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Home: Facutly & Research: Teacher Education Initiative

Teacher Education Seminar Series Description

2007-2008
Topic:  Teaching Practice

Next Seminar:
Marilyn Guenther and Mark Fitzgerald
Clinical Education for Dentists
Monday, March 31, 2008
Tribute Room, 4 pm

In preparation for this seminar, please thoroughly review the
materials on the special website that our speakers have prepared for
us here.

The University of Michigan has an unusual commitment to professional education, and a distinguished School of Education.  We are home to one of the oldest programs in teacher education in the United States.  With that history as our foundation, we are setting out on a new journey to reinvent how we educate teachers at Michigan.  Our 2007-2008 Teacher Education Seminar Series will support that work by providing an opportunity for our own learning about the teaching of professional practice.

Building a teacher education program focused on preparing beginning teachers for practice will require new ways to name and organize the curriculum so that it is focused on the work that teachers do. It will also require new ways to help beginners learn that curriculum. Learning to lead a whole class discussion is different from reading about methods of instruction, for example, and learning to talk with parents about their child’s development is different from reading and discussing home-school relationships.  Since teacher education has traditionally focused more on discussion of teachers’ work than it has on opportunities for student teachers actually to learn to see and discuss the work of teaching in precise and professional ways, and to rehearse and practice that work, organizing systematically for our own learning as teacher educators is an important part of our effort to rebuild teacher education here at the University of Michigan School of Education.  To this end, we will devote our 2007-2008 seminar series to studying how other professions and other teacher education programs deliver professional preparation that helps novices learn to do work in their field.

The first seminar in the series will provide a short history of how teacher education in the United States has attempted to prepare novices for the work of teaching and an overview of how other fields conceive of and carry out professional education. We will consider what the challenges of this work are, examine several historical attempts to design more practice-based teacher education, and study the notion of “approximations” of practice (Grossman, 2005). The next two seminars will address how the fields of law and dentistry, respectively, prepare novices for professional work. We will study examples of curricula and clinical programs from each of these fields, and consider how each field decides what needs to be taught and learned, what resources are required to offer first-rate clinical programs, and what the demands are on professional educators who seek to make elements of their own practice visible to and learnable by novices. In our fourth and final seminar, we will examine a case of a single teacher education program that is currently working to design and deliver a practice-based program that offers students significant opportunities to rehearse and practice while receiving intensive coaching.

             
Symposium Topics, Invited Presenters, & Reading Assignments