Brian Cambourne

The Knowledge Building Community Program: A Partnership for Progress in Teacher Education

The preparation of teachers and current teacher education programs according to Tripp (1994) has not stood up well to public scrutiny. He says that many people, particularly teachers, administrators, and governments, believe that teacher education practices are an inadequate preparation for teaching. Teacher education in many tertiary institutions throughout the world is under pressure (Korthagen and Kessels, 1999) and it has evolved to the point where “the professional school’s prevailing conception of professional knowledge may not match well with the actual competencies required of practitioners in the field” (Schön, 1987, p. 10). This mismatch discussed by Schön (1987) may in reality reflect the ambiguous and complex nature of teaching as it involves the acquisition of a wide range of skills. Teaching requires judgment, appropriate action and the capacity to reflect and revise decisions on the basis of observations and insight. Learning to teach means gaining theoretical and practical knowledge along with the development of interpersonal skills (Furlong and Maynard, 1995). The associated problems of conventional teacher education programs have been identified by Louden (1993) as collisions between university-based theory and school-based practice. He lists hit-and-run supervision by university staff who have no connection with the student’s development as a teacher, and sink-or-swim supervision by cooperating teachers who are unwilling (or unable) to help students bridge the gaps in their knowledge between theory and practice. The development of teaching skills is complicated by the fact that often the knowledge that may be most critical for an individual beginning teacher is identified during preservice teaching experiences, but is seldom fully developed in subsequent preservice practicums (Barnes, 1989). Fullan (1993) says that there is a widely held misconception that teaching is not all that difficult. As a result of this misconception, it is a common belief that education faculties attract only the students on the lower end of the academic scale (Sarason, 1993). The challenge, therefore, for teacher educators, is to create programs that will prepare the beginning teacher for the intricacies of life in the classroom. The transformation of students to teachers is a combination of complex events, which needs to take place in both universities and schools. Hannan (1995) argues that the teaching profession requires highly trained teachers at degree standard who have had such a balanced training. Like most providers of pre-service teacher education in Australia, the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong, has been under constant pressure to