Opportunities to Enact Practice Within Coursework on Campus

• In Event: 29.048 - Practice What You Teach: International Studies of the Enactment of Practice in Teacher Education

Abstract

Despite calls for research examining the ‘black box’ of teacher preparation (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015; National Research Council, 2010), in-depth studies of teacher education courses are rare—especially those that examine the nature of teacher education methods courses across programs and settings. While there has been a strong tradition of action research in teacher education, with a few exceptions (McDonald, 2005), there are relatively few qualitative comparative studies of teacher education coursework across multiple programs. To help address that challenge, this paper examines the nature of teacher education courses in six different teacher education programs in three different countries specifically in the language arts and mathematics methods courses on campus. Using the lens of opportunities to enact practice, this research examines the question: To what degree do teacher candidates have opportunities to enact practice during their math and language arts methods coursework in these different settings?
Drawing on data from case studies of six teacher education programs in California (US), Norway and Finland, for this paper we analyzed data from field notes from observations of language arts and mathematics methods courses. Observations cover a three-week period in each program, approximately 10-16 hours per program and a total of 104 hours. We analyzed the data by examining the presence of eight dimensions targeted towards teacher candidates’ opportunities to enact practice, including opportunities to plan for teaching; analyze teaching materials; experience the teacher educator modeling and opportunities to analyze student work (Authors, 2015).
Our findings show that across programs, teacher candidates had extensive opportunities to analyze teaching materials and take pupils’ perspective (see Figure 1). They had some opportunities to plan for teaching, talk about field placement and analyze national/state curricula. However, we identified few opportunities in these observations to enact practices connected directly to routine classroom teaching practices, such as enact a whole class-discussion, analyze pupil learning, and see teacher educators themselves model teaching practices. Given recent interest on teacher education that is centered on the actual work of classroom teaching (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman et al., 2009; Kemmis & Smith, 2008), our findings suggest that across these international programs, attention to enactment of practice varies. Across all programs, we see that while there are more opportunities than we might have expected to examine and use national curriculum in planning, we also see that analysis of pupils’ learning seems to need explicit attention. Further, our results reveal differences in the characteristics of the opportunities to enact practice. Using excerpts from our observations, we also provide specific examples of especially lengthy and specific opportunities to enact practice, as a way to illustrate the variation in our data.
Our study reveals promising findings in international efforts to connect to practice. Certain practices in teacher education, such as analyzing teaching materials, lesson planning and analyzing national curriculum are relatively frequent. However, our study reveals areas for improvement: the need for more opportunities to analyze student learning representing a key area for greater attention across programs.

Authors

• Inga Staal Jenset, University of Oslo

• Kirsti Klette, University of Oslo

• Karen M. Hammerness, American Museum of Natural History