Kip Téllez

Mentors By Choice, Not Design: Help-Seeking by Beginning Teachers

This paper focuses on the informal help or advice that beginning teachers seek. The data reported in this study, gathered from 128 first-year teachers, suggest that beginning teachers are selective in whom they ask for help. They seek help from experienced teachers they perceive as friendly and caring, independent of whether the teachers are formally recognized as their mentors. Most of the teachers in the sample reported that they would seek help from someone other than their mentor if they had a serious problem in teaching. Satisfaction with help from other sources, an unwillingness to seek formal help, and organizational factors are explored as possible reasons why these beginning teachers reported that they would seek help from others rather than from their assigned mentors. Issues of teacher socialization are also discussed.

Mexican-American preservice teachers and the intransigency of the elementary school curriculum

Abstract Perhaps the intense focus on the lack of minority teachers in the US has obstructed the study of those students of color who do enter teacher education programs. In particular, few research studies examine Mexican-American preservice teachers and their negotiation of the learning-to-teach process. This study addresses how Mexican-American student teachers “use” their ethnicity during student teaching. For instance, do Mexican-American teachers express their cultural knowledge in lesson planning and implementation? Semi-structured interviews with four Mexican-American student teachers revealed little ethnic expression, even when teaching Mexican-American children. Implications for teacher education programs are also discussed.

Examining the Internal Structure Evidence for the Performance Assessment for California Teachers A Validation Study of the Elementary Literacy Teaching Event for Tier I Teacher Licensure

Interpretations for licensure tests involve a series of inferences or a validity argument, leading from the test score to decisions about who is accepted or denied entry into a profession. Utilizing an argument-based framework for validation based on the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, we explore the evidence for the ongoing use of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) for Tier I licensure decisions. The evidence for a unidimensional and a multidimensional structure based on the instrument’s content are examined with an item response model. Examining operational data (n = 1,711) from seven California teacher education institutions, we found sufficient internal structure validity evidence to support the continued, but limited, use of this instrument for its intended summative purpose. Evidence for a three-dimensional structure of model fit better explains overall teacher candidate performance on the PACT instrument as it is currently designed.

Contextualizing Parent Education Programs in Urban Schools: The Impact on Minority Parents and Students.

This article describes a collaborative effort among a university college of education, its graduate school of social work and a community school to develop a culturally responsive parent education/involvement program. Educators and social workers worked cooperatively to provide a model for involvement and education that validated the cultural frame of reference, values, and heritage of the participants. As a result of participating in this type of program, the participants indicated they had more knowledge and confidence, which enabled them to interact more effectively with their children at home, as well as with teachers and others at the school.

Teachers as Intellectuals and Advocates: Professional Development for Bilingual Education Teachers

Bilingual education continues to be one of the most controversial educational programs worldwide. In several US states, it has even been put to a vote in general elections. Internationally, nations that have long promoted multilingualism are debating whether the languages of new, working-class immigrants deserve to be taught in schools. Consequently, bilingual educators now find themselves in a newly charged and precarious political position. We argue that bilingual educators are now beholden to a single professional development goal: reappraising their efforts at saving this important instructional program in the interest of immigrant youth. We first explore the demise of bilingual education across the United States, address the condition of bilingual education worldwide, point to promising teacher development projects, and end by asking bilingual educators to consider who is left to join them in promoting the marginalized languages—and communities who speak them—in the context of a new world order.

Have conceptual reforms (and one anti‐reform) in preservice teacher education improved the education of multicultural, multilingual children and youth?

This article examines three conceptual reforms in US teacher education (competency‐based teacher education (CBTE), reflective teacher education (RTE) and constructivist teacher education (CTE)) for their effects on the education of multicultural, multilingual youth, as well as considering alternative certification (AC), known here as an ‘anti‐reform’. The author suggests that although each reform made incremental improvements in the ways that preservice teachers are prepared to teach multilingual and multicultural learners, none significantly altered the education of under‐served children and youth. For instance, CTE points out the importance of prior knowledge, but fails in connecting its core concepts with culturally relevant instruction. CBTE, while also generally failing to alter teacher preparation for multicultural learners, did try to make explicit connections for preservice teachers. RTE made explicit the moral consequences of working in diverse communities but fell short when it altered the apprenticeship–mentor relationship. AC of teachers is presented as the work of neo‐liberals whose largely successful efforts to deregulate teacher preparation offer both an improvement and retrenchment for urban children and youth. Finally, the article links the field’s focus on the preparation of teachers for diverse students and the moral dimension of teacher education, concluding that such a connection may be the only way to maintain the professional school preparation of teachers.

Developing Teachers' Knowledge and Skills at the Intersection of English Language Learners and Language Assessment.

T growth of teachers’1 professional knowledge and skills has been the topic of policy, research, and even philosophy for many decades. The assessment of English Learners (ELs), a more specific concern, has become an interest of the educational community in just the past 40 years (e.g., Harris, 1969). Our task in this chapter is to combine these two topics and consider their relations from empirical, practical, and historical perspectives (listed here in what we consider to be the rank order of importance). At the intersection of any pedagogical practices, we are drawn into the complicated mix of generalized and specialized knowledge required for expert teaching. And although the theory/practice split might be a false dualism, we agree with Salvatori’s (2003) characterization of the discipline:

Pre‐service Teachers and their Students: early views of race, gender and class

ABSTRACT Whereas much teacher education continues to engage in a limited and mechanized version of the learning to teach process, many teacher educators view their work as critically important to fostering societal equality and justice, conditions that remain uncommon in many US schools. By helping pre‐service teachers to view race, class, and gender as issues central to their concern as educators, teacher educators typically and systematically introduce their students to these issues with little regard for their students’ initial thoughts on these dimensions. This study examined 235 pre‐service teachers’ early views on students’ race, class, and gender by asking them to rate their respect for students who varied on the dimensions of race (black/white), gender, and class (lower/upper middle). The results of this investigation suggest that pre‐service teachers show patterns of greater respect for black, female students of low social‐economic status, independent of the type of student described (a leader, a...

A Room of One's Own: Teaching and Learning to Teach through Inquiry

Abstract In this paper, we argue that, in the best of all possible worlds, every teacher would engage in teacher-research. In order to become a teacher-researcher, those who teach will require extra resources. We propose that teacher educators can provide a substantial resource by offering the services of a teacher education student to assist practicing teacher-researchers in their efforts. Ultimately, the preservice teachers may gain the most from such a relationship.

A case study of a career in education that began with “Teach for America”

In this article I share the results of a seven‐year case study of an educator who began his career without formal preservice teacher education, as a participant in Teach for America. Steven (a pseudonym) began teaching mathematics in an urban middle school, later teaching social studies to English language learners, and is currently a principal of an urban charter school. Using a narrative/biographical research method, I have documented how Steven combined his personal resources, the confidence he gained from participating in Teach for America, and, because he began taking professional coursework in his second year of teaching, his emerging understanding of the foundations of teaching and learning (i.e. what he learned at the university) to form the educator he has become. His growth in understanding the culture of his students is a particularly compelling part of his story. Implications for contemporary teacher education are discussed, including the role of multicultural education courses and why customized teacher education programs should become more commonplace.