Robert E. Floden

Teacher Preparation Research: An Insider's View from the Outside.

The authors were asked by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement and the U.S. Department of Education to conduct a review of high-quality research on five questions concerning teacher preparation. As part of that assignment, they were asked to develop a set of defensible criteria for including research in the review. In this article, they summarize what the research says about the five questions posed by their funders, and they discuss the development of the review criteria. The questions included attention to the subject matter and pedagogical preparation of prospective teachers, to the content and character of high-quality field experiences and alternative routes, and to research on the effects of policies on the enhancement of teacher preparation.

Learning From Our Differences: A Dialogue Across Perspectives on Quality in Education Research

The dialogue re-presented in this article is intended to foster mutual engagement—and opportunity for learning—across different perspectives on research within the education research community. Participants in the dialogue each addressed the following questions: (1) What are the touchstones by which you judge quality or rigor in education research (for a single study, a set of studies, or a “field” or community of researchers in dialogue)? What is your chief concern or fear that the touchstones guard against? (2) Where do you see challenges to your perspective in the perspectives of other members of the panel? How might your perspective evolve to respond to those challenges? Given all of this, what are the implications for the preparation of education researchers? Opening and closing comments set the dialogue in historical context, highlight issues raised, and suggest next steps for collaborative learning from the diversity of perspectives in our field.

What Can Research on Teacher Thinking Contribute to Teacher Preparation? A Second Opinion

Recent reviews suggest that research can only provide teacher educators with food for thought, observational methods, and rationales for current practice. Although each of those contributions is valuable, research on teaching and teacher education can provide even more. It is inappropriate to turn research results into teaching prescriptions and teacher-testing systems, but research knowledge still can, and should, play a substantive, constructive role in teacher education.

Between Routines and Anarchy: preparing teachers for uncertainty

Abstract Many aspects of teaching reveal it to be an activity imbued with uncertainty. Teachers are frequently unsure of their students’ knowledge and understanding, of the effects of their instructional strategies, of the most appropriate content to cover in their limited time with students, and ultimately of their own intellectual and social authority. Initial inclinations to reduce teachers’ uncertainty through the introduction of routines or through more extensive subject matter study may be misguided, however, for whereas too much uncertainty may promote anarchy, too little uncertainty may engender dogmatism. Teacher educators might instead consider introducing their students to the myriad uncertainties they will face in their work, assist them in learning to judge when it may be desirable to increase certainty, and encourage them to view remaining uncertainties as an essential driving force in teaching. [1] Many of the ideas in this paper were presented earlier in Robert E. Floden & Christopher M. C...

Coherence, the Rebel Angel:

When working against fragmentation in education, we must not confuse coherence with consistency. While consistency implies logical relations and the absence of contradictions, coherence allows for many kinds of connectedness, including associations of ideas and feelings, intimations of resemblance, conflicts and tensions, and imaginative leaps. Coherence–but not consistency–is hospitable to change and imagination, while true to the many facets of concepts and experiences. Educational coherence is found where students and teachers can discover and establish relations among various areas of sensibility, knowledge, and skill, yet where loose ends remain, inviting a reweaving of beliefs and ties to the unknown.

Teacher Value Added as a Measure of Program Quality: Interpret with Caution.

Many states now possess the data and statistical methods that can produce teacher value-added scores and link them to preparation programs. It is important to understand the limitations of these measures and the inferences that they do and do not support. These limitations fall into three categories. First, value-added measures (VAM) provide information about only one of several important dimensions of teacher preparation program quality, focusing on one outcome measure, but not addressing other program characteristics, including the quality of program resources, the appropriateness of program content, and the contributions programs make to teacher learning. Second, comparing programs on the average VAM scores begs the question of whether mean performance is the most appropriate way to look at program quality. Third, the measurement of program graduates’ VAM is strongly affected by the labor market for teachers, which weakens the inferences from VAM scores to the quality of preparation programs.

Practical Significance in Program Evaluation

Defining practical significance in program evaluations is a difficult measurement problem, which can only be solved by an intimate familarity with the measures upon which effects are estimated, and their substantive relationship with the goals of the program being evaluated. Past attempts to describe the “size of effect” of instructional programs have characteristically relied on statistical indices that can be estimated and reported without any knowledge of what was measured. This practice is shown to be misdirected. Instead, what is called for is a procedure whereby the substantive instructional intentions of the program, the substantive characteristics of a test, and the interrelationship between the two are made explicit.

Programme Coherence in Teacher Education: a view from the USA (1)

Abstract Concern for coherence in European teacher education is fueled by changes in political organisation and teacher mobility. ‘Coherence’ is a value‐laden concept, yet its meaning is unclear. In the USA, advocates of coherence assume that a tightly connected set of experiences is needed to give teacher education programmes sufficient power. Both ‘coherence’ and ‘programme’ have positive associations with harmony and wholeness. The difficulties with ‘programme’ and ‘coherence’ in the North‐American context are suggested by the terms’ historical associations with behaviourism and the pursuit of efficiency. Single‐minded planning for particular programme effects may crowd out other goals and compromise the idea of educational progress. Rather than adopting the metaphors of force historically associated with programme coherence, this paper suggests that teacher educators should consider metaphors of light, especially the metaphor of a sparkling diamond. [1]Paper prepared for the 15th annual conference of ...

Flexner, Accreditation, and Evaluation.

Accreditation, the process by which an organization grants approval to an educational institution, is the central issue in several current debates among educators. The major parties in these debates are the various representatives of elementary and secondary school teachers, on the one hand, and the faculty members of schools of education, on the other. State education agencies also play an important part in these debates, but they have not been as much in the forefront as have the other two parties.

Research Traditions, Diversity, and Progress

Looking at this exchange on concepts and realities of traditions in qualitative educational research (Atkinson, Delamont, & Hammersley, 1988; Jacob, 1987, 1989), we feel moved to rewrite parts of this academic battle, pointing out some additional, and different, disagreements. We will also treat this discussion as an attempt to answer larger questions of how to regard diversity within a field and of what educational researchers should draw on to guide their work.