Mapping the Teacher Education Terrain for Novices

Abstract

Teacher education in the U.S. suffers from a form of continental drift with deep fault lines. Most teachers learn to teach in three disconnected lands--colleges of arts and science, schools of education, and K-12 classrooms. Each of these instructional continents offers settings for preservice teachers to develop important resources. However, there is little to help preservice travelers navigate within and bridge across these spaces. Consider, for example, learning to teach secondary history or social studies. The required sequence comprises ill-organized sets of educational experiences in different spaces (e.g., history seminars, education classes, high school classrooms), for different purposes (i.e., to learn history, to learn to teach history, to observe classrooms), and led by people who don't work with one another (history professors, education professors, and cooperating teacher mentors) and may never even have met. These divisions in the preparation of history teachers are widely recognized. But, there is also disconnection within each of those spaces. For example, most preservice history teachers take more than four-fifths of their courses in arts and sciences. Yet, they often meander through a maze of history electives, using personal interests, classmates' recommendations, professors' reputations, and course availability to shape their courses of study. However strong particular courses or instructors may be, whether prospective educators acquire the content knowledge they need to be effective teachers depends on whether they took a particular course in a particular space at a particular time. Further, the absence of defined pathways or roadblocks among subject-matter courses will make it difficult and less likely that preservice teachers will assemble a coherent and suitable body of knowledge and skills. Prospective history teachers experience something similar in their education courses. Scholars have long recognized the gaps between colleges of arts and sciences and schools of education. But many teacher education programs have their own minifault lines dividing courses in psychology from those in education foundations, or literacy, or methods. Preservice learning also is a hodgepodge outside university classrooms. Prospective teachers spend time in the field observing, practicing teaching, and eventually taking responsibility for one or more classes during teaching. The practicing teachers in whose classrooms they student teach often lack detailed knowledge about the preservice teachers' training program. Their teaching practice is typically framed by their own interests and goals, the orientations of their departments, and the imperatives of the local community and policy environments. Thus, there are as many hidden fault lines within each of these settings as there are among the three continents of teacher education. These compartmentalized and loosely coupled field experiences, liberal arts classes, and professional education courses are typical (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond, 2006; Labaree, 2004; Weick, 1976). Although each space con-tributes to learning, each does so in episodic ways that essentially require the preservice teacher to construct the connections. In short, the person least equipped to navigate among and across these different sites has the task of coordinating disparate experiences, concepts, and discourses into a meaningful and useful whole. Since 2005, we've been engaged in the Rounds Project, which has been driven by the recognition that, like the earth's continents, the continents of teacher education cannot be fully joined. We are trying to build a navigational system that connects these spaces for novice teachers. Reconnecting the continents The Rounds Project required restructuring our secondary program and entailed seven key reforms. The brief description that follows illustrates the various dimensions of the project. …