Lauren Gatti

Learning to Teach in an Urban Teacher Residency

In this article, I employ sociocultural theory to analyze the learning to teach process of two novice teachers enrolled in one Urban Teacher Residency (UTR). Findings show that Genesis and Jackie were differentially drawing on programmatic, disciplinary, relational, experiential, and dispositional resources as they learned to teach in an urban context. I show that programmatic resources of supervision and classroom management requirements (i.e., Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion) not only differentially influenced teachers’ learning and development but also differentially impacted the development of trust with students.

Representing teachers as criminals in the news: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Atlanta schools’ “Cheating Scandal”

ABSTRACT On 1 April 2015, 11 Atlanta teachers accused of changing answers on their students’ standardized tests were convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 5–20 years in prison. Despite ample news coverage, few sources investigated teachers’ motivations for altering students’ responses or explored what the consequences would have been if student scores had not been changed to passing. Moreover, the fact that the teachers’ actions resulted from systemic problems associated with working within a high-stakes testing environment is glossed over and all but lost in the reporting of the “Cheating Scandal” events. The authors conduct a critical multimodal analysis of how semiotic resources were used to represent teachers in the Atlanta “Cheating Scandal” and show how the medias framing of teachers both reflects and conceals specific interests of the powerful educational reform movement and the corporations that benefit from it, such as Pearson, Inc. Data sources included four online news sources from April 2015 that covered the teachers’ sentencing, and the authors analyzed the visual and verbal transformations that occurred during the process of recontextualization. Analysis revealed the construction of a moral narrative that depicted the teachers as selfish and incompetent, reinforcing the dominant paradigm driving school reform in the USA. The authors conclude by calling for more counter-narratives that expose how dominant representations reify negative public perceptions of teachers.

Disciplinary Resources and the Role of Aims: Teaching Our Subjects To What End?

Over the last 30 years, important scholarship has been conducted around the role of content knowledge for teaching, pedagogical content knowledge, and the role of teacher preparation in helping novice teachers develop in these disciplinary realms (e.g., Shulman, Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4, 1986; Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1–22, 1987; Ball, et al., Content knowledge for teaching: What makes it special? Journal of Teacher Education, 59(5), 389–407 2008; Grossman, The making of a teacher: Teacher knowledge and teacher education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press 1990; Holt-Reynolds, Good readers, good teachers? Subject matter expertise as a challenge in learning to teach. Harvard Educational Review, 69(1), 29, 1999). It is important to note, however, the historical context from which this focus on content knowledge in and for teaching came. As I discussed briefly in Chap. 2, the publication of two reports in 1986—Holmes Group of Education Deans report and the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy—served as a wake-up call to university teacher preparation and catalyzed wide-ranging reforms.

Conclusion: Teacher Education to What End?

My semester-long poetry elective was always a small class, but my students and I agreed that we loved it that way. For some reason, it was always scheduled as the last period of the day, and so at 2:30 pm, my students would come in and, without prompting, configure the tables so that we sat facing each other in class. We would chat for a few minutes, and then we would get into our work, each of us opening our journals to free write before turning to the poems we would be discussing that day. Almost without exception over the six years I taught it, the course was a sort of cozy, intellectual community.

Teacher Education Partnerships and the Role of Ideology and Aims

In this chapter, I turn to the broader realm of partnerships in teacher preparation. Specifically, I explore the ways in which LEE Residency’s partners—Partner University and Leaders for Equity in Education (LEE)—brought different visions for teacher preparation to their partnership. Using interviews from people involved in both Partner University and LEE (i.e., deans, professors, supervisors, and partnership directors), I show how Partner University’s larger aim of flourishing was in direct conflict with LEE’s aim of achieving. Moreover, I illustrate how this “flourish versus achieve” tension shaped on-the-ground decisions and practices for the novice teachers enrolled in the LEE Residency.

Experiential and Dispositional Resources and the Role of Negotiating Curriculum

In this chapter, I explore how Sarah and Sam (discussed also in Chap. 4) leveraged their experiential and disciplinary resources to negotiate and deepen curricula that were largely aimed at developing “college-ready” skills. I start with Sarah, whose experiences of living in Latin America and working as a translator for a landscaping company powerfully influenced her ability to create learning opportunities for her students that were more aligned with her larger vision of teaching skills for engaged and productive citizenship rather than the school’s emphasis on teaching skills for “college readiness” (as measured by the ACT). Sarah drew on these experiential resources in order to work with an almost entirely Latino student body in responsive and productive ways.

Teacher Education in Deep Focus

In May of 1941, Orson Welles’s now-iconic film Citizen Kane premiered in New York City. A thinly veiled depiction of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane was a sort of twentieth-century morality play about the ethical hazards of greed and excess. Storying the rise and fall of poor-boy-turned-famous, Charles Foster Kane, the film dutifully adhered to the elements of a solid Greek tragedy: hubris, ultimately, is the hero’s downfall. Citizen Kane has been lauded for its non linear storyline and for the mystery—sweet and sad in the end—of “Rosebud.” But the movie was also famous for its use of a cinematic breakthrough, “deep focus.”

Transformative Teacher Preparation: A Framework of Resources for Learning to Teach

If, as I argued in Chap. 2, we are to approach teacher preparation in deep (rather than shallow) focus, then we must attend equally to the wider policy stage where novice teachers learn to teach and to the more fine-grained, context-bound, and complex processes of how they learn to teach their subject in particular school contexts. Chap. 2 aimed to bring into focus the current policy debates defining the field of teacher preparation, showing how the reductive and binary “reform” or “defend” response to university teacher preparation is shaping policy decisions about where and how teachers should be prepared.

Programmatic Resources and the Role of Programmatic Responsiveness

As I have tried to show throughout the previous chapters, each of the novice teachers I worked with accessed a constellation of programmatic resources made available to them by their particular teacher preparation pathway. In Chap. 4, I noted how Genesis accessed resources from her coursework at Partner University, including her Special Education course and her Methods course. She sought out colleagues in her building, like Hendrick, to observe and to be observed by. For Sam, the moment of transformation in terms of her relationship with her students was catalyzed by watching a video of herself teach, a core programmatic pillar in the residency program.

Relational Resources and the Role of Trust

As I discussed in Chap. 3, the relational, affective work of teaching is arguably some of the most foundational; it can also be one of the most complicated terrains for novice teachers to navigate, especially with students who have been underserved by schools and whose primary relationship to school is one of alienation and/or frustration. In this chapter, I delve deeply into the learning-to-teach processes of two LEE residents teaching in different schools: Genesis, who learned to teach at Orion Academy, a recently turned-around school; and Sam, who learned to teach at LEE’s flagship teacher training school, Teaching Academy High School.