Morva McDonald

Back to the Future: Directions for Research in Teaching and Teacher Education:

In this article, the authors examine two distinct but closely related fields, research on teaching and research on teacher education. Despite its roots in research on teaching, research in teacher education has developed in isolation both from mainstream research on teaching and from research on higher education and professional education. A stronger connection to research on teaching could inform the content of teacher education, while a stronger relationship to research on organizations and policy implementation could focus attention on the organizational contexts in which the work takes shape. The authors argue that for research in teacher education to move forward, it must reconnect with these fields to address the complexity of both teaching as a practice and the preparation of teachers.

Redefining teaching, re‐imagining teacher education

In this article, the authors provide an argument for future directions for teacher education, based on a re‐conceptualization of teaching. The authors argue that teacher educators need to attend to the clinical aspects of practice and experiment with how best to help novices develop skilled practice. Taking clinical practice seriously will require teacher educators to add pedagogies of enactment to an existing repertoire of pedagogies of reflection and investigation. In order to make this shift, the authors contend that teacher educators will need to undo a number of historical divisions that underlie the education of teachers. These include the curricular divide between foundations and methods courses, as well as the separation between the university and schools. Finally, the authors propose that teacher education be organized around a core set of practices in which knowledge, skill, and professional identity are developed in the process of learning to practice during professional education.

Core Practices and Pedagogies of Teacher Education A Call for a Common Language and Collective Activity

Currently, the field of teacher education is undergoing a major shift—a turn away from a predominant focus on specifying the necessary knowledge for teaching toward specifying teaching practices that entail knowledge and doing. In this article, the authors suggest that current work on K-12 core teaching practices has the potential to shift teacher education toward the practice of teaching. However, the authors argue that to realize this vision we must reimagine not only the curriculum for learning to teach but also the pedagogy of teacher education. We present one example of what we mean by reimagined teacher education pedagogy by offering a framework through which to conceptualize the preparation of teachers organized around core practices. From our perspectives, this framework could be the backbone of a larger research and development agenda aimed at engaging teachers and teacher educators in systematic knowledge generation regarding ambitious teaching and teacher education pedagogy. We conclude with an invitation to the field to join with us in imagining approaches to generating and aggregating knowledge about teaching and the pedagogy of teacher education that will move not only our individual practice but also our collective practice forward.

The Integration of Social Justice in Teacher Education Dimensions of Prospective Teachers’ Opportunities to Learn

This article examines the integration of social justice in teacher education and defines dimensions of teachers’ opportunities to learn. Findings come from a comparative case study of two elementary teacher education programs: the Teachers for Tomorrow’s Schools Program at Mills College and the Teacher Education Intern Program at San José State University. Combining concepts from sociocultural theory and a theory of justice for the conceptual framework, this study illustrates how these programs addressed social justice in university courses and how teachers’ opportunities to learn varied across specific dimensions. Specifically, this article highlights teachers’ opportunities to develop conceptual and practical tools related to social justice as emphasizing the needs of students identified by their membership in educational categories and the needs of students identified by their status in oppressed groups. In addition, it addresses how variation in teachers’ opportunities informed their conceptions of students and their preparation.

Surveying the Landscape of Teacher Education in New York City: Constrained Variation and the Challenge of Innovation

In this article, the authors describe the state of teacher education in and around the large and diverse school district of New York City. Using multiple data sources, including program documents, interviews, and surveys of teachers, this study attempts to explore the characteristics of programs that prepare elementary teachers of New York City public schools, including the kinds of programs that exist, who enters these different programs, who teaches in the programs, and what characterizes the core curriculum. A central question concerns the amount of variation that exists in the preparation of elementary teachers for a single, large school district. Despite the number and variety of programs that exist to prepare elementary teachers, the authors found the overall curriculum and structure of teacher education to be more similar than different. To understand this lack of variation, the authors draw on organizational theory, particularly, the concept of institutional isomorphism, to examine the case of teacher education. The authors conclude with recommendations for what it might take to change the landscape of teacher education in the context of a large urban district.

Practice Makes Practice: Learning to Teach in Teacher Education

In this article, we argue that teaching is and should be a central element to learning to teach, particularly as teacher education once again turns toward practice. From this perspective, we must elaborate how such a shift addresses the need to bridge the gap between knowledge for teaching and knowledge from teaching, between theory and practice, and among university courses and fieldwork. If the intent of such a shift is to fundamentally change the preparation of teachers, we argue that it requires teacher education programs to do more than increase the amount of time candidates spend in clinical field placements. It requires, we argue, that teacher educators engage in simultaneous innovation in three related, but distinct aspects of program design and implementation: organizational structures and policies, content and curriculum, and teacher education pedagogy. Without such dynamic engagement, the practice-turn will go the way of many past reforms in teacher education—it will be symbolic but not significant or meaningful.

Creating “Cultures of Evidence” in Teacher Education: Context, Policy, and Practice in Three High-Data-Use Programs

One of the important rationales for the development and implementation of a rigorous classroom-based measure of preservice teacher quality is that such a tool will provide new sources of data that are highly relevant to the task of improving programs of teacher preparation. However, research on data utilization within organizations from a variety of disciplines makes it clear that even when relevant and useful data are available, they are often not used for decision making. We studied three “high-data-use” programs from among the 32 California institutions implementing the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) to identify organizational practices associated with the use of PACT data for program improvement. We describe practices within and across these programs that were identified by informants as important to their success in using teacher performance outcome data to make decisions about program renewal and improvement.