Innovator Vol. 38 No. 1 - Fall 07: RE-IMAGINING TEACHER EDUCATION
Return to contents “I wanted to reinvent teacher education at a very good research university,” says Deborah Loewenberg Ball, “and Michigan was the place to do it.”
Of course, the Dean of the University of Michigan School of Education is well aware that the enterprise requires far more than her own efforts, or the School’s, or the University’s, but if that reinvention could pick a place for itself to be born, Michigan’s credentials are in order.
Among them: a commitment to teacher preparation among the U-M faculty that stretches beyond the School of Education, an abundance of instructors with recent and extensive classroom experience, a commitment to top quality research, a tradition of interdisciplinarity that facilitates cross-fertilization with other professional schools, and solid support for the enterprise from the central administration.
Scalable Innovation that can Travel
Launched two years ago, the Teacher Education Initiative (TEI) is, as its web site puts it, “a comprehensive project to redesign how teachers are prepared for practice at the University of Michigan, and to build knowledge and tools that will inform teacher education more broadly.” That means not only figuring out how to prepare new professionals for the complex, difficult work of teaching in the real world, but also conducting research on teacher education – much of it rooted in the activities of the TEI itself – that will, so to speak, travel well.
“The history of teacher education reform is that very smart and clever people get together and develop innovations that are not scalable,” Ball says. “We don’t want to do things that only work at Michigan. We want to develop practices and approaches that can be transplanted. Teacher education mostly happens in big places whose mission is to prepare large numbers of teachers. The reason for doing it at a place like U-M is that we should not only do it very well but also study it, so what we learn and what we produce are available to other institutions that don’t have an infrastructure like ours.”
Those products include a rationally sequenced curriculum organized around skills like designing instruction, interacting with students’ parents and care-givers, managing classroom discussions, and documenting and interpreting P-16 students’ progress in ways that inform better instructional decisions; a reliable and relevant system of performance assessment of teaching practice; and effective tools for creating records of practice that fuel the continuous improvement of both students of teaching and its practitioners.
“There are education schools where almost no one studies teaching or how minority kids achieve,” says Ball, “and there’s no course in many teacher education programs called ‘assessment.’ People think the way to improve poor schools is to allocate more funds or create charter schools, but there’s decent evidence that teachers who know what they’re doing can make a big impact on kids’ learning. One of the best things we can do is educate teachers who are prepared to work in those situations.”
Donald Freeman, a key player as the School of Education’s new director of teacher education, sees reasons for optimism. “I really get a sense of casting the net wide and thinking deeply and asking questions that people might have wanted to avoid in the past because they were somewhat uncomfortable,” he says. “There are so many smart people involved and looking at different dimensions of what we may have been doing wrong over time that it stands at least a fighting chance, if not better, of making an impact.”
Here’s a quick look at three TEI works-in-progress, each of which exemplifies a core strand of the initiative:
Revising ED 392: Education in a Multicultural Society
This required course is almost a microcosm of the sea changes the TEI envisions. Here’s how Francesca Forzani, the TEI project manager and doctoral candidate who has taught sections of the course both before and after revisions began, puts it: “There were two problems in the past. One of them was that five people would teach it and they would teach it five different ways. The other was it would consist largely of academic discussions of the history and sociology of schooling, or race and culture as concepts, and it would never get into
any detail about how those things actually show up in the
work of teaching.”
Having spent four years teaching high school English in rural Mississippi, Forzani knows whereof she speaks. “I was a white teacher from an upper-middle-class background going into an all-black school in a very poor community,” she says. “I had to learn about the kind of instruction that made sense for my students, which was different from the kind of instruction that made sense for me when I was in high school.”
When she taught the course most recently, “We did a lot more of bringing in class records of teachers’ work and videotape of teachers teaching. We looked at actual lessons teachers taught, including assignments they’ve given and assessments they’ve used. I wouldn’t say we have a new way yet, but we’re working on it.”
Assessment Methods in Teacher Education
The “aha” moment for Elizabeth Moje came when she was working on a teacher preparation research project that preceded the TEI but has since become integrated with it. “We had to have a way to assess whether what we were trying had any impact in our secondary teacher education program,” she says. “And,” notes Tim Boerst, lead instructor in the elementary Math Methods course, “the complexity of teaching practice requires assessments that let us scaffold student teachers’ learning as they move toward assuming responsibility for their own classrooms.”
“What we need,” says Pamela Moss, director of the assessment component for TEI, “is an assessment system that can serve multiple purposes: to provide clinical feedback to student teachers, to help teacher educators decide ‘what to do next’ in planning instruction, to track student teachers’ progress as they engage in increasingly complex aspects of teaching, to support consequential decisions about student teachers’ readiness to teach, and to evaluate the quality and impact of the teacher education program itself. And we need to do this in ways that those outside our teacher education program will
find credible.”
Moje adds, “We decided that the Secondary Teacher Education assessment would be the perfect opportunity to analyze who our teacher candidates are when they come to the School of Education, and who they are as teachers when they leave.”
Apply that brush to a larger canvas, and the central role of the assessment strand of the TEI becomes clear. How will anyone know if the initiative is making a difference without an integrated system for tracking the achievement of pre-service teachers? This entire perspective has been curiously absent from both teacher preparation programs and the profession in general.
“This is the sort of systemic assessment work that people are not typically doing, and that should be routine in Teacher Education,” says Freeman. “I am genuinely excited to be working in the Teacher
Education Initiative,” says Moss. “Its work provides a uniquely rich grounding for the development of assessments that can support the teaching and learning of teachers and provide compelling evidence about student teachers’ readiness to assume responsibility for their own classrooms. I think we
have the opportunity to make a distinctive contribution to
the assessment of teaching practice.”
Secondary MAC Technology Pilot
Using videos in the Secondary Master of Arts with Certification program is nothing new, but the breadth and depth of their deployment in the program’s current pilot project bespeaks a significant difference of kind rather than degree. Instead of recording their activities once or twice, pre-service teachers will be equipped with cameras throughout the school year, taping their interactions with both mentors and students to create, in effect, an individualized text that can be fully integrated into their classroom work.
“This allows technology to be a real tool to help them more closely examine and reflect on their own practice,” says Charles Peters, director of the Secondary MAC program, “and it allows us to begin to refine some of our curriculum and how we think about what effective teaching should look like.”
“We really think this will bring the field experience into the coursework,” says Deanna Birdyshaw, an instructor in the program. “With the digital reproduction of what’s actually happening, we can have a much more powerful conversation about acts in teaching.”
At the end of the day, the key question speaks to the core of what the TEI is all about. As Peters puts it, “Does this really
help us better prepare them for their first year in school? The more we close that gap between what happens in classrooms and what are good techniques of practice, the better these teachers will be for the students they teach in that first year, and for the years that follow.”
Story by Jeff Mortimer. Photos by Mike Gould.
