Melanie Shoffner

Informal reflection in pre‐service teacher education

Although numerous benefits to teaching and learning are associated with reflective practice, reflection is not a common professional behavior among practicing teachers, despite the flexibility of approach and application. Teacher educators continue to explore meaningful options when engaging pre‐service teachers in reflective thinking. The author, also a teacher educator, presents informal reflection as one such option. Informal reflection is grounded in the conceptualization of reflection articulated in the seminal works of Dewey and Schön and rests on the elements of practical theory, flexible structure, communal interaction and personal expression. Drawing from a 2004–2005 qualitative research study on weblogs in pre‐service teacher reflective practice, the author situates the elements of informal reflection in both theory and practice, presenting informal reflection as one approach to assist in the formation of reflective practitioners.

Considering the first year: reflection as a means to address beginning teachers’ concerns

If teaching is a complex act, it is additionally complex for first-year teachers’, who enter with the same responsibilities as veteran teachers yet encounter specific difficulties as beginning teachers. This paper uses existing research on beginning English teachers major concerns to frame the exploration of concerns faced by four beginning teachers. This exploration focuses on two guiding questions: (1) What issues of practice do beginning teachers identify in their first year of teaching?; (2) How do the beginning teachers understand these issues of practice? A qualitative methodology guided the research, with active interviewing and ethnographic content analysis used to examine the data. While the beginning teachers experienced several concerns noted in previous research, analysis of the data identified three additional first-year teacher concerns: adjustment to the profession, acceptance of students and management of emotion. Teacher educators must prepare beginning teachers for the existence of these concerns in the classroom, as well as the impact of these concerns on the beginning teacher. Reflective practice is offered as a means to meaningfully address concerns during university preparation and consider these concerns in the first years of teaching.

Addressing the Needs of English Language Learners in an English Education Methods Course

During the 2005 Conference on English Education (CEE) Summit, English educators identified the importance of responding to linguistically and culturally diverse learners in the English classroom. The integration of English language learner (ELL) issues throughout and within the methods course is one way to successfully prepare secondary English preservice teachers to meet the needs of their future students. In this chapter, the two authors describe how the collaboration of an English as a second language teacher educator and a secondary English teacher educator led to the “rethinking and revising” of a secondary English methods course. The authors consider how teacher educators in different departments can collaborate to meet the needs of English preservice teachers and offer strategies developed individually and collaboratively to infuse ELL issues and instruction throughout the secondary English methods course.

The Difficulty of Teacher Dispositions: Considering Professional Dispositions for Preservice English Teachers

This article explores the place of teacher dispositions in English teacher preparation by contextualizing the issue of dispositions in English teacher preparation. This allows consideration for the importance of developing professional dispositions during English teacher preparation by recognizing that various stakeholders (teacher educators, university supervisors, mentor teachers, and preservice teachers) in teacher education often understand dispositions differently. The authors reflect and offer suggestions on how professional dispositions might be more effectively addressed in an English teacher education program through richer interactions among all stakeholders.

Reflecting to learn mathematics: supporting pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge with reflection on writing prompts in mathematics education

The use of and reflection on writing prompts in mathematics education can allow pre-service teachers to enhance their own mathematical knowledge and broaden their understanding of students’ learning needs. In this paper, we share results from a study with secondary pre-service mathematics teachers who were asked to respond to writing prompts related to various mathematical concepts, reflect on their responses, and then give the same prompts to a group of college algebra students. Our analysis of the data shows that the prompts helped the pre-service teachers to reflect on their role as learners, student thinking and needs and classroom practices. We relate these findings to a framework for looking at pedagogical content knowledge and discuss the usefulness of writing prompts with pre-service mathematics teachers for expanding such knowledge.

Preparing preservice English teachers and school counselor interns for future collaboration

The authors believe that by working together, teachers and school counselors can better support students and more effectively work for their success. In this article, we present our efforts in creating a collaborative class for preservice English teachers and school counselor interns. While offering an overview of English teachers and school counselors in their daily interactions with adolescents, we focus on the university preparation of both groups, specifically the preparation at our university, a large research institution in the Midwestern United States. We provide a look at the collaborative class created for the preservice English teachers and school counselor interns, offering examples of their interaction and feedback from the students. Lastly, we close with a consideration of the meaning of such collaboration at the university level for both English teachers and school counselors.

Connecting Technology, Literacy, and Self-Study in English Language Arts Teacher Education

This chapter shares two English teacher educators’ use of self-study to examine the integration of technology and literacy in two English Language Arts methods courses. The purpose of this self-study was twofold: (1) to examine how technology was specifically used in two methods courses and (2) to consider how that usage informed preservice teachers’ teaching and learning of literacy. Through self-study, the teacher educators were able to develop their own – and, by extension, their preservice teachers’ – understandings of the connections between literacy and technology. Specifically, they were encouraged to revise curriculum in order to integrate technology more authentically into the methods courses and revisit their own understandings of technology in order to reconcile previously unrecognized discrepancies in their pedagogy. By engaging in self-study, the teacher educators confronted tensions in their own practice, better understood their own beliefs about literacy and technology, and better articulated their reasoning for integrating technology into literacy teaching and learning.