Student teachers and cooperating teachers: An ecological relationship

Abstract

Willis D. Copeland University of California Santa Barbara, California Student teachers' ability to use many skills they learn during their university training depends not only on the quality of the initial training they receive but on the environment in which they must practice use of those skills, their student teaching classrooms. This finding, a result of a series of research projects I have conducted with the Teacher Preparation Program of the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that teacher educators should not be concerned only with the ways in which they train their students in the use of technical skills. It suggests that they must also develop a clearer and more integrated understanding of the realities present in classrooms. The technical skills approach has for some years been a part of most teacher training programs across the country. N. L. Gage has defined technical skills as . . specific instructional techniques and procedures that a teacher may use in a classroom. They represent an analysis of the teaching process into relatively discrete components that can be used in different combinations in the continuous flow of the teacher's performance (Gage, 1968, p. 602). Examples of these technical skills are Establishing Set in learners, using Higher Order and Probing questions, Verbal and Non-verbal Redirection, enabling learners to achieve Closure, and using appropriate Wait Time after asking a question or hearing a pupil's response. Typically, teacher education institutions have employed some sort of laboratory based training procedure such as microteaching to enable their students to achieve competence in the use of these technical skills. As developed at Stanford University during the mid-1960s, a typical microteaching session begins with the student teacher learning the characteristics of a particular technical skill. The trainee then watches or listens to a recording of an example of the skill in use in a teaching situation, plans and teaches a short five to eight minute lesson using the skill with a small group of pupils, receives videotaped feedback guided by a supervisor concerning appropriate use of the skill, replans and reteaches the lesson and continues the cycle of feedback/re-teach/feedback until the skill is mastered. The inclusion of experiences such as microteaching into teacher preparation programs was based on two assumptions. The first was that such training would increase the probability that the technical skills which were the targets of the training would be acquired rapidly and to a high degree of proficiency. There is currently a significant body of research that supports this assumption (Davis & Smoot, 1970; McDonald & Allen, Morse & Davis, Reed, Van-