Lynn Paine

Teachers working together: A dialogue on organizational and cultural perspectives of Chinese teachers

Abstract This chapter is a dialogue between two scholars — one Chinese and one North American. Each from her own perspective draws on field research and professional experience to analyze practices of teacher collaboration in China. The chapter considers how Chinese teachers work together as a matter of both formal organization and informal relations. The underlying cultural assumptions which support these practices are also discussed. Much of what is perceived to be dichotomous in the West (such as group vs. individual, hierarchy vs. equality, and control vs. commitment) is perceived to be reconciled within the complex historical, cultural, and political patterns which embed Chinese thinking and practice.

Learning To Teach with Mandated Curriculum and Public Examination of Teaching as Contexts.

Abstract This case study explores how a Chinese beginning teacher developed her professional knowledge of mathematics instruction under the influences of a mandated curriculum and a contrived teaching organization. It finds that the teacher was able to develop a mathematics lesson that engaged students in discovering mathematics ideas and making sense of their relationships and her way of teaching was influenced directly and indirectly by the nature of the mandated curriculum and teaching organization in the context of her work. Her exploration of the mandated curriculum individually and with her colleagues contributed to her understanding about mathematics concepts and their representations. Other teachers’ systematic observations and discussions about her teaching with a focus on pedagogical content knowledge helped her develop and refine her teaching strategies. Such a focus was again shaped by the ways in which the mandated curriculum and teaching organization are structured. Some shared concepts in mandated curriculum and the teachers’ working language mediated her understanding of the curriculum and other teachers’ examinations about her instruction. The study indicates that the ways in which the mandated curriculum is structured and teachers are organized may help teachers develop the necessary professional knowledge for teaching.

General Pedagogical Knowledge of Future Middle School Teachers: On the Complex Ecology of Teacher Education in the United States, Germany, and Taiwan

For more than two decades, three components of teacher knowledge have been discussed, namely, content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and general pedagogical knowledge (GPK). Although there is a growing body of analytic clarification and empirical testing with regard to CK and PCK, especially with a focus on mathematics teachers, hardly any attempt has been made to learn more about teachers’ GPK. In the context of the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), Germany, Taiwan, and the United States worked on closing this research gap by conceptualizing a theoretical framework and developing a standardized test of GPK, which was taken by representative samples of future middle school teachers in these countries. Four task-based subdimensions of GPK and three cognitive subdimensions of GPK were distinguished in this test. TEDS-M data are used (a) to test the hypothesis that GPK is not homogenous but multidimensional and (b) to compare the achievement of U.S. future middle school teachers with future middle school teachers from Germany and Taiwan. The data revealed that U.S. future teachers were outperformed by both the other groups. They showed a relative strength in one of the cognitive subdimensions, generating strategies to perform in the classroom, indicating that in particular they had acquired procedural GPK during teacher education.

Mentoring as assisted performance: A pair of Chinese teachers working together

In this article, we explore the assisted performance that mentor teachers develop to help novice teachers learn to teach through analysis of the collaboration of a first-grade novice teacher and her mentor teacher in the context of the formers learning to teach mathematics in Shanghai, China. We briefly examine the possibilities and challenges associated with mentoring, describe how the novices teaching changed over the course of her first year of teaching in the direction mathematics education reformers advocate, and explore the ways in which the mentor contributed to that development. The mentor contributed to the novice teachers progress for several reasons. First, she developed and implemented a clear and consistent focus throughout different stages of the novices learning and employed forms of mentoring that aligned with the kind of teaching reformers advocate. Second, the mentor also modeled, analyzed, and reflected on such mathematics teaching. Third, she defined and refined the zones of the novices proximal development in learning to teach and pushed her to move gradually from one zone toward the other until she was able to function independently.

The Local and the Global in Reforming Teaching and Teacher Education

Nations no longer have the freedom to formulate their educational policies in isolation. . . . While everyone is aware of how international economic competition, free-trade zones, and global exchanges have dramatically altered the nature of the world we live in, we rarely think about public schooling as affected by global trends. . . . Now, these cross-national studies of school achievement have become common, even mandatory in the sense that more and more nations feel compelled to participate in order to “benchmark” their educational achievements against other nations. (Akiba and LeTendre 2009, 6–7)

Knowledge Expectations in Mathematics Teacher Preparation Programs in South Korea and the United States: Towards International Dialogue:

As a comparative analysis of teacher preparation in its sociohistorical contexts, this study examines the official educational aims and curricula of 49 mathematics teacher preparation programs in South Korea and the United States, where substantial differences have been observed in both student achievement and teacher knowledge. Overall, the findings from this study suggest that transnational commonalities and national differences exist simultaneously in social expectations for teacher knowledge. The authors argue that attending to both culturally contextualized and semantically decontextualized dimensions helps us have a more balanced comparative perspective from which we can better assess current conditions of teacher education. Constructive international dialogue can be facilitated by such a balanced perspective that may further enrich teacher education without ignoring either profound differences in sociohistorical contexts or important commonalities in epistemic models of teacher education across countries.

Entering a Culture of Teaching: Teacher Induction in Shanghai

Li Mei is an energetic, cheerful woman who feels that teaching “is the hardest job under the sun, but the happiest”. [2] In her second year of teaching lower secondary mathematics, she teaches thirteen periods a week (the average load for most lower secondary teachers in Shanghai): six each to two different sixth-grade classes and one to an elective ‘activity class’ (huodong ke) that is geared at strengthening and deepening pupils’ interest in mathematics and helping them develop ‘divergent’ ways of thinking that stretch beyond the textbook. Her load is like that of most teachers in her school.

Shifting Patterns of Authority in Chinese Schools

Chinas schools are in the midst of structural changes affecting principals, teachers, and students. These changes have been promulgated as the solution to many of the educational systems weaknesses: resource shortages, rigid bureaucracy, inefficient management, overly centralized decision making. The initial quote from Premier Li Peng provides the politicians broad policy pronouncements. But policy implementation, as the second quote from a Beijing principal suggests, also raises new challenges and problems for those participants in the educational bureaucracy. This article is about authority and responsibility in Chinese schools and how relationships between the state and society affect them. The structure and source of authority are important educational issues, both for what they reflect about the way educational decisions are made and carried out and for the way they reveal connections between schools as organizations, the state, and society. At one level these issues have consequences for teaching, teachers, school curriculum, and student learning, and at another level they affect access to the opportunity structures schools provide.

Exploring the Interaction of Global and Local in Teacher Education: Circulating Notions of What Preparing a Good Teacher Entails

In this chapter, I explore the current moment of global discourse and its challenges for teacher education. I begin by making the case that, at an ideational level, there is indeed a global conversation of teacher education, one supported by cross-national studies, the role of national scholars and policymakers, and the emergence of global consulting (perhaps a new player in a new role). I then examine, through analysis of curriculum and teacher education student learning, how the practices of teacher education, when viewed comparatively, suggest a far more local, or regional, conversation. Finally, I consider the role of research in supporting what I see as an interaction of global and local discourses. Throughout, I am drawing on ideas of externalization (Schriewer 2000; Steiner-Khamsi 2004) and an understanding of teacher education as existing in both discursive and structural levels.

Teacher Education Effectiveness: Quality and Equity of Future Primary and Future Lower Secondary Teachers’ General Pedagogical Knowledge

For more than two decades, three components of teacher knowledge have been discussed, namely, content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and general pedagogical knowledge (GPK). Although there is a growing body of analytic clarification and empirical testing with regard to CK and PCK, especially with a focus on mathematics teachers, hardly any attempt has been made to learn more about teachers’ GPK. In the context of the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), Germany, Taiwan, and the United States worked on closing this research gap by conceptualizing a theoretical framework and developing a standardized test of GPK, which was taken by representative samples of future elementary and middle school teachers in these countries. Four task-based subdimensions of GPK and three cognitive subdimensions of GPK were distinguished in this test. TEDS-M data are used (a) to test the hypothesis that GPK is not homogenous but multidimensional and (b) to compare the achievement of future elementary and middle school teachers in Germany, Taiwan and the US. The data revealed that US future teachers were outperformed by both the other groups. They showed a relative strength in one of the cognitive subdimensions, generating strategies to perform in the classroom, indicating that in particular they had acquired procedural GPK during teacher education.