Rethinking Field Experiences in Preservice Teacher Preparation

Meeting New Challenges for Accountability

Etta R. Hollins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317584285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

The focus of this book is the centrality of clinical experiences in preparing teachers to work with students from diverse cultural, economic, and experiential backgrounds. Organized around three themes—learning teaching through the approximation and representation of practice, learning teaching situated in context, and assessing and improving teacher preparation— Rethinking Field Experiences in Preservice Teacher Preparation provides detailed descriptions of theoretically grounded, research-based practices in programs that prepare preservice teachers to contextualize teaching practices in ways that result in a positive impact on learning for traditionally underserved students. These practices serve current demands for teacher accountability for student learning outcomes and model good practice for engaging teacher educators in meaningful, productive dialogue and analysis geared to developing local programs characterized by coherence, continuity, and consistency.

1
Urban Schools as a Context for Learning Teaching

Magaly Lavadenz and Etta R. Hollins

The past two decades have brought increasing public demands and legislative mandates for teacher accountability for student learning and more rigorous curriculum standards at all grade levels in elementary and high schools. These more strident demands for accountability are based on the belief that the condition of public education in the United States has reached the level of a national crisis that threatens the economy and the quality of life for all citizens. This belief is based on evidence from national and international assessments of educational progress and the inability of public schools to prepare students with the necessary competency for jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

For example, results from the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 38% of 12th-grade students scored at or above the proficient level in reading and 26% scored at or above the proficient level in mathematics. Results from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that 15-year-old students in the United States scored lower than their peers in 29 countries in mathematics and scored lower than their peers in 18 countries in literacy (Kelly & Xie, 2013). Further, the failure of public schools in critical areas is evident in the recent action taken by the United States Senate to increase the limit for the number of H-1B guest worker visas from 85,000 to 300,000 for immigrants with at least a college degree and to exempt foreign graduates of U.S. universities with degrees in STEM fields from annual statutory limits on employment-based permanent immigrant visas (green cards). The fact that this legislation was passed at a time when the economy was fluctuating and the unemployment rate was especially high among U.S. citizens fuels this concern (Costa, 2012).

Public schools in the United States have faced an even greater challenge in educating students from low-income groups, ethnic minority groups and students living in urban areas. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2011 reported results for Grades 4 and 8 in reading as average scores on a 0–500 scale. Only five large-city school districts met or exceeded the national average score of 220 in reading at Grade 4. Only two urban school districts met or exceeded the national average score of 264 in reading at Grade 8. These data showed that African American and Latino students as a group scored well below the national average and well below their white peers in the same school setting. These data are particularly troublesome given present demographic trends indicating an increase in the percentage of underserved and underperforming students across the nation. Data from the NAEP showed that there were over 5 million students attending the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. One-fifth of these students were concentrated in five states (California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas). In these five states, almost half of the students were low-income and of an ethnic minority.

Demographic shifts in the makeup of the student population in public schools have resulted in a mismatch between the cultural and experiential backgrounds of the students and their teachers. A recent report from the National Center for Education Information (2011) reported that there are 3.2 million teachers educating 49.4 million students in PK–12 schools in the United States (Feistritzer, 2011). This report indicates that 84% of all teachers are white and female and that 31% of all teachers are employed in large-city school districts, where more than half of their students are low-income and of an ethnic minority. Additionally, there is considerable evidence that graduates of preservice teacher preparation programs across the nation feel underprepared for the diverse students in their classrooms (Hollins & Guzman, 2005).

The central challenge facing teacher educators is that of developing learning experiences that are powerful enough to prepare candidates for facilitating excellence in academic performance for students from different cultural and experiential backgrounds. This challenge is grounded in the extent to which teacher educators have (a) deep knowledge of the particular context in which schools are located and the social and academic context within different school settings, especially those serving low-income and urban communities; (b) a shared understanding among faculty within a teacher preparation program of what constitutes competent teaching practice; (c) a deep understanding of the knowledge and skills that support competent teaching practice; and (d) the ability to develop a well-designed and well-articulated approach to learning competent teaching. The focus of this chapter is on making sense of urban schools as the context for learning teaching and introducing approaches to clinical and field experiences that support learning to teach diverse students in different school settings.

The Conditions in Urban Schools

The life conditions for children living in large cities are very different from those for middle-class white children living in the suburbs or small towns—a lifestyle more familiar to the majority of those who enter teacher preparation programs. Children living in large cities are often faced with poverty, homelessness, living outside the home or in foster care placements, acting as caregivers for younger siblings and working to help support the family, and one or both parents may be incarcerated. Many children attending urban schools have cumulative deficits in their academic knowledge and skills due to lack of opportunities for meaningful learning experiences within and outside school. Teachers in large-city schools are often the least experienced and least prepared for teaching students with a different cultural and experiential background than their own. Further, many beginning teachers who have completed typical preservice programs acknowledge feeling unprepared for the complexity of the academic and social context in urban schools. Often, beginning teachers find themselves unable to provide meaningful and productive learning experiences for urban students and unable to keep the students focused on learning (Hollins & Guzman, 2005).

Academic Performance Challenges

While there is concern about the underachievement of the general population of elementary and high school students in the United States, the crisis in urban schools is of much greater concern for many reasons, including the fact that poor academic preparation contributes to widespread poverty, unemployment and crime in urban communities. The poor quality of education provided for urban and low-income students often develops into a persistent multi-generational condition where parents lack the competency for monitoring, participating in or contributing to the educational process for their children. Teachers’ ability to facilitate learning for children whose parents lack the skills to contribute to their education varies greatly. A few exceptional teachers are able to foster high outcomes for urban students, regardless of their life situation, their parents’ inability to participate or the cumulative deficits in their academic knowledge and skills (MacGillivray, 2009). However, many teachers are unable to facilitate even literacy acquisition and development for the most prepared and eager urban students (Hollins, 2012).

An essential aspect of the problem in schools serving low-income and urban students is limited access to high-quality learning experiences. This situation, which has a devastating impact on student learning, is in part attributable to the content and/or quality of preservice teacher preparation. The disproportionate impact of school conditions on learning outcomes for urban and low-income ethnic minority students when compared with their white middle-class peers is evident in NAEP scores. A comparison of NAEP 2012 reading scores for Grade 8 shows that, on a scale of 0–500, white students had a mean score of 270, while African American and Hispanic students had scores of 247 and 249, respectively (NAEP, 2013). The impact is even greater for English-language learners (ELLs), who now comprise nearly 20% of the nation’s student population. National data reveal achievement gaps of 43 points for eighth-grade ELLs when compared with white eighth graders, with ELLs mean score at 233 and their white counterparts’ mean score at 266 (Hemphill & Vanneman, 2011). The now-prevalent practice of placing students in special education when they fall behind in developing literacy skills or display behaviors that indicate frustration further limits their access to quality learning experiences and increases their risk of dropping out of school (Artiles, Harry, Reschy, & Chinn, 2002; Artiles, Rueda, Salazar, & Higareda, 2005).

The Social Context in Urban Schools

First-year beginning teachers often find themselves in classrooms with urban students who have a cumulative deficit in their knowledge and skills and who display behaviors indicating high levels of frustration. Some urban students distrust adults and have lost respect for teachers and school administrators. When caught in this situation, it is difficult for novice teachers to figure out how to build relationships with and among students, provide meaningful and productive learning experiences and provide the support students need to begin to correct the deficits in their knowledge base. The results of this situation can be disastrous for the students and the novice teachers (Sipe, 2004).

Sipe (2004) described his experience as a first-year beginning teacher in a dysfunctional urban middle school where the physical and social environments reflected a climate of more a jail than a school and projected oppositional relationships of control and authority. Teachers and students were pitted against each other, and the stress level was high among all participants. Some of the teachers exchanged insults with the students. Most seemed insensitive to the students’ life situations or seemed to feel that the students did not deserve better. Most teachers at the school showed little or no commitment to changing the situation or perhaps possessed little knowledge of how to do so. Sipe described the dilemma he faced as “1) … falling prey to the inhumanity of the ‘us vs. them’ mentality and act accordingly; 2) you insulate yourself by refusing to care and bide your time until you can transfer or retire; or 3) the stress gets to you and your mental health suffers” (p. 6). Simultaneously, the district and the state struggled with a litigation appeals process regarding the inadequacy of funding that threatened closure of the school. Ultimately, the court ruled in favor of the district; the school remained open, but Sipe left.

Many first-year beginning teachers face a similar dilemma as that described by Sipe (2004). In this situation, novice teachers and their students are engaged in an ongoing socialization process for induction into the culture of a low-performing school. This means that novice teachers are being socialized into the profession by their colleagues at a low-performing urban school where they are learning to teach and to develop relationships with and among their students. The lessons many of these novice teachers learn will perpetuate the situation in urban schools that promotes a negative social climate and denies access to high-quality learning experiences for the students. The students fail to develop academic knowledge and skills, learn to resent those who denied them access to high-quality opportunities for learning and recognize that the quality of their adult life has been severely and negatively impacted by those they were supposed to trust and respect. This resentment of school and school practitioners may be passed from one generation to the next.

The socialization process that happens in low-performing urban schools is part of the function of schools as the primary socializing institution for the nation. Schools serve as complex microcosms of the macro-level historical patterns of ideologies and practices that intersect in the daily interactions between teachers and students. These ideologies and practices incorporate societal values associated with race, class and gender. For example, Lewis (2011), in a year-long ethnographic study in three schools in southern California, found that schools serve as “race-making institutions through actions that explicitly or implicitly ascribe status, position and power to some students and not others” (p. 190).

Lewis (2011) described a situation in which a teacher denied access to the restroom for one child and not another based on race. This researcher used Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to explain how schools carry out the function of socialization of the young into existing social norms. Cultural capital refers to socially valued assets that provide access to benefits and privileges available in society. Those with less cultural capital have limited access. Based on this theory, students with high levels of cultural capital have greater access to meaningful and productive learning experiences and thus outperform their peers with less cultural capital. The process of schooling can increase the cultural capital provided for urban and low-income ethnic minority students.

Productive Teaching Practices for Diverse Students

A few school districts and individual schools serving low-income and minority students meet or exceed national and state standards, and there are examples among these schools that perform as well as or better than those with a majority of middle-class white students. There are a few teachers in every low-performing school who elicit excellence in academic performance from their students. These high-performing schools and effective teachers serving urban and low-income students are engaged in everyday practices not found in low-performing schools or in the classrooms of less effective teachers. The everyday practices in high-performing urban schools and classrooms include providing access to high-quality education, such as meaningful and productive learning experiences, building relationships with and among students, building collaborative relationships among colleagues and learning teaching in urban school settings (Hollins, 2012).

The teaching practices that hold promise for providing access to high-quality learning experiences for urban and other underserved students incorporate a particular ideological perspective and related epistemic practices that are grounded in teachers assuming responsibility for the quality of the learning experiences they provide and for the learning outcomes that result. This ideological perspective embraces differences among learners as assets for enhancing the depth and breadth of learning rather than as deficits that present barriers to learning. Teachers using this ideological perspective get to know their students well, including the everyday activities in which they engage outside of school, their interests, their values and their cultural practices. This knowledge becomes the fabric for developing meaningful and productive learning experiences that enable students to meet the expected curriculum standards.

There are good examples that apply the assets-based ideological perspective. One example was reported by Moll (1988) in a study of two teachers facilitating literacy acquisition and development for Latino students in an elementary school. These teachers worked from the assumption that the children they taught had the capability to master the curriculum grade-level skills and competencies when supported by appropriate pedagogical practices and social arrangements. The teachers provided the children with a challenging, innovative and intellectually rigorous curriculum where the pedagogy focused on helping the children make meaning from text, regardless of the subject matter. The teachers replaced skills-based basal readers with trade books and allowed the children to choose books that were the most interesting to them. The children were guided in making connections between their personal experiences and what was read in the texts as a way to facilitate reading comprehension. Further, the children were guided in analyzing the strategies they used to understand the text and the strategies the authors used to convey meaning and to elicit particular responses. These metalinguistic and metacognitive activities enabled the students to interpret symbolic language, make inferences based on the texts and to extrapolate.

Moll (1988) found that the teachers’ social mediation encouraged the children to be actively engaged in their own learning and supportive of their peers’ learning. Children had a great deal of autonomy. They were not grouped by ability; rather, children worked collaboratively on projects and learning tasks with others based on personal interest and choice. Moll (1998) concluded that the teachers were able to provide appropriate, high-quality and meaningful learning for the students because they had managed to create autonomy for themselves as well. These teachers were able to establish such autonomy for themselves because they used theoretically and philosophically grounded approaches that they could explain. The teachers could present persuasive arguments to the school administration that allowed them to make decisions for their classrooms. Additionally, teachers engaged in regular dialogue and collaboration with colleagues and university faculty as a way to analyze and improve their classroom practices.

Robert Moses and his colleagues (1989) faced a similar challenge to that with Latino children in their efforts to make algebra accessible to African American students who had frequently underperformed in math and were denied access to algebra. The approach used in this situation was two-pronged: first, parents were engaged in a process for gaining access to the algebra classes for their students and, second, developing a pedagogical approach that provided access to meaningful and productive learning experiences for African American students that included teaching students to set and achieve learning goals. The students and their parents were frustrated with the lack of access to higher-level...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Urban Schools as a Context for Learning Teaching
• Part I Learning Teaching through the Representation and Approximation of Practice
• Part II Learning Teaching Situated in Context
• Part III Assessing and Improving Teacher Preparation
• About The Contributors
• Index