,” or “the kind of theoretical knowledge generally assumed to be both created and taught by members of the academy” (p. 23).

2. These piloting processes were undertaken by Megan Peercy in her elementary ESOL literacy methods course, one of the first courses NTs took in the program. Through a process of refinement, the CPs focused upon varied over time, but frequently included scaffolding, comprehensible input, the development of content and language objectives, and opportunities for receptive and productive language use. For further insight into the development of our CPs, we include three versions that demonstrate their evolution over time. Figure 1 was collaboratively generated by our group in August 2015; Figure 2 represents our conceptualization as of February 2016, and Figure 3 and Table 3 shows our current version, which has been collaboratively generated and refined by our group from 2016 to the present. The CPs continued to evolve between these points in time, but these artifacts show our thinking at three points across the process of development.

3. In pull-out models, instruction occurs individually or in small groups separate from grade-level classroom instruction. In plug-in models, instruction occurs in the grade-level classroom and can occur in small group rotations, co-teaching of the entire class, and other formats.

4. We use this term because it was frequently used by the teachers and others in their settings. Synonymous terms include classroom, grade-level, or content area teachers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan Madigan Peercy

Megan Madigan Peercy is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on pedagogies of teacher education; the development of teacher educators; and the preparation and development of teachers throughout their careers, as they work with linguistically and culturally diverse learners. She is deeply invested in understanding the ways in which practice and theory can be in dialogue. Her recent research appears in Teaching and Teacher Education, Language Teaching Research, and TESOL Journal.

Tabitha Kidwell

Tabitha Kidwell is a Professorial Lecturer in the TESOL program at American University. She has taught languages and worked with teachers on five continents. Her research focuses on language teacher education, particularly how language teachers are prepared to teach about culture. Her recent work has been published in Multicultural Education, Kappa Delta Pi Record, and Language, Culture, and Curriculum.

Megan DeStefano Lawyer

Megan DeStefano Lawyer is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests related to the teaching and learning of English language learners include cross-age peer learning, teacher collaboration, and novice teacher preparation and a former elementary ESOL teacher.

Johanna Tigert

Johanna Tigert is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her research focuses on social contexts of language teaching and learning and the development of teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions for working with linguistically and culturally diverse learners. Her recent research appears in Language, Culture and Curriculum and TESOL Journal.

Daisy Fredricks

Daisy Fredricks is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University. Her research focuses on English learner education, restrictive language education policy and practice, and pre-service teacher preparation. Her current research focuses on the daily instructional practices that teachers utilize with emergent bilingual youth—and how the youth respond to such practices. She has publications in Bilingual Research Journal, International Multilingual Research Journal, CATESOL Journal, as well as in peer-reviewed book collections.

Karen Feagin

Karen Feagin is a PhD student at the University of Maryland, in Applied Linguistics and Language Education. Her research focuses on educational language policy, both at the classroom level, studying how teachers manage language in multilingual classrooms, and at the macro level, taking a critical perspective on the assessment of bilingual children.

Megan Stump

Megan Stump is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include the emotional dimension of learning to teach, second language teacher education, and sociocultural theory. She is interested in exploring teacher emotions as mediational spaces and how emotional experiences can be used productively for teacher development.