Improving Teacher Education by Learning Across Programs

• In Event: 34.049 - Teacher Education Redesign in Research-Intensive Universities: Perspectives From Research and Practice

Abstract

Purpose
We have intentionally designed pedagogical and accountability processes that stretch across five distinct teacher education programs. This paper describes how this cross-programmatic work created understanding for how to prepare teachers within differing program designs.

Theoretical framing
I frame this paper within a narrative theoretical framework. Connelly and Clandinin (2000) identified three commonplaces as dimensions of a narratives. Temporality means every story has a past, present, and future and our stories are situated in an ongoing process of change over time. Sociality refers to the tensions among personal (feelings, desires, morals) and social conditions (environment, external social forces). Place is concrete topological boundaries where events happen. These three dimensions mutually shape each other, forming stories that are grounded in experience. This allows me to capture the ongoing shifts that we negotiate as an organization actively engaged with community partners and working within an ever-changing social context.

Method and analysis
I draw on the work of several faculty and program leaders at our institution to construct three stories about our teacher education design processes. From a narrative perspective, we make sense of disconnected and fragmented experiences through the stories we construct by selecting and ordering events, creating “a new level of relational significance” and “a legitimate form of reasoned knowing” (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 7, 9).

Three narratives
Learning from data is a central narrative to our institution. I tell the story of our faculty efforts to use the edTPA—a standardized teacher performance assessment—to learn about our candidate performance based on the evidence they present within their edTPA. I restory our institutional processes for teaching candidates to frame their edTPA experience as a progressive narrative that begins with a narrow focus on certification requirements and ends with the ongoing growth and development that the edTPA can inspire.

I use a professional learning cycle narrative to describe our mentor/cooperating learning process. Faculty and staff across multiple programs have designed “mentor labs” positioned in schools. I use a narrative of a “learning cycle” to restory how mentor teachers experience support from knowledgeable others through identifying mentor “moves” (decisions that mentors make while coaching), practicing those moves while being observed, and debriefing the learning interaction.

The third narrative highlights the importance of place and time for teacher candidate development by describing how our efforts to diversify our candidate pools across all programs shown us that recruitment efforts are not enough to reach our goal. This narrative is one of uncovering the deeper complexities of our mission as we work more intentionally with communities. This is a story of the struggle of enacting our values connected to equity and social justice as they relate to working with families and communities.

Significance
While higher education is governed by program and degree requirements, we find that in order to bring about deep change we must cross program boundaries through staffing, pedagogical, and accountability practices. These stories illustrate how we have made institutional-level changes by distributing the changes grounded in practice across multiple programs within our institution.

Author

• Patrick Sexton, University of Washington - Seattle