Exemplary Teaching in Catholic, Jewish, and Urban Public Schools

• In Event: 66.046 - Inspiring Teaching: Context-Specific Teacher Education for the 21st Century

Abstract

This paper tackles one of the most salient issues in teacher preparation and education policy nowadays: finding good measures to identify and describe teacher quality and effectiveness. While most of the research literature and public policy debate focus on finding better ways to measure student outcomes on standardized tests through large-scale econometric studies, we experiment with a detailed observational approach. We study teachers who graduated from context specific teacher education programs in order to understand how their preparation lays the foundation for effective teaching after they have graduated (5 or more years out).
The first question we address is whether the UTEP, ACE, and DeLeT programs embody key features consistently associated with strong preparation (Howey, Post & Zimpher, 2006; Darling-Hammond, 2006; Zeichner & Conklin, 2008). Our findings suggest that all three programs offer extensive clinical experience with components widely regarded as an essential to strong teacher preparation; however, differences in setting, purposes, timing and supervision produce different consequences for teachers’ practice.
Then we look at teachers’ practice, offering concrete images of exemplary teachers from UTEP, ACE, and DeLeT at work in their classrooms and schools. The teachers, two from each program, were chosen by program leaders because they embody the commitments and enact the practices advocated by each program. Semi-structured interviews with teachers before and after the lessons we observed provide additional insight into teachers’ goals for student learning, pedagogical reasoning and rationale for curricular choices. [We also used data from semi-structured interviews with faculty and program leaders, as well program documents (e.g. syllabi, handbooks, web-sites) to lay out the vision of good teaching that each program promoted among its graduates.]
In providing snapshots of teachers-in-action, our purpose is to highlight and illustrate the distinctive pedagogies promoted by each of the programs as they are enacted in the classroom. For example, in the case of DeLeT teachers, we saw efforts to integrate general and Jewish studies, a hallmark of the program, and to build and sustain a classroom community infused with Jewish values and practices. UTEP teachers pursued a balanced approach to literacy and worked to accommodate the needs of individual students through differentiated instruction. We also heard about social studies projects designed to appeal to students’ interests by studying their own history (e.g., how blacks resisted racism in America through art, music, and culture). ACE teachers, in keeping with the ethos of the schools and the program, displayed direct instruction in well managed classrooms. In each of the cases, we demonstrate some of the ways that the teachers in these different settings brought to bear local and contextual understandings to their teaching practice. In so doing, we illustrate some of the impact that context-specific teacher preparation had upon these teachers’ practice and their understanding of their professional settings.

Authors

• Eran Tamir, Tel Aviv University

• Karen M. Hammerness, American Museum of Natural History