Designing an Elementary Teacher Education Program to Foster Ethical and Skillful Beginning Teaching Practice

• In Event: Redesigning Teacher Education as a Practice-Based Venture: Lessons and Challenges

Abstract

Program vision and the selection of high-leverage practices: Our elementary teacher education program's overarching goal is to support the development of well-started beginners (Hollon, Roth, & Anderson, 1991). Toward that end, first, we nurture novices who demonstrate beginning proficiency with a set of high-leverage practices. Second, we aim to prepare "subject-matter serious" elementary teachers able to represent academic content with integrity. Third, we support novices in becoming teachers who recognize and can act in light of professional obligations to support all students' learning. We selected high-leverage teaching practices that result from decomposing the work of teaching (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman et al., 2009), basing our choices on considerations related to high quality teaching and high quality teacher education. We provide examples of these practices and unpack the selection considerations in the full paper.

Centering on issues of equity: We work with our students ("interns") on being able to teach in ways that demonstrate a set of ethical obligations that complement our high-leverage practices in guiding our program. We use these ethical obligations throughout the program. Drawing on work from a planning group for our mathematics methods course, we also developed "equity practices" that teachers use specifically in the service of equity. We worked on these across subject-matter methods coursework—for example, in mathematics and science. These equity practices include using and connecting multiple representations of ideas and selecting and enacting activities with care (to ensure all students have equal footing with regard to the contexts used for problems or investigations). To interns, we described these as practices that teachers use to make academic content accessible to all learners—one of our ethical obligations. In the full paper, we unpack the equity practices and give examples of how we worked on them in our methods courses.

Assessing interns' proficiency with ethical, highly skilled practice: Our assessment focuses on the use of ethical obligations and equity practices in teaching. We examine artifacts (e.g., written lesson plans, videorecords of enacted lessons) to explore ways in which the interns take up the equity practices in their math and science teaching. We also have developed other forms of program-level assessment to get at instantiations of the ethical obligations in practice. In the paper, we describe our assessments, with a focus on those used in the subject-matter methods classes, and discuss the dilemmas we face in making decisions about interns' proficiency.

Research agenda: We are refining subject-specific approaches for helping interns learn to engage in equitable teaching practice that is responsible to academic subject matter, supports the learning of all students, and reflects the ethical obligations. Our research agenda explores the efficacy of our approaches. To what extent, for example, do interns learn how to support students with multiple representations in mathematics and science? How is this proficiency reflected in their teaching and teaching artifacts? We discuss these research questions and our research approaches in the full paper.

Authors

• Elizabeth A. Davis, University of Michigan

• Meghan M. Shaughnessy, University of Michigan

• Timothy A. Boerst, University of Michigan