Coaching Interns in Urban Field Placements: A Cultural Tool to Support Cycles of Focused Inquiry, Directed Observation, and Guided Practice

• In Event: The Way Education Is Can't Be How You Teach: Learning Urban Teaching as Interpretative Process

Abstract

Purpose: This poster presentation shares findings from an ongoing study of the impact of the L-TIP framework on the habits of mind of teacher candidates at an urban-serving, Mid-Atlantic University. In this project, faculty and staff aligned an urban teacher preparation support program with Hollins’ (2011) theoretical framework of learning teaching as an interpretive process. Within that frame, teacher candidates internalize habits of mind through iterative cycles of inquiry, observation, interpretation, and translation of teaching. This process is guided by three epistemic practices; focused inquiry, directed observation, and guided practice. The coaching tool is an interactive document that creates a space to guide and document these epistemic practices as interns complete student teaching field experiences.

Perspective: The L-TIP approach engages teacher candidates in focused inquiry, which involves “reading the research and theory that supports [a] particular area of practice; examining documented accounts and descriptions [of that area of practice]; and interviewing practitioners and participants” (Hollins, 2015b, p. 120). Teacher candidates then complete directed observations of teaching looking specifically at the ways in the element of practice under study. Next, candidates engage in guided practice, enacting, in a scaffolded manner, “a learning segment under the close supervision of an experienced teacher” (Hollins, 2015b, p. 120).

Methods: Methods of naturalistic inquiry used in this study include case study, focus group interviews, prolonged observation, phenomenological interviewing, triangulation through the collection of multiple data sources, member checking, and external audit (Schwandt, Lincoln & Guba, 2007). Researchers acted as participant-observers in this study, meaning that they “assume a variety of roles within . . . the situation and actually participate in the events being studied” (Yin, 1994, p. 87). Fifty participants participated in the study. As it progressed, a smaller number of participants were selected from the cohort for in-depth study (Ellen, 1984).

Findings: Here we share multimedia samples of L-TIP coaching tools over time for five focal participants or telling cases. These samples will illustrate two initial findings of the study. First, the coaching tool helped teacher candidates develop nuanced views of teaching as a continuous, cyclical process. Second, participants’ nuanced understandings seemed to progress along a continuum.

Significance: Findings from Warner et al’s (2017) study illustrate the importance of structural coherence in application of the L-TIP framework in field experiences, and the particular importance of tools in helping candidates mediate and interpret growing understandings of teaching. This study confirms previous findings, establishing trustworthiness and making the findings of the current study highly significant.

Authors

• Joshua L. Michael, University of Maryland - Baltimore County

• Corey Carter, Sherman Program

• Jaqueline Matise Peng, University of Maryland-Baltimore County