Activities and Settings
Under the leadership of Magdalene Lampert and Tim Boerst, the Activities and Settings team is actively supporting the creation of new environments in which a variety of practice-oriented teaching and learning can take place and on designing activities through which students can learn to teach in those environments. At the same time the group is learning more about the settings for teacher education that are in use at the School of Education and elsewhere in the country, as well as settings that are used in the education of professionals in other fields. We spent the ’06-’07 academic year exploring and conceptualizing settings for learning to teach. The settings that we are investigating fall into three categories: actual, designed, and virtual. Actual settings refer to existing school sites, which have typically been used as the only settings for learning practice. We are exploring how to improve the use of those settings for learning teaching. By designed settings we mean settings in which teacher educators can control certain conditions so that a student teacher can engage in learning practices in a more efficient and effective manner. For example, we may deliberately set the curriculum or structure blocks of instructional time to allow for more or particular kinds of interactions between student teachers and cooperating teachers to promote engagement in particular teaching practices or to enhance the likelihood that students will encounter core problems of practice that a teacher must learn to solve. Our current conception of virtual settings draws heavily on ideas about representations of the work of teaching. In this domain, people often think of classroom video, but our conception of virtual is not limited solely to video representations. Teaching practice is also represented in lesson plans, reflections on lessons, communications between educators about students, communications between educators and parents, student work and the arrangement of learning spaces.
The majority of our work thus far has focused on designed and virtual settings. The work on designed settings has involved interviewing educators in various professional schools--including dentistry, social work, family therapy, clergy, nursing, and medicine--about the ways in which beginners can be taught to engage in the practices of their intended profession. This inquiry has illuminated some of the similarities in the challenges that educators in these professions and teacher educators share. These challenges include ensuring that the sites for learning practice are productive for learning the desired knowledge, skills, and dispositions; and that the people who supervise beginners in the practice sites provide the type of support and instruction that helps students gain the desired knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Each of the professional schools we visited struggles to balance teaching professional practices with teaching ways to interpret and reason about problems of practice. Learning how different professions work to address these challenges has broadened our understanding of what we may consider in the development and use of settings for teaching beginning teachers.
During summer 2007, we launched two new experiments in designed settings: The Elementary Mathematics Laboratory Class (EML), and a new version of ELMAC 401: Developmental Reading and Writing in the Elementary School. The EML was a two-week mathematics class for students entering the fifth grade in Ypsilanti that was intended to provide opportunities for students to explore and develop a deeper understanding of important mathematical concepts and build critical skills for learning and doing mathematics. It was taught by Deborah Ball and observed by classroom teachers, preservice teachers, teacher educators, mathematicians, and researchers from the local area as well as from across the country. The EML was designed to provide children with a rich context for learning mathematics and also professionals interested in mathematics education and teacher education with a productive setting for studying and learning from an instance of "live" classroom practice. It was very well attended and drew enthusiastic engagement from the children and observers alike.
In conjunction with the EML, we also offered a workshop for practicing teachers interested in studying and improving instruction in general and mathematics teaching in particular. Participants observed the lab class each morning and spent the afternoons revisiting the lessons, and examining the teaching, mathematics, children's thinking, and social contexts captured in observation notes, video recordings, and children's writing.
In another experiment this summer, we launched a redesigned version of ELMAC 401: Developmental Reading and Writing in the Elementary School. Students in the course engaged in focused rehearsals of a small set of high-leverage instructional practices. They received intensive feedback from the instructor during these rehearsals, and then delivered the lessons with actual students participating in the Ann Arbor Public Schools Summer Institute. The course instructor and a team of others are considering the affordances of this approach to teacher education and to determine how best to expand the experiment next summer.
In yet another important new settings project, beginning in summer 2007, we are sponsoring a one-to-one laptop computing pilot project in the Secondary MAC Program. This experimental project will provide each entering Secondary MAC student with a laptop computer, a video camera, and an iPod. Instructors and students will draw on these resources to gather and study records of practice from K-12 classrooms as students learn to teach. Secondary MAC instructors and others who are interested in learning to use records of practice in teacher education will participate in a monthly study group to discuss the records collected by MAC students and their use in the program. This work will be coordinated with the TEI's on-going efforts to articulate the core work of teaching and to build a curriculum and assessment system that will support students' learning to do that work. We are extremely excited about this project, which will give us a chance to experiment with and further develop many of the ideas on which we have been working in the TEI in the past two years.
Finally, under the rubric of virtual settings we have investigated multimedia collections that currently exist (e.g., collections developed by the Carnegie Foundation’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching; the Annenberg Center’s collection of video; Magdalene Lampert’s records of her own practice, a collection developed under the auspices of the University of Chicago’s Center for Urban School Improvement) and various tools (e.g., video analysis tools such as Studiocode, Transana and Diver) that we might use to both consume and produce digital artifacts for use in teacher education.
For more information about our work on activities and settings, please contact Tim Boerst ( tboerst@umich.edu)
