The Questions that Drive Reform

Abstract

An intriguing way to trace the recent history of teacher education reform is in terms of the major questions that have driven the field and the varying and sometimes competing ways these questions have been constructed, debated, and enacted in research, policy, and practice. Along these lines, a loosely chronological list of the major questions that have driven teacher education over the past 50 years might go something like this: the attributes question, the effectiveness question, the knowledge question, and the outcomes question in teacher education. Each of these questions both shaped and was shaped by the political climate, degree and kind of public attention to K-12 schooling, perceived supply and demand of teachers, federal and state policies and funding programs, evolving perceptions of teacher education as a profession vis-a-vis colleges and universities as well as schools, and emerging and competing paradigms and programs of research on teacher learning, and teaching/learning/curriculum in the subject areas. The attributes question, which was prominent from roughly the early 1950s through the 1960s, asked, are the attributes and qualities of good teachers, prospective teachers, and/or teacher education programs? Explored through studies of the personal characteristics of teachers and teacher educators, versions of this question emphasized both attributes related to personal integrity and human sensitivity as well as attributes of the liberally educated and/or academically able person. A different version of the attributes question was central to critiques of teacher education programs and faculty, especially the degree to which they provided (or failed to provide) intellectually rigorous, discipline-based training for new and experienced teachers worthy of a place at the university. This version of the attributes question drove debates about the balance between professional and arts and sciences courses, the scholarship of teacher education students and faculty, and the organizational structures of programs. The effectiveness question posed a different issue: What are the teaching strategies and processes used by effective teachers, and what teacher education processes ensure that prospective teachers learn these strategies? This question drove many of the reforms in teacher education during the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. Influenced by new studies of the basis of teaching, many teacher education programs developed systems for evaluating prospective teachers according to scientific objectives and stated performance criteria. Checklists and other forms of assessment attempted to align classroom teachers' practices with the criteria used by fieldwork supervisors and also with teacher education processes, programs, and language. Other questions that shaped this period arose at least partly in response to perceived flaws in the effectiveness question. New questions about the meanings of classroom and school events countered the effectiveness question and began to identify what was left out of discussions that focused primarily on effective teacher behaviors. Prompted by but also concurrent with public concern about the quality of teaching and teacher education, the knowledge question animated the field from the early 1980s through the late 1990s: should teachers know and be able to do? should the knowledge base of teacher education be? At the heart of the knowledge question was the desire to professionalize teaching and teacher education by building a common knowledge base for the profession. Building on early research about teachers' thinking and on emerging knowledge about subject matter learning, the knowledge question moved the field away from what effective teachers do to what they know and how they construct new knowledge appropriate for differing local contexts, particularly for increasingly diverse learners. Versions of the knowledge question identified and made distinctions among formal and practical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, case knowledge, knowledge in action, reflection on knowledge, culturally relevant knowledge, and local knowledge generated through teacher research and action research. …