Unpacking practice with clinical instructional rounds in the San Francisco Teacher Residency program

Abstract

Clinical instructional rounds have recently gained national and international attention as a pedagogical innovation that can help school administrators, leaders, and sometimes teachers move past the impenetrability of siloed classrooms to study teaching and learning across school sites and even districts. While rounds are an increasingly widespread form of professional development for administrators and teachers, they are less commonly used in preservice programs with teacher candidates. This article describes how an urban teacher residency program strives to strengthen the connections between the fieldwork and the coursework of novice teachers through clinical instructional rounds within and across the educational settings in an urban school district. It also describes the findings from research into what candidates seem to learn by participating in instructional rounds and how this might impact their future practice. The findings suggest that rounds can be useful for helping teacher candidates develop deeper understandings of the educational systems where they will work, facilitate their learning of diverse teaching practices, and develop an appreciation of diverse student's strengths across contexts. They also suggest that rounds are not a silver bullet, and candidates can develop reductionist views of student ability and disjointed understandings about how school systems work. The implications of this research are discussed in terms of considerations for how teacher educators can employ rounds as a tool for deepening candidates’ understandings of students, classrooms, schools, and the systems that support urban youth.