Mediated Field Experience as a Pedagogy for Teacher Education

• In Event: Tools and Routines for Preparing STEM Teachers

Abstract

Purpose: In this paper, we describe principles and practices of a pedagogy for teacher education built on a mediated field experience (MFE). In prior work, we found a lack of uptake of progressive teaching practices by teacher interns from their university coursework to their classrooms (Horn, Nolen, Ward & Campbell, 2008). This was particularly true of teaching practices requiring responsiveness to the particular students and situations interns encountered. Because our methods course focuses on highly interactive teaching practices aimed at increasing equity in mathematics, the teaching practices we most valued were also the most likely to be misinterpreted or left behind.

Perspective: In order to investigate this problem, we extended prior work on the gap between coursework and fieldwork using a sociocultural framework on learning. From this perspective, we view the travel of ideas from coursework to the classroom not as simply the cognitive problem of transfer but as one of recontextualization (van Oers, 1993). That is, interns do not simply carry over interactive practices from coursework to their classrooms. Rather, they must make sense of abstract ideas within the concrete particulars of classroom settings.

Methods: Our pedagogical practice is grounded in five principles and involves set routines for helping develop interns’ understanding of interactive practices. Based on the analysis from our earlier work, our principles for the MFE are: 1. Complexity. Provide interns with a common object of classroom instruction that, unlike video and cases, is complex and fully dimensional. 2. Collegiality. Introduce interns to collegial teaching where instruction and curriculum planning are public and open to discussion. 3. Student Learning. Focus interns’ attention squarely on student learning over time while making connections between student learning and teaching practice. 4. Transparency. Instructors and partner teachers work collaboratively to support interns as they observe and make sense of common aspects of classroom life that are often invisible to the novice eye (e.g., norms, status, transitions). 5. Adaptive Expertise. Help interns observe teaching as a problem solving process, where complex decision-making occurs in relationship to context.

Data sources and evidence: The routines for the MFE involve meeting with novice teachers twice a week, once at the university and once in partner classrooms. We focus each week on critical issues and practices, providing typical activities for our interns. For the field-based lesson, interns and instructors use a structured observation protocol, followed by a moderated debrief with partner teachers to deepen our understanding of their pedagogical reasoning, with the principles guiding our focus.

Results: After multiple iterations of our MFE, we observed and interviewed interns from our courses. We found that this pedagogy supports recontextualization of practices by building a more situative and flexible understanding of teaching.

Scholarly significance: By elucidating this pedagogy and our framework for engaging in it, we hope to contribute to the field of teacher education by helping other scholars engaged in similar work. At the same time, this work validates the notion of uptake as a problem of recontextualizing practices, contributing to our theoretical framework for teacher learning.

Authors

• Ilana S. Horn, Vanderbilt University

• S. Sunshine Campbell, University of Washington - Seattle