Competing Obligations for Preservice Teachers in an Immersive Field Placement Partnership

• In Event: The Role of the Professional Obligations for Mathematics Teaching in Mathematics Teacher Education

Abstract

Purpose: In this session, we describe the case of a partnership between a teacher preparation program and an elementary school (Briar Elementary) that included daily one-on-one sessions pairing junior-year preservice teachers with individual students to discuss mathematics; we call it the “Math Buddies” program. PSTs were supported in their interactions through a variety of program elements, including structured rehearsals of task-based interviews, regular instructor feedback, and opportunities for debrief and reflection.

Methods and Data Sources: We collected several types of data to understand how multiple stakeholders from both settings were interpreting the program and its effects. These included interviews with course designers, course instructors, the Briar principal, a subset of Briar teachers, and the director of elementary education at the university. From the PSTs, we collected and analyzed reflection papers, course evaluations, and recorded episodes with Math Buddies.

Findings: Although there was evidence of development of skill in exploring children’s thinking, the partnership brought significant tensions to the surface for the PSTs. In some cases, PSTs referenced obligations to their cooperating teacher: “My host teacher was under the impression that I was going to be supporting her student in the work they were doing in her 5th grade classroom, not with material that was brought in from my college course.” Some questioned the value of Math Buddies by referencing obligations to the child they were working with, wondering, in one PSTs’ words, “how meeting every day will help my Math Buddy in her math class.” Though changes to the program were made, PSTs continued to question the benefits of being at Briar Elementary School, and their end-of-program evaluations were overwhelmingly negative. Based on these, administrators decided to discontinue the program.

Significance: During this session, we plan to engage attendees with questions about the ways that Math Buddies surfaced tensions between competing obligations. On the one hand, PSTs were obligated to demonstrate particular types of moves to elicit, support, and extend student thinking as part of their methods course. On the other hand, because they knew the Math Buddies and their teachers well, PSTs felt obligated to support student learning, which some saw as dissonant with the use of supporting and extending moves. We acknowledge that such tensions are always at play to some extent when PSTs move between their university courses and field placements (Feiman-Nemser & Buchman, 1985), but we also conjecture that the Math Buddies partnership made these particularly untenable because PSTs were expected to respond to both sets of obligations at the same time and in the same space.

This raises questions about practice-based approaches to teacher education more generally; even if PSTs develop competency with specific teaching practices, what will happen when these practices come into conflict with their new responsibilities as teachers? From this perspective, we wonder whether a focus on skill development needs to be supplemented with explicit attention to the norms and obligations of school settings, and whether field assignments and experiences could be designed in ways that explicitly take these competing obligations into account.

Authors

• Corey M. Webel, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Stephanie Hopkins, University of Missouri - Columbia