Woong Lim

Supervision matters: Collegial, developmental and reflective approaches to supervision of teacher candidates

Abstract This self-study examined the communication approaches of 15 university supervisors who oversaw teacher candidates enrolled in year-long, co-taught P-12 clinical experiences. Supervisors attended 20 hours of professional learning on pre-service co-teaching, developmental supervision, and instructional coaching. Findings indicated that our supervisors primarily used collaborative and nondirective communication approaches to improve candidates’ teaching skills, while facilitating collegial relationships between collaborating teachers and teacher candidates engaging in co-teaching, co-reflection, and co-generative dialogs. Ultimately, our findings suggested that these collaborative and nondirective communicative approaches played a significant role to enable our candidates to demonstrate self-directed and self-regulated learning.

Preservice Teachers’ Learning Paths of Classroom Discourse Through Scripting

This chapter discusses the application of a scripting tool in teacher education and how scripting can support preservice teacher learning. Two preservice teachers participated in an intervention using a media-based scripting tool. The study examined changes in the preservice teachers’ scripting. Findings indicate that common characteristics can be clustered, and we attempted to organize those clusters into a set of scripting trajectories. We argue that preservice teachers can develop skills for generating dynamic classroom discourse into their scripts through a cycle of feedback and revision with scripting exercises, and that there is a strong need for curricula in teacher preparation programs reflecting appropriate learning pathways at the preservice teacher level to support preservice teachers’ development of effective discursive skills.

Shoelace formula: Connecting the area of a polygon and the vector cross product

Understanding how one representation connects to another and how the essential ideas in that relationship are generalized can result in a mathematical theorem or a formula. In this article, we demonstrate this process by connecting a vector cross product in algebraic form to a geometric representation and applying a key mathematical idea from the relationship to prove the Shoelace theorem.

Cross-Cultural Lesson Planning Between the United States and South Korea

Our chapter examines a cross-cultural learning project in which teachers from the United States and South Korea collaborated and shared feedback on writing lesson plans using asynchronous communication tools. In our documentation and discussion of participants’ perceived strengths and weaknesses in lesson planning, we found that their cross-cultural experiences facilitate collaborative lesson planning by fostering cross-cultural perspectives on teaching and provide insight into curricular ideas that have the potential to narrow the teaching gaps between countries.

Using Discourse Analysis to Understand the Relationships and Practices of Pre-service Co-teachers

Early in 2016, the Council on Accreditation of Educator Providers (CAEP) (caepnet.org, 2016) published a new set of standards that called for increased collaboration of university-school partners by means of coconstruction clinical experiences. In designing the new models, pre-service co-teaching, conducted by the teacher candidate and collaborating teacher, emerged as a promising practice in teacher education (Arshavskaya, 2014; Perry, 2016). However, even with the current enthusiasm for the establishing the new practices, a working definition of pre-service co-teaching remains elusive. Thus, the study of the voices of educators who are involved in co-teaching is essential as universities make the transition from single-taught to co-taught clinical experiences. This study presents a discourse analysis of the voices of 21 teacher candidates who were enrolled in a year-long, co-taught clinical experience, along with the voices of 29 mentor teachers. The findings of this study describe the terms and language used by our candidates and mentor teachers to describe their relationships and practices. The implications for these findings are discussed in terms of our new understandings of the nuances of co-teaching and how they may be used to shape a common definition of pre-service co-teaching.