Showing papers by "Pam Grossman published in 2009"

Redefining teaching, re‐imagining teacher education

Abstract: In this article, the authors provide an argument for future directions for teacher education, based on a re‐conceptualization of teaching. The authors argue that teacher educators need to attend to the clinical aspects of practice and experiment with how best to help novices develop skilled practice. Taking clinical practice seriously will require teacher educators to add pedagogies of enactment to an existing repertoire of pedagogies of reflection and investigation. In order to make this shift, the authors contend that teacher educators will need to undo a number of historical divisions that underlie the education of teachers. These include the curricular divide between foundations and methods courses, as well as the separation between the university and schools. Finally, the authors propose that teacher education be organized around a core set of practices in which knowledge, skill, and professional identity are developed in the process of learning to practice during professional education.

Teaching Practice: A Cross-Professional Perspective

Abstract: Background/Context: This study investigates how people are prepared for professional practice in the clergy, teaching, and clinical psychology. The work is located within research on professional education, and research on the teaching and learning of practice. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of the study is to develop a framework to describe and analyze the teaching of practice in professional education programs, specifically preparation for relational practices. Setting: The research took place in eight professional education programs located in seminaries, schools of professional psychology, and universities across the country. Population/Participants/Subjects: Our research participants include faculty members, students, and administrators at each of these eight programs. Research Design: This research is a comparative case study of professional education across three different professions—the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. Our data include qualitative case studies of eight preparation programs: two teacher education programs, three seminaries, and three clinical psychology programs. Data Collection and Analysis: For each institution, we conducted site visits that included interviews with administrators, faculty, and staff; observations of multiple classes and fieldwork; and focus groups with students who were either at the midpoint or at the end of their programs. Conclusions/Recommendations: We have identified three key concepts for understanding the pedagogies of practice in professional education: representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice. Representations of practice comprise the different ways that practice is represented in professional education and what these various representations make

Teacher Preparation and Student Achievement

Abstract: There are fierce debates over the best way to prepare teachers. Some argue that easing entry into teaching is necessary to attract strong candidates, whereas others argue that investing in high quality teacher preparation is the most promising approach. Most agree, however, that we lack a strong research basis for understanding how to prepare teachers. This article is one of the first to estimate the effects of features of teachers’ preparation on teachers’ value added to student test score performance. Our results indicate variation across preparation programs in the average effectiveness of the teachers they are supplying to New York City schools. In particular, preparation directly linked to practice appears to benefit teachers in their 1st year.

Complex Interactions in Student Teaching: Lost Opportunities for Learning

Abstract: Student teaching is a cornerstone of teacher preparation, yet it remains one of the most difficult experiences to understand. Calls for an ecological approach to research on student teaching prompt...

Research on Pedagogical Approaches in Teacher Education

Abstract: Most reports about teacher education focus more on curricular issues, such as what prospective teachers should learn, or on structural issues, such as the uses of professional development schools or the length of programs, than on issues of instruction. Neither the research literature nor the reform reports of the 1980s (Carnegie Forumon Education and the Economy, 1986; Holmes Group, 1986) had much to say about how prospective teachers should be taught.1 Yet in teacher education, attention to pedagogy is critical; how one teaches is part and parcel of what one teaches (Loughran & Russell, 1997). In the professional preparation of teachers, themedium is themessage. This chapter summarizes the research on how we teach prospective teachers and on how various approaches used by teacher educators might affect what teachers learn about teaching, including what they come to know or believe about teaching, as well as how they engage in the practice of teaching itself.

Learning to Look beyond the Boundaries of Representation: Using Technology to Examine Teaching (Overview for a Digital Exhibition: Learning from the Practice of Teaching)

Abstract: [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] At first glance, the video tape of one day in Yvonne Hutchinson's classroom showed work that was effortless. Hutchinson calmly moved around among the ninth-grade students while they went over their homework and discussed their reading of A Call to Assembly, an autobiography of the jazz musician and professor Willie Ruff. There was some commotion in the classroom as Hutchinson organized a group discussion, but soon the students began talking, calling on one another, responding to one another, referring to the text they were reading, and making connections to their own lives. Hutchinson casually interjected a comment or a question here or there, but for the most part, the students seemed to be talking about the book among themselves. From the perspective of the preservice teachers from the Stanford Teacher Education Program who were watching the video, Hutchinson's classroom provided a vision of the possible--an image of what a group discussion could look like. In some ways, however, the video also provided a vision of the impossible: How could these preservice teachers, many of whom had never seen or led a group discussion in their own teaching placements, produce or even approximate the teaching moves that Yvonne Hutchinson had cultivated over a career of more than 30 years? For teacher educators and the novice teachers they seek to support, these kinds of representations of teaching provide a dual challenge: These viewers need to be able to see what is there and to see what is not; they need to be able to analyze the many elements of teaching and learning that are captured in video and other media, but they also need to have a sense of what those representations fail to capture---crucial details that might be obscured, larger contexts in which work may be situated, overarching purposes, histories, and long-term relationships invisible in daily interactions (Ball & Lampert, 1999). Part of this challenge involves the difficulty of analyzing the highly complex practice of leading a rich discussion. Leading a classroom discussion involves multiple components, including establishing norms for participation, assisting students in engaging in careful readings of text ahead of time, and modeling features of academic discourse. In other work, Grossman and her colleagues (Grossman et. al., 2009) refer to this as the "decomposition" of practice--breaking down complex practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of teaching and learning. If decomposing practice enables novices to "see" and supports them in enacting practice, how can multimedia records of practice illustrate both the fluid performance and the individual parts that contribute to such fluidity without making teaching seem rote or simplistic? [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] This challenge--to make teaching accessible for analysis while still capturing its complexity--serves as the focus of a digital exhibition that brings together four Web sites that represent teaching using group discussions in four different ways and contexts (A list of Web sites referred to is included at the end of this article). This overview of the exhibition describes the background of the work on these Web sites, the conceptual framework that guides the development of the Web sites and this digital exhibition, and a discussion of the exhibition and the implications for the development and exchange of these kinds of multimedia representations of teaching, and their use in teacher education, in the future. Background This exhibition grows out of work begun at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where Hutchinson was a member of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). (1) CASTL provided fellowships to faculty in both K-12 and higher education who had been nominated for both their excellence in teaching and their involvement in efforts to study and document their practice. …

(Overview for a Digital Exhibition: Learning From the Practice of Teaching) Learning to Look Beyond the Boundaries of Representation: Using Technology to Examine Teaching

Abstract: One day in Yvonne Hutchinson's 9th grade classroom in Los Angeles in which students discussed A call to assembly. A t first glance, the video tape of one day in Yvonne Hutchinson's classroom showed work that was effortless. Hutchinson calmly moved around among the ninth-grade students while they went over their homework and discussed their reading of A Call to Assembly, an autobiography of the jazz musician and professor Willie Ruff. classroom as Hutchinson organized a group discussion, but soon the students began talking, calling on one another, responding to one another, referring to the text they were reading, and making connections to their own lives. Hutchinson casually interjected a comment or a question here or there, but for the most part, the students seemed to be talking about the book among themselves. From the perspective of the preservice teachers from the Stanford Teacher Education Program who were watching the video, Hutchinson's classroom provided a vision of the possible—an image of what a group discussion could look like. In some ways, however, the video also provided a vision of the impossible: How could these preservice teachers, many of whom had never seen or led a group discussion in their own teaching placements, produce or even approximate the teaching moves that Yvonne Hutchinson had cultivated over a career of more than 30 years? For teacher educators and the novice teachers they seek to support, these kinds of representations of teaching provide a dual challenge: These viewers need to be able to see what is there and to see what is not; they need to be able to analyze the many elements of teaching and learning that are captured in video and other media, but they also need to have a sense of what those representations fail to capture—crucial details that might be obscured, larger contexts in which work may be situated, overarch-ing purposes, histories, and long-term relationships invisible in daily interactions (Ball & Lampert, 1999). Part of this challenge involves the difficulty of analyzing the highly complex practice of leading a rich discussion. Leading a classroom discussion involves multiple Homepage of a Web site documenting a unit in Pam Grossman and Christa Compton's teacher education course Curriculum & Instruction in Secondary English. The unit uses Hutchinson's website as a central " text " for learning to lead discussions (2003). components, including establishing norms for participation , assisting students in engaging in …