Spring/Summer 2007 Update
Spring and Summer 2007 saw progress in every major strand of work underway on the Teacher Education Initiative (TEI), as well as the birth of several exciting new projects. We are looking forward to launching an even more productive round of work in the ’07-’08 academic year.
Updates on Core Areas of TEI Work
In the area of curriculum redesign, a sub-set of the Curriculum Group spent the summer working on a draft map of the work of teaching that was begun earlier in the year by the entire group. We are considering different ways to share this map with the broader School of Education community and with practicing teachers so that it can be refined and elaborated. Please stay tuned for more information about this! We will need a great deal of input and help as we flesh out this map and eventually use it as the foundation for work on redesigning our teacher education curriculum.
The spring and summer months have also been productive for work on assessment. Members of the assessment-related project titled “Developing an Integrated Assessment System for Elementary Teacher Education” (DIAS) worked with their partners at UC-Berkeley to generate a draft map of the work of leading a mathematics discussion that can be used for analyzing discussion practice, guiding learning opportunities, and/or tracing progress over time. Areas and aspects of this progress map were generated based upon a review of relevant literature, consultation with practitioners, and analysis of evidence collected from the work of novices and more accomplished mathematics educators. In addition, members of DIAS worked with leaders in the Teacher Education Program to generate a structured set of opportunities for student teachers to learn more advanced techniques, engage in practice, and receive feedback on work within several of the domains of practice that were the subject of previous work in methods courses. This development work centers on what DIAS refers to as “instructional cycles” and includes a detailed plan for the collection of evidence from student teacher practice that encompasses audio, video, and written artifacts, as well as multiple iterations of feedback from field instructors and cooperating teachers. Members of the DIAS project will continue working this year to develop assessment practices for student teachers in elementary mathematics. In addition, Pamela Moss will begin coordinating work on assessment practices in other parts of the teacher education program.
This summer was an especially exciting time for work on activities and settings, as we both continued gathering information on ways of creating new relationships with schools and designing new activities for student teachers, and completed two successful settings-related experiments. In particular, we continued to explore ideas for innovative relationships with schools that would provide sites for teacher education; opportunities for research on teaching, learning, teacher learning, and leadership; and a mutually beneficial and sustainable arrangement for schools and the School of Education. In service of this aim, we are gathering and reading literature on charter and lab schools, and engaging in on-going consultations with individuals around Michigan and in other states about charter schools, Educational Management Organizations (EMO’s), and other university-school partnerships. Closer to home, members of the activities and settings committee also used the summer to summarize observations from both a pilot professional development opportunity for field instructors that was conducted during the Winter ’07 term and the ED 392 Taskforce’s experiments with using records of practice in ED 392.
New Experiments
Two important settings-related experiments completed this summer were the Elementary Mathematics Laboratory Class (EML) and a foray into using rehearsals and coaching in the first literacy course in the ELMAC program. 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 in the School of Education by Deborah Ball and observed by classroom teachers, pre-service 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. For more information, please see our website: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sleepl/eml2007.html
In conjunction with the EML, Jenny Lewis also led 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. The workshop was sponsored by the Center for the Proficiency in Teaching Mathematics and the School of Education; please visit its website for more information: http://www.soe.umich.edu/teachersmathlab
Both the EML and the accompanying workshop for teachers helped us explore ways of making elements of practice visible to and accessible by novice and veteran teachers alike. We documented both efforts carefully, and will be considering ways of expanding the EML and making it even more productive for observers next year.
In another experiment this summer, Sarah Scott taught a redesigned version of ELMAC 401: Developmental Reading and Writing in the Elementary School. Students in Sarah’s course engaged in focused rehearsals of a small set of high-leverage instructional practices. They received intensive feedback from Sarah during these rehearsals, and then delivered the lessons with actual students participating in the Ann Arbor Public Schools Summer Institute. Magdalene Lampert is working with Sarah and a team of others to consider the affordances of this approach to teacher education and to determine how best to expand the experiment next summer.
In yet another important new project, beginning this summer the Teacher Education Initiative is sponsoring a one-to-one laptop computing pilot project in the Secondary MAC Program. Led by Charlie Peters and Deanna Birdyshaw, 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. The project will also help us explain and market the Teacher Education Initiative to interested parties outside the School of Education.
Please visit the links here for more detailed updates on our progress on curriculum, assessment, and activities and settings.
Finally, we are delighted to welcome two new members of the TEI Steering Group for the 2007-2008 year. Donald Freeman, new director of the Teacher Education Program, will join the group as a representative from the current TE program. Donald will replace Beth Grzelak, who is on maternity leave this fall. Tim Boerst will also join the group as the new coordinator of work on activities and settings; Tim will replace Magdalene Lampert, who is on sabbatical during the ’07-’08 academic year. We may also make additional changes to the composition of the Steering Group this fall. We also plan to hold regular Steering Group meetings that will include leaders from the Teacher Education Program and from each TEI-related project and will allow us to enhance the connectivity and coordination of our work.
HOW CAN I GET INVOLVED IN THE INITIATIVE?
If you have a question about or would like to get involved with a particular aspect of work on the TEI, please contact the coordinator for the area of work that interests you:
Curriculum: Deborah Ball ( dball@umich.edu)
Activities and Settings: Timothy Boerst ( tboerst@umich.edu)
Assessment: Pamela Moss ( pamoss@umich.edu)
General TEI Infrastructure (communications, budgeting, marketing, etc.):
Deborah Ball (dball@umich.edu) or Francesca Forzani (fforzani@umich.edu).
