Conceptualizing Learning in Practice for Novice Teachers in Urban Teacher Education

• In Event: 28.052 - Studying Teacher Learning: International Perspectives — Invited Session

Abstract

Aim and Context
My colleagues and I have taken up Grossman et al.’s (2009) call for redesigning teacher education to support the development of knowledge, skills, and identities that enable novices to become ambitious mathematics teachers but does so considering teaching as working to transform schooling. Our teacher education program focuses on social justice and understanding structural inequality in meeting the needs of our local, low-resourced schools serving predominantly poor, racially marginalized families.

Theoretical Perspectives
Our goal is to create social circumstances that allow preservice teachers to develop their identities as particular kind of practitioners (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff et al., 1995). We create opportunities for them to develop as practitioners who (a) see themselves as learning from their practice, (b) value developing relationships with students and (c) know that structural inequities pervade the lives of the students they teach and know how to begin to develop spaces in their mathematics classrooms that push back against those inequities. Researchers have found that membership in a community of practice where teachers continually challenge their assumptions about students’ competence, value and investigate student work, treat students as sense-makers, and adapt teaching to learning has resulted in teachers being able to maintain high expectations of students and enact practices that accomplish high-level academic learning goals (Gutiérrez, 1996; Horn & Little, 2010; Strutchens, Quander, & Gutiérrez, 2011).


Method
This case study examines how preservice teachers learn as they engage in a field-based methods course, situated in a third-grade classroom where the preservice teachers partner with third grade buddies. The preservice teachers learn instructional activities, get to know the students as people and rehearse and teach their buddies each week within the demands and policies of a public school. The data sources include videotapes of the course, written reflections, assignments, and observations of novice teaching.

Findings and Implications
The case study enables us to theorize about teacher learning while preservice teachers are engaged in practice and identify which opportunities support what aspects of learning. We have found that the teachers’ learning about the students in the students’ school context and putting that into practice as they teach is challenging their notions of teaching and learning and creating opportunities to integrate understandings of social justice and mathematics teaching. The findings highlight the conditions and principles of practice in preservice elementary mathematics teaching that lead to teacher learning.

Author

• Megan L. Franke, University of California - Los Angeles