Mentoring Preservice Teachers Through Practice

A Framework for Coaching with CARE

Melissa Mosley Wetzel, James V. Hoffman, Beth Maloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315520513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

Supporting and challenging cooperating teachers to grow in their mentoring and coaching practices with preservice teachers and also in their own work as classroom teachers, this practical guide presents and illustrates the Coaching with CARE model—a framework for reflection and action that helps cultivate a perspective on teaching that puts students at the center of teacher preparation and places value on apprenticeship and participation in learning. The CARE model takes a turn away from traditional evaluation-based "training" approaches, offering a way for cooperating teachers, and facilitators and university teacher educators who work with them, to come together to shape innovative coaching and mentoring experiences for preservice teachers.

Mentoring Preservice Teachers Through Practice, building on the authors' own work with cooperating teachers, is based on the most recent research on learning to teach and supporting preservice teachers and grounded in the realities of teacher education today. Each chapter includes questions for discussion and suggested readings that can be used to explore the focus of the chapter more deeply as well as relevant research reports published by the authors.

PART I

Teacher Preparation

The Practice Turn in Teacher Education

1

UNFINISHED AND BECOMING

“I am a teacher educator.” Say that aloud. It doesn’t just roll off the tongue in the same way as saying “I am a teacher.” You aspire to become a mentor of preservice teachers. You are embarking on a journey that will be both familiar and different. You will be challenged along the way and in these challenges you will find opportunities for growth. Whether you are working as a university-based teacher educator, a mentor of a new teacher in a school, or with a group of teachers in a peer support learning community, you are trying out and trying on a new teacher educator identity. You will have to construct your identity for yourself. The identity of teacher educator doesn’t come in a degree or a certification. The identity of teacher educator comes with time and hard work making sense of practice. There are no shortcuts. Even this book is, at best, a meager starting point for your journey. You will take on the responsibility of becoming.

Mentor teachers are individuals who take on the responsibility of guiding and supporting preservice teachers as they develop practical knowledge for teaching. We, the authors of this book, have been investigating possibilities around the support mentor teachers offer to new teachers that taken us far beyond the traditional. We resist the notion that effective teaching can be represented in a set of discrete competencies arrayed along a hierarchical sequence from the simple to the complex. We resist the notion that the role of the teacher educator is to install these competencies into preservice teachers’ behaviors at a mastery level to get them ready to teach. This “training” model for teacher education that focuses almost exclusively on the procedural and technical is fundamentally flawed and has corrupted efforts to provide support that matters for growth. The training model for teacher education ignores the cognitive, social, emotional, and moral demands of teaching. The training model for teacher education has failed in educating teachers in the same ways that the “banking” model for classroom teaching—the idea that teachers make “deposits” into passive students’ minds—has failed to meet student needs (Freire, 1970). Rather, Freire proposed that dialogue, which requires (1) humility, (2) hope, (3) faith, (4) love, and (5) critical thinking, is a pathway to better and more powerful approaches for nurturing teacher growth and promoting a professional identity that can thrive in the face of adversity or challenges.

The key question we address in this book as teacher educators is not, “How do we get teachers to perform in a certain way?” Nor is our key question, “How do we give teachers the knowledge they need to know to be effective?” Our key question as teacher educators is: “How do we support preservice teachers along a path to becoming the teachers they aspire to become?” This is not a single path, and there won’t be one path for everyone. We embrace diversity, creativity, and possibility in practice in ways that push back against the norms for a standardized or normalized ways of being a teacher. The more different we are, the greater the possibilities for us to learn from each other. And, because of our differences, we will support teachers on their path differently. We strive for aspiring teachers to become knowledgeable, thoughtfully adaptive teachers (Fairbanks et al., 2009) who recognize that the practice of teaching is always responsive to the students they serve and the contexts in which they work in the moment—not the districts, administrators, states, nor institutions they serve.

Coaching is the primary focus for our work but it is only one of the things that mentors do with their preservice teachers. In our work, we draw on models of coaching that emphasize participation and collaboration. We see “trying out” and “trying on,” or what Grossman (2011) describes as “approximations” of practice, as the necessary contexts for preservice teachers to become thoughtfully adaptive, critical, and independent learners through practice. Often, the field experience is seen only as a place to apply pedagogy, and the mentor is expected to provide direct feedback and judge whether the teacher has done it the “right” way. Rather, we see these practice contexts as times when the identity of teachers is fundamentally shaped, and therefore, these authentic experiences in practice must be accompanied by attention to and reflection on the work that preservice teachers do. We must attend to approximations and the changes that are made in practice and after practice in order to respond to students. When these conditions are in place, novices learn that their students are their teachers for life when the teacher’s role is to attend to what students are saying, doing, and feeling. The mentor teacher is the person who can support the aspiring teacher by becoming their companion on a journey of learning.

Our Teacher Preparation Program

Our work around mentoring and coaching has been focused at the elementary level on the work of mentor teachers working in the role of cooperating teachers in a university-based teacher education program. While this focus has been on preservice teachers, we see these same practices as useful when mentor teachers support beginning teachers through their first years of teaching. Indeed, we see the practices we describe as adaptable to the context of peer coaching among experienced teachers.

At our university, the teacher preparation program is a large program; we graduate around 300 teachers every year. Each student is placed in a cohort that has about 20–25 students and travels through a three-semester program together. Coursework sits alongside field experiences, because the research about teacher education that we lean on has told us that the ways that coursework is integrated with field experiences matter. When our students are in one place, we want them thinking about the other place. We want them to question into the coursework and field experiences because they have these two side-by-side experiences.

The CARE model, which we will explore in this book, has expanded the ways we work with preservice teachers throughout our preparation programs. Thus far, we have worked with cooperating teachers in our elementary preparation program and are beginning to work with secondary English education cooperating teachers. We are fortunate for the opportunities we have to work directly with these cooperating teachers, and we are always looking to expand even further what we do.

In our research over the last five years, we have seen the power of bringing the cooperating teacher front and center in the community of teacher preparation. We take the long view in teacher preparation. In making program decisions we have not chosen the easy or efficient path. Reflective coaching is difficult and time intensive but worth the effort. In the last chapter of this book, we return to the ways that CARE is infused throughout our program.

Who Are We?

We, the three authors of this book, are experienced elementary teachers. We now serve in the role of university-based teacher educators with a specialization in language and literacy studies. We work both in the preparation of elementary teachers as well as in graduate programs for master’s and doctoral students. We have been working over the years to design and implement a teacher education program that is on the cutting edge of research and practice.

We are literacy educators, but we are teachers first, and we focus on general principles of teaching practice and teacher development. At the same time, we understand that different disciplines in teaching have different structures and histories that are important to understand. There may be common features of coaching across disciplines, but there also may be different, specific practices that a mentor might use in mathematics, science, or social studies, which we will address in Chapter 9.

Our research is our practice. We subscribe to Kurt Lewin’s (1951) notion that there is “nothing as practical as a good theory” (p. 169). We extend this position with our own spin to argue that there is “nothing as theoretical as good practice.” In writing this book, we endeavor to speak to practice directly with concrete examples drawing from our experiences. We put the “academic” discourse in places that can be used as a resource for digging deeper into the scholarly literature around the issues of coaching and mentoring. Throughout this book we will suggest readings to extend your learning. You will meet many of the outstanding preservice teachers, cooperating teachers, and researchers who have been and continue to be our companions throughout this inquiry. Their voices will be found in almost every chapter.

Although our focus in this book is toward developing your role in supporting preservice teachers, everything we address will, at the same time, be around who you are a as classroom teacher in this moment and in the future. Dialogue is central to both activities. The ways in which we engage with novices in our words and actions will spill back into our thinking about how we engage with the learners in our own classrooms. The act of mentoring or coaching a novice is not an altogether altruistic endeavor of “giving” to the profession. Your experiences in mentoring in coaching will change you, for the better, as a classroom teacher and as a person. We subscribe to Paulo Freire’s (1970/1995) belief that we are better as educators to position ourselves as problem posers rather than problem solvers. He writes:

Problem-posing education affirms [people] as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, incomplete beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality … The unfinished character of [people] and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity. (p. 65)

The CARE model is unfinished. We are all unfinished. We are all becoming. We will present ideas that challenge all of us to change. We are not about preparing teachers to fit into something that exists. That would be easy for all parties and is the status quo in many teacher education programs. We aim to prepare teachers who can make schools better places for learning for all. You will likely become very uncomfortable in the process as you are asked to let go of some beliefs about teaching that have been instilled through your many years of exposure to teaching as a student in schools (what was termed by Lortie [1975] the “apprenticeship of observation”) and through your experiences as a teacher in schools.

A Case: A Place of Uncertainty

In each chapter of this book, we will draw from the voices of the teachers we have worked with over five years of exploring the CARE model within this teacher preparation program. Denise is a cooperating teacher who worked with us during the second year of this project. Denise had worked as a coach and mentor to preservice teachers for six years before joining our graduate program. She admitted early on that change was hard for her, and she had developed a reputation as an expert teacher in her school and district, which she did not want to disrupt. It felt unsafe for Denise to share her vulnerability as she learned about reflective coaching and CARE. Like so many cooperating teachers, Denise shared that her preparation to serve as a coach and mentor came in the form of reading a PowerPoint from her district, and she believed that it was her job to provide direct feedback and evaluate the preservice teacher’s performance. After one semester of working with the CARE model with the support of her colleagues at the university, Denise’s thinking had evolved, and she was ready to move forward as a learner and problem-poser with her preservice teacher. Denise expressed her thoughts in her class’ blog,

There is still so much for me to learn and I am still in a place of uncertainty—and I don’t really like it that much. I would be lying if I said that this was an easy semester for me. Everything that I have thought, felt as a teacher has been somewhat challenged and I now stand on a rug of discomfort but I know that that ground will become more stable as we continue on the journey [Blog Post, December 2013].

Denise proclaimed her “uncertain” state with hesitation; however, with the support of her learning community, she was willing to accept that teaching (and teachers) could not remain in a static state. Tensions with your own belief systems will surely rise up. Struggle is essential to learning. But you do not need to take this journey on your own. In fact, we encourage you to find colleagues to grow with you.

In this book, we feature our own teacher preparation program and the teachers who have worked beside us to construct this model of CARE. You also are working with teacher educators who are as committed as we are in preparing the preservice teachers they work with, and in choosing to use this text, you and these partners, perhaps are beginning to move down this challenging and exciting path of coaching with CARE. We encourage you to read and engage with the ideas we present in this book with others who are on a similar journey, a critical friend, an inquiry group, or an academic course. Your learning community will be an important interpretive and support base for your growth. In each chapter, we provide some suggestions to guide your conversations. We are excited for the opportunity to join with you in this journey.

Some Thinking and Talking To Do

• Think about how it once felt to be a novice teacher, in your own student teaching experience. How do you feel about being a new teacher educator? Are there any parallels between who you are, reading this book, and that experience of being a new teacher?
• Where have you encountered the ideas of thoughtfully adaptive teaching, approximations in teaching, or problem-posing education before in your own development as a teacher, and what questions do you have about these three foundational processes? What might these ideas have to do with being a cooperating teacher?

References

Fairbanks, C. M., Duffy, G. G., Faircloth, B. S., He, Y., Levin, B., Rohr, J., and Stein, C. (2009). Beyond knowledge: Exploring why some teachers are more thoughtfully adaptive than others. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1–2), 161–71.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: Bloomsbury. (Original work published in 1968).

Grossman, P. (2011). Framework for teaching practice: A brief history of an idea. Teachers College Record, 113(12), 2836–43.

Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers. D. Cartwright (Ed.). New York, NY: Harper and Row.

Lortie, D. C. and Clement, D. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

2

A MENTOR, A COACH, A TEACHER

Who Are You? Who Are You Becoming?

Jane, one of the cooperating teachers we have worked with for many years, has taught us much about being a mentor, a coach, and a teacher. She was in the first cohort of our master’s program and we have come to think of our CARE model as informed by the ways she and her cohort appropriated the model and gave it shape through their practice. We begin each section with her words—her image of what it means to become through these different roles, and end with a case of the dialogue between her and the preservice teacher who worked with her that first year.

Mentor: Who Gets To Be a Mentor? What Does a Mentor Do?

Different preservice teachers are on different point...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Teacher Preparation: The Practice Turn in Teacher Education
• PART II: The Coaching with CARE Model and Cycle
• PART III: The Three C’s of CARE: Community, Critical, and Content
• PART IV: Expanding Tools for Coaching
• APPENDICES
• About the Authors
• Index