Building a Common Language and Shared Understanding About Facilitating Discussions as a Core Practice

• In Event: Core Practices in Teacher Education: Preparing Teachers to Facilitate Whole-Class Discussion

Abstract

Over the past three years, teacher educators in the consortium have met as a whole group and in discipline-specific groups to identify, define, and specify teacher education pedagogies and core practices in teaching. This paper examines the processes that have supported teacher educators as they worked toward a common specification of facilitating classroom discussion as a core practice and modeling and rehearsal as teacher education pedagogies.

This research relies of sociocultural theories and communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The consortium is a community of practice focused on improving teacher preparation by preparing teachers to competently execute a set of core practices. Members of the consortium come into the group with a variety of conceptual tools for thinking about teacher preparation. These tools have been cultivated through participation in a variety of theoretical and disciplinary traditions as well as engagement in a variety of teacher education programs.

Data for this paper includes interviews with all members of the consortium (n=27), audio recordings of whole-group meetings, written notes from whole group and discipline-specific meetings, and multiple versions of written specifications of the practice of facilitating whole class discussions. These data are being analyzed thematically using a combination of a priori and emergent codes.

The paper will describe three major findings. First, that the process of making teacher educator practice public has had a significant impact on the development of a shared understanding and movement toward common practices. Second, the use of video has been a significant tool in facilitating the development of shared understanding. Seeing video of practice provides specific examples that can be used as tools to check the validity of specifications and shared understanding by exposing disagreements that were not uncovered during more abstract conversations. The findings also illustrate how sustained engagement over time has played a significant role in developing shared understandings. Many of the differences of opinion about discussion, modeling, and rehearsal are deeply rooted in discipline-specific understandings, theoretical traditions, and programmatic history. The opportunity to identify tensions and return to the same tensions many times throughout the work has played a role in the development of shared understandings and common language.

A core assumption of the consortium’s work is that the improvement of teaching and student learning hinges on developing a common language around the specification of core practices and teacher education pedagogies. The lack of common language for analyzing teaching is a major barrier to professional preparation and instructional improvement. The other major problem facing teacher education in the US is a lack of specification around the practice of teacher educators. As a result, there is incredible variability in how teachers are prepared, leading to enormous variability in classroom practice. Given the central importance of teachers to student achievement, we believe that developing more consensus around how best to prepare high quality teachers is a critical component of improving the quality of education for all students. The research described in this paper illuminates how one group of teacher educators are working toward this consensus.

Authors

• Pamela L. Grossman, University of Pennsylvania

• Morva McDonald, University of Washington

• Christopher George Pupik Dean, University of Pennsylvania