Priorities in Teacher Education

The 7 Key Elements of Pre-Service Preparation

Clare Kosnik, Clive Beck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135226183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Good teacher education not only enhances the understanding and skills of new teachers, but increases the likelihood of them staying in the profession. In Priorities in Teacher Education, Clare Kosnik and Clive Beck argue that teacher preparation should be given sharper focus, identifying seven priority areas:

• program planning
• pupil assessment
• classroom organization and community
• inclusive education
• subject content and pedagogy
• professional identity
• a vision for teaching

Long-time teacher education instructors and researchers themselves, the authors identified these priorities through literature-based research and the findings of a three-year study following twenty-two graduates through their first years of teaching. Packed with examples and quotes about these experiences, the book is broken down into seven chapters, each focusing on one of the seven priorities and containing a case study of one teacher whose experiences embody the priority being discussed.

As the chapters progress, the authors increasingly demonstrate the interplay between the seven priorities, showing that none of them can be pursued in isolation, and building a comprehensive base of essential knowledge for beginning teachers.

Teacher educators will find Priorities in Teacher Education a key guide to pre-service preparation, while new and student teachers will benefit enormously from reading the 'front line' accounts of their contemporaries.

Chapter 1
Program planning

The aspect of teaching that emerged in our study as the top priority for teacher education was program planning, that is, creating a program of educational experiences for a class across the whole school year. Student teachers need to learn how to develop a set of topics and activities that are feasible, fit together, engage pupils, and promote deep and important learning. This is sometimes called program development or program design, but we prefer the term program planning because it points to the need for prioritization and time allocation in teaching.

In their first year, teachers are surprised at how little time they have for actual instruction. During pre-service practicums, time was given to them so they could carry out the teaching performances on which they were assessed. Accordingly, they tend to imagine that teaching will be a matter of conducting such performances throughout the year until the whole curriculum has been covered in the subject(s) for which they are responsible. The reality, however, is that teaching time is greatly reduced by interruptions, class cancellations, managing behavior, community building, assessing, reporting, and various other activities, and so they cannot possibly cover all curriculum topics in significant depth. They quickly see that a major dimension of their role is deciding which topics to emphasize and how to fit them together to maximize learning in the time available.

Of course, pre-service education already addresses program planning to a degree: unit and lesson planning are standard topics, along with what should be taught in particular subjects and across subjects. However, the issue of time constraints and prioritization of topics receives little attention. All 22 of our study participants came away from pre-service without an understanding the extent of the planning task or how to go about it. For example, Liane commented:

The technical literacy elements that I learned [in pre-service] underpin everything I do. However, I needed some way to bring those items together so I could see the larger picture … I knew a number of strategies that would be useful to me. But tying it all together … was lacking.

Part of the problem here is that it is difficult to understand program planning until one is a “real” teacher with one’s own class and a sense of all the responsibilities involved (Jacklin, Griffiths, and Robinson, 2006). However, we believe much more could be done during pre-service to foster such understanding. We can ensure that many key principles and strategies of program planning – above all, selection and prioritization – become part of our student teachers’ vision and practice. But this in turn requires that we teacher educators develop clearer and more concrete ideas in this area. Too often our instruction in programming remains at a rather abstract and idealistic level, and we fail to take a stand on some of the difficult choices that must be made (Kennedy, 2006).

Over their first three years, the new teachers in our study reached significant insights into program planning and we detail many of these as the chapter unfolds. We do not wish to suggest that all the teachers achieved all these insights to a high degree: that would be unlikely given their early career stage. Rather, we have used input from the group as a whole (along with ideas from other sources) to form a composite picture of program planning. By way of introduction we present the case of Tanya, who seemed to us to have especially instructive views and practices in this area.

Tanya

As a third-year teacher, life is getting a lot easier. Life is getting a lot like life; I’m getting a life. I’m staying up until 9:00 o’clock at night, which is a huge feat for me because in my first year it was 7:30 and I was falling asleep at the table.

Background

Tanya, a new teacher in her mid-twenties, graduated in 2004 from a two-year master’s credential program, specializing in kindergarten through grade 6. Her first three years of teaching, although they went relatively smoothly, were in three different grades – 1, 4, and 3 – in two different schools. The schools, both in the same district, were suburban and fairly affluent and had a high proportion of minority students from South-East Asia and the Middle East, with a small percentage of English Language Learners (ELLs). During the master’s program, Tanya had done three of her four practice teaching placements in the school where she was first hired to teach. She felt the extended time in the school was an apprenticeship of sorts. Her associate teachers had been outstanding practitioners and mentors for her.

Tanya’s previous undergraduate degree was a Bachelor of Science in child studies. Although not giving her a teaching credential, this small, prestigious program had a teacher preparation component, thus allowing her to begin learning the skills of program planning early in her studies. In the third year of the degree Tanya had two practicum placements, one in a daycare center and one in senior kindergarten. In the fourth year she did a semester-long placement (five days a week) in a grade 2 class, where she could observe and participate in the development and implementation of curriculum units. She thoroughly enjoyed the child studies degree because she acquired a deep understanding of child development, had extended experience working with children, learned skills of curriculum development, and honed her reflective practice skills. During the program, Tanya worked for three summers in a highly progressive daycare center emphasizing inquiry-based learning for both children and staff: the influence of this experience is evident in her current approach to program planning.

Tanya was very pleased with the master’s credential program that followed because it provided opportunities to learn planning and teaching skills while also addressing many theoretical concepts. The literacy courses in particular “gave us the philosophy we needed to make our way through our first year.” She elaborated:

If you come into teaching with the philosophy you want, then the other stuff will follow and you’ll figure out how to fit your school’s resources into your philosophy. If you have a strong philosophy – like fostering love of reading – that you’re just not willing to let go, then you’ll figure out the rest.

She recalled that the program also exposed her to a variety of resource materials that helped her in her planning as a beginning teacher.

Description of practice

We consider Tanya’s program planning in literacy to be exceptionally strong, especially for a new teacher. Now teaching grade 3, she uses a variety of excellent books of various genres; the reading materials are developmentally appropriate; she links reading and writing; she spends time getting to know her students and carefully tracking their progress; she is highly focused on pupil learning, while recognizing however that children have to be motivated to read and write; she uses oral language as a bridge to print; she integrates literacy skills into the content areas; students read and write for extended periods each day; decoding and comprehension skills are taught both separately and in content-area lessons; and she uses many different teaching techniques (e.g., Readers’ Theater, mini-chalk boards, guided reading, literacy centers, and children word processing on their own).

Tanya’s skills in program planning evolved over her first three years of teaching, but she was already quite able in her first year. She began in the same school and at the same grade level (grade 1) as in her final master’s practicum, with a mentor teacher whose style and philosophy closely matched hers; accordingly, she was able to base her program on the one she had experienced. The mentor teacher did not rely heavily on a formal reading program; rather, she carefully selected texts and lessons from a range of sources. Tanya continued this thoughtful approach to planning, shunning the basal readers in favor of high-quality children’s literature and drawing on research to select specific decoding and comprehension skills to teach. By the end of her third year, she was able to report that “my kids are happy. And I feel pretty confident that they feel okay in here. They’re willing to take risks, they’re learning, they’re progressing, and I’m confident they’ll do okay next year.”

No doubt Tanya’s outstanding practicums helped prepare her for the difficult task of program planning; however, this tells only part of the story. As a beginning teacher, Tanya had a clear vision for her literacy program. Toward the end of her first year she said:

I want the children to become motivated to read and write. I want them to work in a group so they can talk about reading and writing and actually do it, responding to books through writing or more reading, or manipulating something or listening to something rather than answering a question on a worksheet.

Her vision helped guide her selection of topics and tasks; however, she faced programming challenges in her first year, including “knowing how much work to put in front of the students to keep their attention … knowing what to teach them and when to teach them and how to teach them.” As time passed and she got to know her students better, these challenges decreased significantly.

In each of her first three years Tanya was keen to co-plan with her grade partners, but she had limited success on account of timetabling logistics, conflicting philosophies, and other factors. When teaching grade 4 (in her second year), she and another new teacher co-planned many of their lessons and units and she found this very rewarding and useful.

We bounce ideas off each other, we have the same books for our literature circles or sometimes we’ll split them up and say, You use these ones this round and we’ll switch next round. So all that is co-planned and the work is split up, which is very helpful.

However, the mentor formally assigned to her for this second year was teaching a special needs class and had never taught grade 4, thus limiting how much she could assist Tanya with program planning.

Tanya found planning for the older students challenging because “the program in grade 4 is much more driven by [government] curriculum expectations than it was in grade 1.” But in general over the three years she became less confined by the formal curriculum because she

learned how to read between the lines of the curriculum expectations. I’ve become better at saying, Okay, I know how that would look. When I first started, I’d read the expectation and only think of the expectation in one way – literally, that means they need to do this. Whereas I now see a variety of different ways of realizing the expectation.

One feature of Tanya’s planning is her reluctance to use ability groups. She tends to form groups that are heterogeneous and changes them frequently. “I find that if I do ability groups my lower students get lost. And they’re the ones I need not to be lost, they’re the ones I need to be engaged.” She now uses group work extensively, particularly in the literacy centers. Many teachers, especially beginning teachers, find group work problematic because of classroom management issues. In Tanya’s philosophy of education, fostering a strong class community is essential if she is going to realize her vision of interactive learning. She spends an enormous amount of time in the first semester of each year building community, teaching social skills, playing non-competitive games during the Daily Physical Activity period, teaching students how to work in groups, developing a respectful culture, and establishing routines. As described below, her students truly work well together.

Tanya’s class in action

Tanya’s grade 3 classroom (in her third year) is a fairly large, bright room. The tables are arranged in groups and every inch of space is utilized. There are bins of books, crates of art supplies, baggies for the literacy centers, math manipulatives, photographs, books on display, samples of work, word walls reflecting the current units, motivational posters (that are changed regularly), a computer, and a teacher’s desk tucked in the corner. The room is colorful and inviting.

One day when we observed Tanya’s class, the complexity of her program was evident. The afternoon began with students presenting a Toy Expo. The science expectations for the term were force and movement, both fairly abstract concepts; however, the children had built toys embodying the concepts, using boxes, pipe cleaners, magnets, paper clips, elastics, springs, and so on. Each toy had to illustrate at least one force and one form of movement. The pupils wrote advertisements for their toys using the skills of persuasive writing they had learned in writing class. Another grade 3 class visited the Toy Expo and the scene was a true celebration of learning. The children were thrilled with their toys and could use scientific language to explain how they built them and how they worked.

The Toy Expo was followed by work at the literacy centers. The six centers were: persuasive writing (responding to the text Click, Clack, Moo, Cows that Type); making words; listening (story on tape); reading comprehension (each student had an individually chosen book but answered generic questions); team reading; and spelling. There was a quiet hum in the room as the students worked in their centers for 30 minutes. The level of cooperation and time on task was outstanding. The day ended with Tanya reading a chapter from Jigsaw Joe and leading pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading discussion. Throughout the day, she moved among the children giving words of encouragement, asking probing questions, and suggesting strategies. Her approach was caring yet firm.

Ongoing professional learning

During her third year, Tanya remarked that she will spend a lifetime learning how to teach. In every interview she described the many in-service workshops she attended, some focused on content (e.g., literacy) and others on instructional strategies. Both types deepened her vision for her program and strengthened her program planning abilities. By the end of the first semester of the first year she had already attended three after-school workshops on literacy, had numerous meetings with the literacy consultant (all of which she arranged herself), and attended the monthly in-school PD sessions. In the second half of the first year she went to a workshop “almost once a week.”

As we have seen, Tanya’s talents as a teacher emerged quite quickly. In her second year, the principal asked her to help co-plan a professional development session on instructional strategies. In her third year, she was invited to join several district-level professional development committees, including First Steps and the Schools Attuned Initiative. Participating in committees further increased her confidence and enhanced her own planning and implementation skills.

In conclusion, we can see that Tanya’s undergraduate and graduate programs, with their strong academic content and extended practicum placements with able mentors, contributed to her solid formation as a teacher. By the end of her third year, her developed vision for literacy teaching, her deep understanding of child development, her extensive knowledge of balanced literacy, her familiarity with a broad range of curriculum resources, her repertoire of teaching strategies, and her reflective practice were evident in her very effective approach to program planning and teaching generally.

What and why of program planning in the school classroom

Tanya’s deep understanding of the need for program planning was unusual for a beginning teacher, being due to distinctive talents and special aspects of her background and training. For most of the new teachers in our study, it came as quite a shock that program planning is such a large part of what teachers do. Like most people, they tended to assume that teachers simply make their way steadily through the mandated curriculum for a given subject and grade. And certainly that is what happens in some countries: all teachers at a particular grade are literally “on the same page” on a given day, teaching the same content and using many of the same activities.

But in the context in which we and our graduates work, much of the responsibility for planning the school day, week, and year lies with the teacher; and this is the case (in varying degrees) in other school systems around the world (Calderhead and Shorrock, 1997; Clayton, 2007; Darling-Hammond, 2006; Hagger and McIntyre, 2006; Kennedy, 2005). Although the official curriculum may list topics and “expectations” for each grade level, the teacher – often guided by broader goals and a deeper vision – decides how closely to follow these guidelines and how to implement them. Even in schools where the principal stresses sticking to the official curriculum, teachers behind their closed door make choices tailored to their class. There are differences of degree, however; teachers vary in how much freedom they think they have and should exercise (Kennedy, 2005; Sleeter, 2005).

With time, all the new teachers in our study came to accept a decision-making role at least to an extent. In April of his first year David said:

I think I relied too heavily [earlier in the year] on the school board program. It was a security thing for me, to make sure I did what the board asked me to do … [I would advise a beginning teacher to think] what do you want to achieve in language arts, what is your language program? If you have a good idea then integrate that with the board program … Do yours first and then match it up with the other and don’t be afraid to take a little leniency with it. You have to cover the expectations, but don’t be afraid to say your activity is covering the expectations just as well as the school board resources are.

Similarly, Nina saw that she had to adapt her program to her students: “I tried to use [an] approach to reading instruction … we learned in pre-service, and I think the theory behind it is fantastic, but in a class like mine I simply can’t do it.”

Briefly put, the program planning role of teachers involves deciding: (a) what topics to include (or how much emph...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Program planning
• 2 Pupil assessment
• 3 Classroom organization and community
• 4 Inclusive education
• 5 Subject content and pedagogy
• 6 Professional identity
• 7 A vision for teaching
• References