Playing Doctor With Teacher Preparation

• In Event: Rounding Out Teacher Preparation? Examining Education Rounds From Multiple Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives

Education rounds is one of the most recent innovations taken from the medical profession and adapted by the education community as an exemplar of practice (City, Elmore, Fiarman & Tietel, 2009). Based on the medical community’s “powerful social practice” (City, et al., 2009, p. 32) for socializing practitioners into the profession, rounds in education also attempts to support the development of a shared knowledge base (Elmore, 2007). Whereas in medical rounds, medical students, residents, and physicians engage in patient care together, in education rounds, also called instructional or teacher rounds, various groups of educators come together to observe instruction. Rounds has become a common practice for networks of administrators within and between school districts (City, et al., 2009; City, 2011; Marzano, 2011; Roberts, 2012; Teitel, 2009), and is taken up by in-service and preservice teachers (Bowe & Gore, 2012; Del Prete, 2013; Watts & Levine, 2011). However, most literature on rounds is descriptive, with little critical analysis of how rounds socializes teachers into the profession.

The purpose of this paper is to question the rounds process within teacher preparation programs and the challenges that may be embedded within this practice. In so doing, I aim to support teacher educators in enacting rounds in ways that contribute to new teachers’ growth and development as reflective, inquiry-minded practitioners.

Perspectives
I organize this paper around the seven challenges that Roegman and Riehl (2012) identified in their review of the literature on rounds within the medical community. They examined these challenges in the context of education rounds for administrator networks, and I extend these challenges to the context of teacher preparation. These seven challenges raise critical questions for teacher educators to acknowledge and address:

Purpose: Does the rounds process itself or do those involved in rounds have divergent or conflicting purposes?

Implicit professional worldview: What are the underlying assumptions and beliefs of the rounds process?

Content: How can learning be optimized when participants have limited control over the problems of practice they will be observing?

Pedagogy: How do practitioners learn through observation and analysis? What
Expertise in teaching: What is the role of the expert in the rounds process?

Voice: What is the role of the student in the rounds process?
Power/status: What role do race, gender, class, and other aspects of identity play in the rounds process?

Implications

Considering these challenges and their application to rounds with preservice teachers can support teacher preparation programs in developing rounds processes that enable this practice to reach its promise of socializing new teachers in a profession of open doors and collaborative inquiry. However, merely assuming that rounds is a good practice, because it is the signature pedagogy of the medical profession, leaves too many questions unanswered—questions that continue to endure not only in the education community, but also in the medical profession.

Authors

• Rachel Roegman, Purdue University

• Carolyn J. Riehl, Teachers College, Columbia University