Early-Career Teachers’ Reflections on Teacher Education and its Impact on Current Teaching Practice

• In Event: Preparing for Equity and Justice: A Multi-Perspectival Exploration of One Urban Teacher Preparation Program

Abstract

Purpose
Teaching practices that are responsive to student thinking are central to creating more equitable mathematics learning environments (e.g., Kazemi et al., 2016). However, making instructional decisions in response to emergent student ideas and identities is challenging, particularly for novice teachers (Kavanagh et al., 2020). Most mathematics teacher educators agree that a practice-based approach to learning to teach mathematics responsively through rehearsals of key practices supports novice teachers in developing their ability to make in-the-moment decisions (McDonald et al., 2013). This analysis focuses on the reflections of early-career teachers interviewed within their first three years of teaching to understand the following questions: 1) how do elements of a practice-based teacher education program influence the beliefs and practices of novice teachers once they enter the classroom, and 2) to what extent does fieldwork facilitate novice teacher learning?

Theoretical Framework
Practice-based teacher education is grounded in a sociocultural perspective of learning within classroom settings (McDonald et al., 2013). From this perspective, novices learn through enactment of core practices of instructional activities, often learned through rehearsals of responsive teaching routines (Lampert et al., 2013). Rehearsals provide novices with the opportunity to learn a practice and receive scaffolded support and feedback in enacting instructional activities. Through rehearsals, teachers learn how to enact instructional activities in simulated or actual classroom environments with opportunities for reflective discussions of the instructional decisions that are made within the teaching episode (Kazemi et al., 2016).

Methods and Data Analysis
Data for this study come from a larger examination of the experiences of early-career teachers who graduated from two master’s level teacher education programs at a private (HWI) university in a large city. The program aims to prepare teachers to work in poverty-impacted, urban schools. This analysis is based on interviews from 15 graduates working in a variety of different school contexts (see Table 2).

Findings
All 15 participants noted that elements of responsive teaching learned through number talk rehearsals influence their beliefs about and approaches to mathematics instruction. Opportunities to enact these practices in the classroom, videotape them, and reflect on them helped to strengthen novices’ practices and better understand how leveraging student ideas served as a form of social justice. However, many teachers reported that fieldwork experiences did not provide them with sufficient opportunities and strategies for developing classroom communities that support enactment of these practices. Further, teachers noted challenges in meeting the diverse needs of their students. As such, many reported struggling to translate these responsive teaching practices during their years of teaching when working without support in their own classrooms.

Significance
These findings support prior research on practice-based teacher education, suggesting it helps bridge connections between coursework and fieldwork and extends this research to highlight the impact of this learning in the early years of teaching. However, more attention should be paid to supporting novices to translate these skills, building effective systems for differentiating to meet the needs of all students, and developing classroom discourse communities when they are the sole teacher in the classroom.

Author

• Lara Condon, University of Memphis