Connie Schaffer

Developing the Effective Teaching Skills of Teacher Candidates During Early Field Experiences

Abstract This study examined the development of effective teaching skills in teacher candidates in the context of early field experiences directly tied to a pedagogical course. Evidence from faculty instructors, mentor teachers, and teacher candidates suggests secondary education candidates were able to develop effective teaching skills related to instructional strategies, classroom management, and curriculum design during an early field experience. Teacher candidates developed these skills as they shifted their identities from candidates-as-students to candidates-as-teachers.

A Tale of Three Cities: Defining Urban Schools within the Context of Varied Geographic Areas.

What constitutes an urban school? This question has confounded social researchers and educators who often limit definitions to population data. H. Richard Milner suggested a framework for defining urban schools that includes population data as well as the racial and social context of schools. This article applied Milner’s model to school districts in New York, Nebraska, and New Mexico which exemplified Milner’s categories of urban schools: urban intensive, urban emergent, and urban characteristic. Application of the framework to the districts presents a model for teacher educators to deliver two important components of preservice preparation. First, the model can assist preservice teachers to challenge their existing perceptions of urban schools. Second, establishing a framework provides teacher educators the opportunity to guide preservice teachers to view urban schools through a Critical Race Theory lens. Through this lens, preservice teachers can begin to realize the impact of systemic racism within education.

The Seven Step Strategy

Is this a familiar scenario? You give students a reading assignment. During class, you pose discussion questions related to the reading. Silence. You rephrase the questions. After an awkward pause, one student responds with a brief answer. According to the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U 2010), when students read they should: engage beyond the explicit message, consider important questions and scholarly contributions, identify relations among ideas, acknowledge multiple perspectives, and deepen disciplinary conversation. Many well-intended instructors use Socratic or leveled questioning to facilitate the discussion of an assigned reading. While this engages a few students, most can opt to remain silent. The seven step strategy provides an alternative to classroom silence and engages all students. Students discuss a single reading as they progress through increasingly complex cognitive levels (Bloom 1956). The first several steps resemble familiar thinkpair-share strategies. However, by mid-strategy, students advance to higher cognitive levels and continue this advancement through the final steps. (See Figure 1.) Steps one through three are each allocated 3 minutes. Students are given 6 minutes for step four and again for step five. The strategy concludes with students spending 12 minutes on each of final two steps. Students are actively engaged with the content for a minimum of 45 minutes, with much of the time dedicated to higher cognitive levels. Because of the length, instructors may want to reserve the strategy for difficult readings that students struggle to understand or interpret. To implement the strategy, instructors create small groups of four to five students and facilitate the following steps. 1. Each student creates a written list of pertinent facts, arguments, and evidence they remember from the reading. 2. Within their small groups, students share their individual lists and record a collective list of recalled information on a separate piece of paper. Each group then exchanges this list with one other group. 3. Within their small groups, students are asked to combine items from their original list with items on the list of the other group. In the process of reviewing the list from the other group, students may recognize information similar to what they had recalled in steps 1 and 2 as well as additional information they had not originally listed. The newly created list represents a broadened understanding of the reading. Groups again exchange these revised collective lists with a second group. 4. Students continue to expand their understanding by reviewing, again within their small groups, the list from the second group. However, during this second review, instructors ask the small groups to apply the information in the reading to other course concepts or their own prior knowledge. Based on this, each group identifies key ideas, the most relevant and important information, from the reading. 5. Instructors begin to deepen the students’ understanding by facilitating a whole-class analysis of the similarities and differences of the various key ideas identified by the groups. Working together, the class identifies all the key ideas from the reading. 6. Returning to their original small groups, students are now asked to evaluate the relevance, merit, and potential biases represented in the key ideas created in step 5. 7. Individually, students compose a paragraph synthesizing their original understanding of the reading (recorded in step 1) with the additional information and insights from the discussions in steps 2–6. The strategy can yield benefits beyond the initial discussion. Instructors can assess understanding by having

How to Thrive during Your Field Experiences.

Field experiences are part of every accredited teacher preparation program. These seven tips will help students get the most out of the experience.