Anne K. Morris

Preparing Teachers to Learn from Teaching

The authors propose a framework for teacher preparation programs that aims to help prospective teachers learn how to teach from studying teaching. The framework is motivated by their interest in defining a set of competencies that provide a deliberate, systematic path to becoming an effective teacher over time. The framework is composed of four skills, rooted in the daily activity of teaching, that when deployed deliberately and systematically, constitute a process of creating and testing hypotheses about cause-effect relationships between teaching and learning during classroom lessons. In spite of the challenges of acquiring these skills, the authors argue that the framework outlines a more realistic and more promising set of beginning teacher competencies than those of traditional programs designed to produce graduates with expert teaching strategies.

LEARNING TO LEARN TO TEACH: AN "EXPERIMENT" MODEL FOR TEACHING AND TEACHER PREPARATION IN MATHEMATICS

This paper describes a model for generating and accumulating knowledge for both teaching and teacher education. The model is applied first to prepare prospective teachers to learn to teach mathematics when they enter the classroom. The concept of treating lessons as experiments is used to explicate the intentional, rigorous, and systematic process of learning to teach through studying ones ownpractice. The concept of planning teaching experiences so that others can learn from ones experience is used to put into practice the notion of contributing to a shared professional knowledge base for teaching mathematics. The same model is then applied to the work of improving teacher preparation programs in mathematics. Parallels are drawn between the concepts emphasized for prospective teachers and those that are employed by instructors who study and improve teacher preparation experiences. In this way, parallels also are seen in the processes used to generate an accumulating knowledge base for teaching and for teacher education.

Teaching, Rather Than Teachers, As a Path Toward Improving Classroom Instruction

For several historical and cultural reasons, the United States has long pursued a strategy of improving teaching by improving teachers. The rarely questioned logic underlying this choice says that by improving the right characteristics of teachers, they will teach more effectively. The authors expose the assumptions on which this logic is built, propose an alternative approach to improving teaching that engages teachers (and researchers) directly in the work of improving teaching, present some indirect evidence to support this approach, and examine the cultural traditions and beliefs that have kept the conventional approach in place for so long.

Creating Shared Instructional Products An Alternative Approach to Improving Teaching

To solve two enduring problems in education—unacceptably large variation in learning opportunities for students across classrooms and little continuing improvement in the quality of instruction—the authors propose a system that centers on the creation of shared instructional products that guide classroom teaching. By examining systems outside and inside education that build useful knowledge products for improving the performance of their members, the authors induce three features that support a work culture for creating such products: All members of the system share the same problems for which the products offer solutions; improvements to existing products are usually small and are assessed with just enough data; and the products are jointly constructed and continuously improved with contributions from everyone in the system.

Building a Knowledge Base for Teacher Education: An Experience in K-8 Mathematics Teacher Preparation.

Consistent with the theme of this issue, we describe the details of one continuing effort to build knowledge for teacher education. We argue that building a useful knowledge base requires attention to the processes used to generate, record, and vet knowledge. By using 4 features of knowledge‐building systems we identified in the introductory article for this issue—shared goals, tangible products, small tests of small changes, and multiple sources of innovation—we examine the knowledge‐building processes for K–8 teacher preparation under way at the University of Delaware. We conclude that the 4 features provide a useful mirror for clarifying the strengths and weaknesses of our local system and, at the same time, reveal a number of institutional obstacles for knowledge building that lie ahead.

Introduction: Building Knowledge Bases and Improving Systems of Practice

In the introductory essay to this special issue, we argue that a knowledge base for teacher education will grow only if the field attends directly to the processes used to study and improve its practices. We identify 4 features that characterize the processes used by a diverse set of outside‐of‐education systems to build knowledge for improving professional practice: shared goals across the system; visible, tangible, changeable products; small tests of small changes; and multiple sources of innovation from throughout the system. Our intent in describing these features is to set the stage for examining how knowledge can be built for educating (mathematics) teachers, a challenge addressed in this article and those that follow in this special issue.

Development of logical reasoning: children's ability to verbally explain the nature of the distinction between logical and nonlogical forms of argument.

Previous research by D. Moshman and B. Franks (1986) supported the hypothesis that children do not explicitly understand the nature of the distinction between logical and nonlogical forms of argument. This research examined the performance of 8-11-year-olds (N = 220) on Moshman and Frankss experimental tasks when the children were cued to apply particular comprehension strategies. Findings from 2 experiments indicated that a significant number of children are capable of explicitly recognizing the necessity of logical forms and the indeterminacy of nonlogical forms and that this competence must be distinguished from their tendency to fail to attend to structural relationships between propositions and to monitor the intrusion of extraneous personal knowledge in assessing the validity of an argument. The findings suggest that all of these competencies are important components of the ability to distinguish logical and nonlogical arguments.

Diagnosing Learning Goals: An Often-Overlooked Teaching Competency

We propose that an often overlooked competence for teaching is diagnosing learning goals. We propose further that this competence is an empirical process of hypothesis generation, testing, and revising. To understand our argument, diagnosis must be conceived as a process of analysis and mathematical decomposition, and learning goals must be treated as mathematical statements that can be decomposed into component parts or subgoals that must be mastered to achieve larger learning goals. By presenting several examples from our mathematics courses for prospective elementary teachers, we show how instructors can develop diagnostic competence by engaging in cycles of improvement. These cycles require diagnosing learning goals to create hypotheses about how to improve instruction, testing these hypotheses by gathering targeted data, and revising instruction based on relevant evidence. Conceived in this way, the diagnosis of learning goals is a competence teachers can develop as part of an evidence-based process for improving teaching.

Effects of Teacher Preparation Courses: Do Graduates Use What They Learned to Plan Mathematics Lessons?:

We investigated whether the content pre-service teachers studied in elementary teacher preparation mathematics courses was related to their performance on a mathematics lesson planning task 2 and 3 years after graduation. The relevant mathematics knowledge was studied when the teachers were freshmen, 5 to 6 years earlier. Results showed that when there were differences in how completely graduates attended to the key mathematics concepts when planning lessons, the differences favored the topics studied in the courses, especially topics emphasized most heavily. We conjecture that teacher preparation can matter for lesson planning, an important task for teaching, if enough opportunities are provided to acquire the relevant content knowledge for teaching. We consider what this might mean for teacher preparation, more generally.