Jamy Stillman

Student Teaching’s Contribution to Preservice Teacher Development A Review of Research Focused on the Preparation of Teachers for Urban and High-Needs Contexts

Despite increasing emphasis on preparing more and better teachers and despite the near universal presence of student teaching across teacher education programs (TEPs), numerous questions about what and how student teaching experiences contribute to preservice teachers’ development remain unanswered. Indeed, much of the attention focused on student teaching in reform and policy discourses emphasizes student teaching’s structural and logistical dimensions—for example, its location, duration, and division of labor—but not its contributions to learning among preservice teachers, nor K–12 students. This article reviews empirical articles published over the past two decades to determine what and how student teaching experiences contribute to preservice teachers’ development as future teachers of students in urban and/or high-needs schools specifically. While keeping this central focus, the article also considers the implications of student teaching for the schools that play host to it and for the students who attend those schools. Anchored by sociocultural perspectives on learning and learning to teach, the review highlights a disproportionate emphasis on belief and attitude change, a relatively slim evidence base concerning the development of actual teaching practice, a tendency toward reductive views of culture and context, and a need for more longitudinal analyses that address the situated and mediated nature of preservice teachers’ learning in the field. Based on these findings, authors offer direction for future research that will extend and deepen the knowledge base.

The 21st Century Teacher A Cultural Perspective

In this article, the authors focus on the disciplinary divides between multicultural, bilingual, and special education. Existing issues that inhibit closer integration of these areas are highlighted, and a focus on the issue of culture is examined. Problematic ways that this key area has been treated in the past are described, and a proposal for a cultural focus on all students is described.

Student Teaching for a Specialized View of Professional Practice? Opportunities to Learn in and for Urban, High-Needs Schools

This article presents findings from a qualitative study of first-year elementary teachers who assessed the strengths and weaknesses of their preservice student teaching experiences vis-à-vis their inservice realities. Specifically, the study explores opportunities to learn across student teaching placements and analyzes the degree to which placements present participants with equitable opportunities to build a specialized view of professional practice—one that can support them to enact in urban, high-needs schools the kind of practices that research suggests are crucial to the academic success of historically underserved students. Findings highlight the importance of providing preservice teachers with examples of “what’s possible” in the face of tightly regulated, accountability-driven policies. The authors conclude with suggestions for teacher educators concerning the reorganization of student teaching and the strategic mediation of preservice teachers’ learning to ensure that all preservice teachers receive equitable opportunities to learn in and through their placements in the field.

From Accommodation to Appropriation: Teaching, Identity, and Authorship in a Tightly Coupled Policy Context.

This article explores how one specially prepared, accomplished teacher managed dilemmas that arose as she worked to enact responsive language arts instruction with English Learners in a policy context that privileged high-stakes accountability and standardization. Drawing on sociocultural learning theory, the article illustrates how the teacher’s sense of self – who she ‘wanted to be’ – informed her engagement with educational policy. Ultimately, we argue that the teacher’s identity pressed her to engage in acts of appropriation and authorship vis-à-vis the policies and policy-related tools she was asked to implement. In making this argument, we theorize an agentive and dialectical relationship between teachers’ identities and their participation in policy implementation.

Minding the Mediation Examining One Teacher Educator’s Facilitation of Two Preservice Teachers’ Learning

This manuscript explores how one teacher educator worked to facilitate preservice teachers’ (PSTs) learning across field- and university-based settings. Using socio-cultural learning theory as a lens, the analysis draws on case study data gathered for two PSTs from the same teacher education program (TEP), who experienced proximal, but considerably different student teaching placements in urban schools. Findings articulate the teacher educator’s repertoire of moves as she worked to mediate PSTs’ development as equity-minded, reflective practitioners. By examining the learner-centered and contextually sensitive aspects of teacher educator mediation, this manuscript challenges notions of “best practices” in teacher education and adds nuance to discussions about “rich” clinical experiences.