Gary A. Morris

Teacher education pedagogy: disrupting the apprenticeship of observation

Teacher educators are challenged to enact a pedagogy that helps facilitate conceptual transitions in preservice teachers away from the naïve notions formed during their long apprenticeships of observation. This study examines one ‘educative experience purposefully embedded in meaningful pedagogical experiences’ using the three-level model of teacher learning. Findings indicate preservice teachers derived a range of learning from the educative experience, and most were found to be surfacing, confronting, and beginning to replace naïve notions of teaching, learning, and assessment. Findings also suggest several characteristics of teacher education pedagogy that disrupt the apprenticeship of observation, including the presentation of dramatically new ideas to elicit the awareness of unexamined assumptions about teaching and learning; the usefulness of affect in awakening that awareness; and opportunities to develop metacognition and process reactions through writing that surfaces prior ideas and articulates new understandings.