Teacher Education Restructuring:

Cheryl Craig, Ph.D. Professor

Endowed Chair of Urban Education AERA Fellow

Texas A & M University

Teacher Education Restructuring:

Learning Environments And Innovative

Pedagogies

When the winds of change blow… some

build walls, others build windmills…

Teachers and the Teaching

Profession

The Winds of

Changes

Teachers:

Teachers

The potential to most significantly impact youth

Minded individuals (Dewey, 1938)

“Agents of education” (Schwab, 1954/1978)

Schools And Teachers Are Charged With

Conflicting Aims

Students must be prepared for the present and future while honoring the past

Teachers must teach students a common body of knowledge

Teachers and students must support the educational directives of

Teachers’ Role?

“Impossible Ones” (Schwab)

Teacher Educators’ Roles? “Impossible Ones” (Ben-Peretz)

Teacher Educators’ Impossible Roles

Demands on teacher education are high; support for teacher educators is low

“The deliverables” policymakers expect are those that prospective teachers would want and which teacher educators would desire

Teacher Candidates

Bring their personal histories,

propensities, desires, and challenges into educational situations

Take away understandings unique to their own persons

Teacher Education Restructuring

Learning Environments and

Innovative Pedagogies

Looking Backward:

Teacher Education Has Mirrored The

Development Of The Country

A British colony

Independence as a nation

Three Certainties About Teacher Education

It is necessary

It is driven by supply-and-demand

Teacher Preparation In The U.S.

Normal Schools

Non-degree Granting Colleges

Teaching: “A minor profession”

“The Crisis Of Professions”

(Schön)

A Nation at Risk (ANAR)

Respect accorded

Teacher Education

Public/private universities and colleges

Regional educational offices

School districts

Private consultants

U.S. Educational Difficulties

The quality of education

Underlying Education Gap

Opportunities

Resources

Stronger Teacher Education

Teacher certification

Looking Forward

Technical Rationalism

(Schön)

Not being able to withstand the complexities of reality

Not being able to adjust to local conditions

Technical

rationalism

Expected output

Planning

Planning Planning

Everything that can be planned can be realized

Mismatch

Academia

Practice

As Teacher Education Became More

Formalized And Standardized…

Theoretical gains Practical losses

Minor Profession Teaching Law Medicine Major Profession (Schön, 1983)

Two Different Places That Teachers Deal With…

The Teaching Profession has been Tightly Controlled & Subject to the Relentless External Manipulation Of Policymakers….

“The Practical” The Restructuring Of Teacher Education

Policy Practice

“The Practical”

A complex discipline

Educational situations Teacher Learner Subject Matter Milieu

The Practical

Organic forms of knowing and intuitive kinds of action

Educational Policy

“A Grand Story” Of Loosely Connected Ideas

• Broader perspective • Vantage point of the system Seeing Small • Close up view • Intricacy • Intentionality • Concreteness of everyday life Seeing Big

Policy

“A bad eclectic” (Schwab, 1983)

Impossible teacher/teacher educator roles

Pieces of policy puzzles do not fit together

Singapore And Finland

“Thinking schools, learning nation”

“Trust through professionalism”

Students in both countries lead the way

Four Pillars Of Education

(UNESCO Report)

Learning to know Learning to do

Learning to live together Learning to be

Life Cycle Learning

Equitable And Excellent Futures

‘Annals and chronicles’

‘Curriculum of life’

Generative Teacher Development Experiences

Narrative portraits of school contexts

A focus on teaching moments Teachers’ cultural narratives

Ongoing analysis of techniques and strategies

Knowing, Doing, Community, And Identity

Thinking and action Narrative authority

Knowledge communities

• The possibility that current, adapted, and new approaches— through the rigorous enactment of ‘the practical’ in local settings—will more purposely be built on policies and theories that are coherent and defensible, not disjointed and destined for failures as so often is the case.

Any instructionally sound practice can be corrupted

Teaching without words occurs

Technician Transmitter

Consumer

Receiver

Teacher-as-Curriculum-Implementer

Policy makers mandate changes; Teachers do what they are told.

Teacher As A Curriculum Maker

Teachers as active agents

Bridges teacher

education and ‘the practical’

‘The Practical’ Paradigm Shift

Cooperating teachers

Teacher educators

Shifting polarized positions: a narrative approach to teacher education

‘The Practical’:

Two Fundamentally Different Teaching Places

Formal: Teachers

Practically Oriented Pedagogies

…formal teacher education… [ is], of course, important. But we do think that, on the whole, there is more for most teachers to learn by

coming, self-consciously, to grips with their own teacher knowledge than with what may be

learned [about] knowledge or skills …from others]… (Connelly & Clandinin)

Practically Oriented Pedagogies

…This work should be done in the context of an understanding of the significance of informal teacher education and, therefore, with a

humble spirit and with modest expectations

First entailment

‘The Practical’…

Is not an elixir

Dependent on the willingness of human beings

Provides opportunities for both negative and corrective responses

Second Entailment

‘The Practical’…

A time-consuming endeavor

Not all educational problems are of sufficient magnitude to warrant full-dress deliberation

The most comprehensive of

deliberations need to be reserved for the most vexing of issues

Third Entailment

Politically charged issues may require prior walk-a-mile-in-my-shoes

The pedagogically use of vicarious human experience

Fourth Entailment

It is entirely possible certain

perennial problems in the education of children may result in mandatory changes in the preparation of all

Fifth Entailment

Those in the teaching and teacher education field will need to…

Systematically disclose the contents of deliberations

Provide field-based evidence for the actions individually and collectively taken

Sixth Entailment

The Practical

Questions driving the deliberative process will hopefully be different ones

The possibility of queries being more closely related to student learning is high

Hegemonies underlying the questions asked will be laid bare at the inquiry table

CHALLENGE Technocratic Thinking, WHICH…

Fails to account for the complexities of educational situations

Gives rise to decisions based on dubitable evidence

Affects adults and children in deleterious ways

Policy Prescriptions Educational Theorists

The

Winds Of

Change

• Editing the ISATT 30th _{Anniversary Yearbook, From}

Teacher Thinking to Teachers and Teaching: The Evolution of a Research Community (2011-2013)

• Editing the three-volume set of International Teacher

Education: Promising Pedagogies (2013-2015)

• Authoring The structure of teacher education chapter in the Handbook of International Teacher Education (2014-2015)

• Delivering keynote addresses around the world since 2007 (Ongoing)