Making teacher education matter

Learning to teach takes time, will, and huge support that is both caring and carefully calibrated to the individual. That is the message of each of the articles in this issue of Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice. Beginning with Fred Korthagen’s consideration of teachers’ professional learning and finishing with the remarkable work of Claire Dickerson, Joy Jarvis, Roger Levy, and Kit Thomas studying ‘Action Reflection Modeling,’ readers will find the whole issue refreshing. Refreshing because, for the most part, the authors whose work is represented here do not argue that they have solved the problem of bringing theory, research, and practice together in teacher education. Rather, they acknowledge it as the core problem of teacher education understood as the whole of a teacher’s professional life; they draw powerfully across a fifty-plus year spectrum of research on preservice and inservice education highlighting what has been learned; and they use that research to help them both shape and evaluate their effort by looking at themselves as teachers of teachers.

Foundational to Fred Korthagen’s ‘Inconvenient truths about teacher learning: Towards professional development 3.0’ is the understanding that ‘… much of a teacher’s behavior is unconsciously guided by three dimensions (the cognitive, affective and motivational dimensions), and that teacher learning takes place at (these) various levels.’ Not exactly new news to many teacher educators but, as Korthagen proceeds to demonstrate, most of us forget it and so does most of the policy world. There seems to be a collective amnesia among teacher educators about the fact that our students whether at the undergraduate or graduate level arrive in our preservice teacher education programs with a wealth of experience of schooling and a lot of time watching teachers at work. We pay lip service to the idea of what Dan Lortie (1975) described as the apprenticeship of observation, but, as Korthagen reminds us in this article, few of us remember that, ‘… we have to take their thinking, feeling and wanting into account’ and make knowing our students essential to our teaching.

This is in keeping with what many us who have come to know Korthagen’s work have tried to implement in our preservice teacher education programs. What’s new here is the serious message that teacher education can only be successful if teacher educators radically shift practice taking it beyond preservice into the development and support of professional learning communities that enable collaboration, experimentation, and reflection. ‘It is impossible to promote change through a pre-planned, fixed curriculum,’ writes Korthagen. Instead, he holds that ‘we need a shift in focus from the curriculum to the learner.’ In the long run, ‘Attempts at influencing teacher behavior have to be adjusted to individual teachers in their specific circumstances and settings.’ This is, as Korthagen reminds us, ‘… always value- based work … which means that it starts from what practitioners themselves value in their own work.’

An appropriate follow-up to Korthagen’s paper, is Sharon Nichols, Paul Schutz, Kelly Rodgers and Kimberly Bilica’s ‘Early career teachers’ emotion and emerging teacher identities.’ While the focus of Nichols and her colleagues is on emotion and identity formation among new teachers, the message that the development of teachers’ identity evolves over time, is affected by contexts in which they find themselves, and has much to do with how their tacit images of teaching (Rust, 2005) – that these mesh with their daily practical decisions is very much in line with what Korthagen has been telling us about professional learning. At the core, as Nichols and her colleagues have found, is emotion and the ways in which teachers’ emotions ‘inform their beliefs about teaching and their identities as emergent teaching professionals.’ They write that, ‘New teachers, who are learning about how to navigate the management and instructional pressures of teaching, may need to engage in mindful attribution work surrounding the (perceived) successes and failures of their teaching practice.’ As with Korthagen, there is a call here for the engagement of teacher educators beyond the preservice program to help new teachers read the moment in ways that enable their long-term professional growth.

Complicating the call for a change in preservice and inservice teacher education is the fact that few schools are organized to support the student-centered instruction that recent research on learning demonstrates to be essential to the type of critical thinking that is increasingly necessary in a technologically-oriented, information rich society. In their paper, ‘Student-centered learning (SCL): Roles changed?’ Gülen Onurkan Aliusta and Bekir Özer get at the conundrum of how schools can make the shift from teacher-centered practice to SCL. Here, as in the earlier papers of this issue, the complexity of the change process emerges. While it is clear that many teacher education programs have shifted their curricula to support student-centered teaching, it is also clear that many new teachers have never experienced such teaching prior to their preservice experience and that they do not see it in their field experiences because few veteran teachers are able to make such a shift on their own. Hence, the opportunity for new teachers to internalize student-centered practices in ways that both support SCL and influence practice in schools is unlikely unless there is intentional engagement of teacher education that blurs the boundaries between preservice and inservice learning.

The critical issue in shifting priorities around professional education and especially in raising up new models is context as Lalit Sharma’s study, ‘Teachers’ perspective on institutional barriers to academic entrepreneurship – a case of Uttarakhand state, India’ demonstrates. Using the development of an entrepreneurship program, a content area that does not typically fit into our thinking about teacher education, Sharma documents the difficulty of adapting new education systems to well established ones when context is either little understood or simply ignored. Here, though there has been a press for entrepreneurial education, the effort to develop a genuine program that really will prepare students as entrepreneurs flounders. In so many ways, this study echoes failed efforts to bring teacher preparation and teachers’ professional learning together as one and the same enterprise placing universities and schools together as serious partners in professional education.

With their paper, ‘A qualitative literature review of educational games in the classroom: The teacher’s pedagogical activities,’ Marjaana Kangas, Antti Koskinen, and Leena Krokfors look at settings where student centered learning happens and it makes for exhilarating reading because so much of what we have learned about constructivist practice that supports genuine student engagement and learning is alive and well in the best gaming settings that these authors have reviewed. By illustrating the tremendous skill that is required of teachers when they bring games into their practice, this study dispels the notion that student-centered practice means the teacher has to give up control of the class. What we see here is what Maria Montessori showed us so long ago: the teacher can prepare the environment to work as another teacher in the classroom. Here, write Kangas and her colleagues,

This means that it is the teacher who makes the educational decisions. When the teacher, for example, acknowledges the teachable moments and uses them for promoting students’ learning, that decision-making is based on the teacher’s pedagogical thinking (Kansanen, 1999; Kansanen et al., 2000). Furthermore, based on his/her pedagogical thinking, the teacher creates the pedagogical framework in which aims as well as time- and place-related factors are defined, and the use of the game-based learning environment is justified in relation to the curriculum.

This is powerful. What we learn is that the kind of ‘presence’ that Rodgers and Raider-Roth (2006) or the ‘flow’ that Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi (1998) describe are possible in classrooms but not likely for new teachers to achieve on their own since deep content knowledge and understanding of one’s students as well as the capacity to reflect in the moment and know how to guide the action are requisite.

In their article, ‘Validating a model of effective teaching behavior of pre-service teachers,’ Ridwan Maulana, Michelle Helms-Lorenz, and Wim Van de Grift, write that expecting such knowledge and skills of preservice teachers is inappropriate. However, they suggest that, if we know (and we do) that first year teachers will not teach as well as veteran teachers, then, they ask, can we develop a realistic set of standards for preservice students that enables them to develop teaching behaviors that positively impact student engagement while they are still in their preservice programs? The model developed here is interesting. Like Ball and Forzani’s (2010) call for preservice teachers to develop the ‘requisite skills’ to begin well or Grossman and her colleagues’ (2009) investigation of core practices in fields similar to teaching, there is in this paper a sense that there could be a unified set of practices that, with intense trial and error in the field, all teachers are prepared to enact in their first year. These could enable a jumpstart for them and the schools that hire them thereby moving teaching practice forward and to a higher level. The messy issue here is that, as Korthagen reminds us at the beginning of this issue, the contexts of practice and the individual understandings that we teacher educators have of our students and they of theirs – these factors make a unitary approach extremely problematic unless there is a higher resolve to know and communicate carefully within the community of teacher educators about how such skills fare in different settings.

That brings us to the final paper of this issue: ‘Using action, reflection and modeling (ARM) in Malaysian primary schools: Connecting “the ARM theory” with student teachers’ reported practice’ by Claire Dickerson, Joy Jarvis, Roger Levy, and Kit Thomas. This is a study of a Malaysia–UK collaborative project to construct a Bachelor of Education (Honors) degree program in Primary Mathematics for a cohort of 120 student teachers in Malaysia. The challenges of this collaborative effort to integrate theory and practice in teacher education were cognitive, cultural, and personal and they affected ‘not only the student teachers involved but also colleagues in the school setting and possibly the teacher educators.’ The essential problem? Teaching in new ways – ways that position constructivism as a learning theory and as a theory of practice at the heart of instruction. Understand that neither theory was part of the lived experience, the daily encounter, of the student teachers or of the teachers involved here as they were learning as children. Again, we encounter the force of the ‘apprenticeship of observation.’ For those who ask, as I have, ‘Does teacher education matter?’ it is worth sitting down and reading this fascinating study because it so surely and deftly helps us to consider how those early experiences of our own schooling can shift dramatically when good design conscientiously followed and assessed is the norm. Further, it invites us into the conversation about teacher education itself not with answers but with the questions that we should be asking and with a commitment to sharing what we learn with one another.

Asking deep questions about our work – Does it show up in our students’ practice? When? How long does it last in their thinking and action? How could preservice and inservice education come together to support teacher’ professional learning? What does such collaboration look like? Sharing what we are learning as we try to address these and other questions – that commitment to share and a refusal to claim ‘the’ answer – these comprise the major message of this entire issue. Along with it comes a serious press for teacher educators to radically shift their practice toward student centered learning in ways that enable a similar shift in instructional practice in schools. None of the remarkable deep learning that Korthagen calls for or the transformational possibilities encountered by the students, teachers, and teacher educators that Dickerson and her colleagues discovered is possible in settings where the thoughtful work of teaching is not valued.

Frances Rust
University of Pennsylvania
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