The Institutional and Pedagogical Consequences of Market Reforms and Increased Regulation in Teacher Education

• In Event: 47.096 - MTCC Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: 47.096-1 - The Challenges and Possibilities of Market-Based Reforms on Teacher Education in England and the United States

Abstract

1. Objectives

This paper explores whether there are common pedagogies that support novices in learning how to respond to the complexity of classroom demands amongst a diversity of routes into teaching in England and the United States. Using document analysis, we examine three important and distinctive modalities. The ‘Teach-for-America’ and the ‘Teach-First’ programs based on the premise of teaching as leadership and rapidly acquired levels of expertise. The ‘school-direct’ modalities largely based on the premise of employment-based learning through clear instruction and modeling. The ‘internship programs’ based on the principle that preparing new entrants to the profession requires high levels of knowledge and adaptive expertise.

2. Perspectives/framework

Our work explores pedagogical variation in different pathways of becoming a teacher as a way to ‘gain greater clarity on the contextual factors shaping teacher education as well as the relationship between those factors and program features’ (Grossman, 2008, p. 194). Our framework links together notions of organizational memory, organizational learning, and institutional theory (Argyris, 1999; March, 1999; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Socio-cultural theory (Hedegaard, 2004) helps explain the influence of policy and institutional contexts on the opportunities to learn offered to novices.

3. Methods

We analyzed policy and program documents to explore the hypothesis that new approaches operating within a market environment tend to emphasize clinical aspects of practice (Grossman, 2008, p. 189) resulting in pedagogies that are more likely to prepare competent novices able to tackle the teaching of students that are culturally, linguistically, and racially diverse.

4. Data sources

The data came from documents collected for the Learning-to-Teach Study describing programs’ philosophy, structure and curricular content. We analyzed trends along these different features according to the degree of alignment with curriculum standards and local market demands. Because we were interested in exploring the effects of local policy and markets and sought depth of understanding, we focused on an urban and a rural region in England, and in the U.S. with similar variety of routes and programs. We examined one program for each modality in each one of these regions.

5. Results

The Teach-for-America/Teach-First modalities pay relatively little regard to subject expertise – while the ‘quality’ of the graduate is important, ‘pedagogical scripts’ tend to limit candidates. In contrast, ‘school direct’ routes value subject-knowledge placing less emphasis on specific subject-pedagogy, and emphasizing ‘learning-while-doing’ as prescribed by standards. Internship programs emphasize subject-specific pedagogy, as subject-knowledge alone is not sufficient for effective teaching, and include long placements in schools. Increased systems of formal compliance in both settings and across modalities paradoxically, restrict the degrees of freedom for innovation and subtract attention to the development of pedagogies sensitive to the needs of diverse students.

6. Scholarly significance

This paper provides a nuanced analysis of the pedagogical approaches in use in diverse teacher education programs as these programs diversify to respond to policy and market demands. Our work contributes to understanding particular features and practices of individual programs in interaction with national/local policies, and local labor markets in an era when diverse approaches continue to proliferate.

Authors

• Maria Teresa Tatto, Arizona State University

• Ian Menter, University of Oxford