Richmond, G. Draft 10-3-03
The nature of tensions between educator and teacher candidate beliefs about science teaching practice[1]
Gail Richmond & Charles W. Anderson
Department of Teacher Education
Erickson Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 4882
Presented as part of the Paper Set: A Longitudinal Study of Science Teacher Preparation at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Philadelphia, March 23-6, 2003
Objectives and Background
As teacher educators, we have specific notions about the skills necessary to effectively teach in reform-minded ways. These include the ability to think about students, content, and pedagogy analytically and reflectively, and to design standards-based instruction that will allow students to understand science deeply and in ways that are meaningful to their own lives. These goals are consistent with reform documents in science education (e.g., National Research Council, 1996; Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1993) as well as our own practice as science teacher educators (Anderson, 2002; Richmond & Anderson, 2002). We believe that, with appropriate support, our teacher candidates can grow professionally toward these sophisticated forms of teaching practice. This has led us to design a developmentally scaffolded set of courses and assignments for the two years that we work with our candidates. In actuality, our candidates’ practices (and our own) fall short of these goals: some of our candidates appear to resonate to our assignments, to draw insights from them and to develop habits of mind as well as pedagogical skills that are in line with our expectations as their instructors. They seem to have goals similar to ours for their present and future students, even if they do not possess all the requisite skills to bring this to pass in the classrooms in which they teach. Others, however, do not respond in this way, and some of these individuals are quite vocal about their inability to see the usefulness of these assignments in their development as teachers.
To make the claim that those in the latter group simply are not sufficiently motivated to “see it our way” would be to adopt the very deficit model we design our courses and our curriculum to circumvent. The situation is much more complex. We have come to appreciate that rather than this being a matter of not working hard enough, the underlying issues seem to arise from a difference in what we see as the appropriate professional goals of science teachers and our candidates’ goals for science teaching, as well as their perceptions of the skills, values, and understandings necessary to achieve their goals. This disparity in these core values and concerns held by teacher educators and teacher candidates about central issues of teaching may more accurately describe the developing practice of teacher candidates as well as their receptivity to assignments we include in our teacher preparation courses (Richmond & Anderson, 2003). The kinds of professional choices teacher candidates make and the way they characterize their own practice, particularly in those situations marked by high risk and high ambiguity (Doyle, 1983), are the result of the approaches they take and priority they place on each of these problems of practice. These core values and concerns are also a foundation of the personal and professional identities that teachers build for themselves and that influence their practice in critical ways. (Helms, 1998; McDonald, 1992).
In our framework, these core values and concerns find their way into approaches to four problems of practice all teachers confront (see, for example, Brickhouse, 1990, Van Driel et al., 2001). These problems include:
· Content and learning goals. In many ways, the candidates knew a great deal of science when they begin their teacher preparation program. They were all within a year of successfully completing their science degrees. However, they quickly discovered that teaching required a different kind of understanding of science. The challenges that teaching posed for candidates’ scientific understanding were particularly apparent when they decided on goals for their students’ learning, when they planned lessons, and when they led class discussions.
· Students and assessment. Teacher candidates quickly became aware of how diverse their students were, and how many students responded to instruction in ways they had not anticipated. They wanted to motivate these diverse students to learn and to help all of them learn with understanding. Furthermore, they needed to monitor their students’ progress and grade their performance in fair and reasonable ways.
· Teaching strategies. Many candidates began their teacher education programs intending to find teaching activities to teach the topics in their curriculum. But collecting activities was not enough. Candidates needed to think strategically about how each activity might contribute to their students’ learning. They also needed to manage their classrooms efficiently and to create learning communities for the diverse students they were responsible for teaching.
· Resources and relationships. Teaching involves working with adults as well as students. Teacher candidates needed to find resources for their teaching and to cope with poorly written textbooks and ineffective teaching tools. They also needed to use the social supports associated with the program, including course instructors, field instructors, mentor teachers, and school administrators. They were expected to work collaboratively with colleagues, to communicate with parents, and to learn from parents about their students.
This paper focuses on a subset of these practices, chosen because we believe that they are fundamentally important and because our assignments required that candidates address them in their written work as well as in their teaching. The specific practices addressed in this paper include:
· Relearning science content. We looked at how candidates described the science content that they were teaching or their intentions for students’ learning, including both specific statements of objectives and more general statements about science content. We also examined their teaching for the specific activities they included in lessons they taught, with particular attention to the extent to which the activities contributed to students’ learning of science content.
· Understanding/assessing students. We looked at what candidates said they wanted to understand about their students, the purposes that they suggested for formal and informal classroom assessment, and their actual assessment practices in the lessons that they taught..
In this study we have used this framework to a) construct an analytical portrait of the approaches taken by candidates to persisting problems of practice teachers face and b) use these responses to understand better the tensions that arise as teacher candidates learn to teach and we try to help them shape their practice.
Methods
Setting
The larger study of which this paper is a part focuses on candidates and recent graduates of the teacher preparation program at our university. Our study began when the candidates were in their pre-intern year in the program. For the majority of candidates, this was the senior undergraduate year. Some candidates had already received their undergraduate science degree, either at our institution or elsewhere and then decided to prepare for a teaching career. These post-baccalaureate teacher candidates were enrolled in the same teacher education courses as those who were senior undergraduates.
All candidates completed a five-credit course in the fall term and a six-credit course in the spring term that focused on subject-specific approaches to science teaching. A total of 71 candidates, all prospective secondary science teachers, completed these courses. These courses included four hours per week in on-campus teaching and four hours per week in middle school or high school science classrooms.
Sixty-three secondary science teacher candidates finished their programs with full-year internships during the 2002-3 academic year. During these internships they worked as science teachers in schools four days a week This work constituting part of their professional/academic load). They returned to the university campus for seminars most Fridays, except for periods during which their teaching loads and responsibilities were increased in cyclical fashion.[2]
Description of the Program and Assignments.
Any discussion of the tensions that arise between our teacher candidates’ views about practice and the values we as educators and as their instructors hold must be viewed against the backdrop of the ways in which our values are expressed in the community, expectations/norms, and assignments for which we act as agents. In this section, therefore, an overview will be provided of the courses in the teacher preparation program prior to the internship year, as well as the assignments and expectations we have designed and teach in the courses taken during the pre-internship year.
Sequence of Pre-Internship Courses
Introductory courses: TE 150, TE 250, TE 301. Teacher candidates who began the program as undergraduates took two introductory courses before they were admitted to the program: TE 150 (Reflections on Learning) and TE 250 (Human Diversity, Power, and Opportunity in Social Institutions). Candidates who met the requirements for a selective admission process took TE 301, a four-credit course with an emphasis on content-area literacy and classroom management, during their junior years. There were field experiences associated with TE 250 and 301.
Pre-intern Year: TE 401, TE 402. All secondary teacher candidates took two Teacher Education courses during their pre-intern years (the senior year for most candidates), for a total of 11 credits. Each of these courses involved six hours per week in on-campus seminars and laboratory activities and four hours per week in field placements in middle schools or high schools. They also included laboratory sessions focused on peer teaching experiences, teaching and learning in their teaching minor, and sessions addressing teaching
Assignments
Teaching cycles. Virtually all of the assignments that candidates did in our courses were field assignments; they involved preparing for, doing, and writing about activities that the candidates conducted in school classrooms. Our overall goals were to help teacher candidates develop skills for reflective and analytical practice. The most important of the assignments we gave to achieve this end were teaching cycles. Our ideas about teaching cycles are based in part on the ideas of Wilson, Shulman, and Richert (1987) about the activities of teaching and have three basic components:
· Clarifying goals. We asked candidates to identify big ideas (patterns, models, and theories associated with the lesson and topic that they were teaching), examples of real-world systems or phenomena to which those ideas could be applied, and objectives for student learning (practices that involved relating big ideas to examples through application or inquiry). We encouraged candidates to develop goals based on national and state standards, and to show how the tasks they choose to use encourage deep understanding by being structured around a learning cycle (Anderson, 2002).
· Planning and teaching classroom activities. We asked candidates to develop written plans for every lesson that they taught. Though we supplied them with a template for lesson planning, in practice we allowed considerable leeway to candidates as they developed their own individual systems for planning classroom activities. During the intern year, our focus on planning shifted from individual lessons to sequences of lessons that helped students to achieve important learning goals.
· Assessment, reflection and revision. Our primary focus in assessment was on helping candidates to develop insights into the thinking and conceptions of individual students. We therefore generally asked candidates to focus on three students representing a range of academic success and develop detailed accounts of their learning. Assessments were designed not only for the purposes of assigning a grade, but also to assess teaching effectiveness and to guide ongoing instruction and therefore are not only those which might be considered more formal, such as lab reports and tests, but also embedded in the instruction itself (e.g., focus questions, group progress reports and presentations, projects with relevant rubrics). Claims for student learning were to be analytically derived, and thus much class time was spent investigating how to assess student work as the evidence upon which claims could be based. In short, we were trying to help science teacher candidates approach their own teaching as a scientist would develop questions about the world and make sense of the data they collected. We also asked candidates to consider what they had learned from their teaching and how they would teach this lesson or topic differently the next time.
Our candidates completed five teaching cycles during the two courses that they took from us during the pre-internship year (and four more during the internship year). During the first half of the senior year, the level of analysis is the lesson, which expands to a three-day “mini-unit” by the second half of the year. (In the internship year, when students are in schools for 4-5 days each week, this expands even further until the unit of planning, teaching, assessment, and reflection/revision become the unit, which often extends over several weeks or more.) Our expectations for quality also increased as the year progressed.
Students also completed other assignments as well during the pre-internship year, most of which were field-based. These included the sharing and critiquing of teaching resources, the construction of personal websites, which many then expanded into professional portfolios, case studies of diverse students, and design, implementation and interpretation of clinical interviews.
Study Participants.
This paper is focused on three candidates in our secondary science teacher preparation program. They were in their last year of undergraduate study during the 2001-2002 academic year. These individuals were selected because they represent the range of views held by individuals in the cohort of more than 60 students with whom we worked this past year. Their pseudonyms are Angelyn, Jared, and Sheila. Angelyn was senior majoring in biological sciences with a minor in chemistry; her grade point average (GPA) was 3.4. Jared was a senior majoring in geology/earth sciences, with a minor in history; his GPA was 2.8. Sheila was a chemistry major, with a minor in geology/earth science; her GPA was 3.1.
Data Sources.
The data reported are those collected during the participants’ senior (pre-internship) year in the teacher preparation program. Data sources included:
1) lesson and unit plans submitted prior to the teaching
2) lesson or unit papers (often including revised plans) submitted after the conclusion of their teaching
3) field notes taken during classroom observations of the students’ teaching
4) interviews with students in the fall and spring of their senior year