Forging a Pedagogy of Teacher Education: The challenges of moving from classroom teacher to teacher educator

Abstract

This paper reports an investigation of the challenges a former classroom teacher encountered when compelled by experiences as a supervisor of student teachers to forge a distinct pedagogy of teacher education. A qualitative self-study methodology was used to identify and examine the competing tensions that surfaced as the author made the transition from classroom teacher to teacher educator. Unanticipated challenges included establishing his professional identity as a teacher educator, navigating the ambiguous role of teacher educator as both advocate and evaluator, and dealing with external sources of resistance manifest in the belief systems of student teachers and the norms of the public school system.

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Studying Teacher Education
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Forging a Pedagogy of Teacher Education: The
challenges of moving from classroom teacher to teacher
educator
Jason K. Ritter a
aUniversity of Georgia, USA
Online Publication Date: 01 May 2007
To cite this Article: Ritter, Jason K. (2007) 'Forging a Pedagogy of Teacher
Education: The challenges of moving from classroom teacher to teacher educator',
Studying Teacher Education, 3:1, 5 - 22
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Forging a Pedagogy of Teacher
Education: The challenges of moving
from classroom teacher to teacher
educator
Jason K. Ritter*
University of Georgia, USA
This paper reports an investigation of the challenges a former classroom teacher encountered when
compelled by experiences as a supervisor of student teachers to forge a distinct pedagogy of teacher
education. A qualitative self-study methodology was used to identify and examine the competing
tensions that surfaced as the author made the transition from classroom teacher to teacher educator.
Unanticipated challenges included establishing his professional identity as a teacher educator,
navigating the ambiguous role of teacher educator as both advocate and evaluator, and dealing with
external sources of resistance manifest in the belief systems of student teachers and the norms of the
public school system.
While classroom teachers are expected to teach subject matter, university-based
teacher educators are expected to teach about how to teach subject matter. Given this
different emphasis for instruction, it seems obvious that the pedagogy used by a
teacher educator would differ in some important ways from the pedagogy used by a
classroom teacher. Despite these apparent differences, teacher education is often
erroneously regarded as a “self-evident activity” (Zeichner, 2005, p. 118). It is
generally assumed “that a good teacher will also make a good teacher educator”
(Korthagen et al., 2005, p. 110). As such, many supervisory teacher educator
positions are hastily filled by former classroom teachers turned graduate assistants
who are wholly unaware of the pedagogical challenges their new roles will present
(Zeichner, 2002). These former classroom teachers technically become teacher
educators as soon as they accept their university appointments. However, as Bullough
*Department of Social Science Education, University of Georgia, 629 Aderhold Hall, Athens, GA,
30602, USA. Email: jkritter@uga.edu
Studying Teacher Education
Vol. 3, No. 1, May 2007, pp. 5–22
ISSN 1742-5964 (print)/ISSN 1742-5972 (online)/07/010005–18
q2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17425960701279776

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(2005) cautions, “simply declaring teachers to be teacher educators or mentors, as is
so often done, and occasionally meeting with them on campus to discuss problems
and programs does very little to improve the situation” (p. 144).
The actual transition from classroom teacher to teacher educator appears to be an
involved process. Murray & Male (2005) claim that “this is a transition that entails the
learning of new social mores as a teacher educator and the creation of a new
professional identity” (p. 126). Dinkelman et al. (2006) suggest that “developing an
identity and a set of successful practices in teacher education is best understood as a
process of becoming” (p. 6). This study was undertaken with the desire to better
understand and subsequently to inform the “process of becoming” a teacher educator.
Theoretical Framework
I identified with constructivism as my epistemological stance because I believe “that
social realities are constructed by the participants in those social settings” (Glesne,
1999, p. 5). As Esterberg (2002, p. 16) argues, “there is no social reality apart from
how individuals construct it, and so the main research task is to interpret those
constructions.” Although I readily acknowledge the paramount role of interpretation
in the construction of meaning, I do not believe that an uncritical sort of relativism
must be adopted in order to explain social phenomena. According to Crotty (1998,
p. 47), “what constructionism drives home unambiguously is that there is no true or
valid interpretation. There are useful interpretations, to be sure, and these stand over
against interpretations that appear to serve no useful purpose.” In this study, I use
interpretivism as a theoretical framework to illuminate the pedagogical challenges I
encountered as I transitioned from classroom teacher to teacher educator.
Interpretivism “looks for culturally derived and historically situated interpretations
of the social life-world” (Crotty, 1998, p. 67). Such a sociocultural-historical
perspective provided me with an effective lens to help reveal what counted as useful
interpretations within my research and why.
The pedagogical difficulties that I identified as I transitioned from classroom
teacher to teacher educator had to be examined and understood as they related to my
subjectivities as a white, middle-class, heterosexual, male, novice teacher educator.
From this positioning, I sought to create interpretations of the role I played in
creating, maintaining, and negotiating the challenges I associated with developing a
pedagogy of teacher education. Incapable of transcending the confines imposed on
my understanding of reality by my positioning in society, I recognise these
interpretations are always partial. In sharing this work, I author the story, contribute
another voice, and invite alternative interpretations of my investigation of my initial
journey from teacher to teacher educator.
Teacher Educator Development as a Learning Problem
The process of how one “becomes” a teacher educator remains a relatively
unexamined question (Korthagen et al., 2005; Russell & Korthagen, 1995; Zeichner,
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2005). I operate from a particular perspective, situated within an interpretive
paradigm, that conceptualises teacher educator development as a learning problem
rather than a technical training problem (Cochran-Smith, 2004). According to
Cochran-Smith, the notion of teacher education as a learning problem rests on three
main ideas:
Teacher education occurs in the context of inquiry communities wherein everybody is a
learner and a researcher; inquiry is an intellectual and political stance rather than a
project or time-bounded activity; and, as part of an inquiry stance, teacher research is
a way to generate local knowledge of practice that is contextualised, cultural, and critical.
(p. 12)
This perspective is based on the fundamental premise that “teaching itself is an
intellectual, cultural, and contextually local activity rather than one that is primarily
technical, neutral in terms of values and perspectives, and universal in terms of causes
and effects” (Cochran-Smith, p. 2). Understood in this light, there is not necessarily a
single right way to teach that will always lead to desirable outcomes. Instead,
educators must decide and act upon their pedagogical decisions within a matrix of
competing and constantly changing tensions. This view calls for fluid understandings
of what it means to be a teacher educator, and what it means to do and research
teacher education.
Constructing teacher education as a learning problem meant that I had to
constantly remember to look inward at myself and my own practice in order to discern
the role that I played in creating and maintaining the problems of practice that I
encountered. As Dinkelman (2004, p. 15) notes, “framed in this way, the challenges
of helping new teachers develop their rationales are as much my own learning
problems as theirs.” This understanding of teacher education supports the notion that
assuming the identity and role of teacher educator is a “process of becoming” that
must regularly be negotiated.
Research Methodology
A Self-Study Approach
This study began as part of a collaborative teacher-research seminar during the 2004 –
2005 academic year called Teacher Support Specialist in Social Studies (TS4). The
purpose of this seminar was to discuss how to effectively mentor beginning teachers.
TS4 consisted of 10 participants, including a university-based teacher educator, four
experienced classroom teachers, and five graduate assistants/novice teacher
educators. I considered myself as one of the graduate assistants, although I had
recently left my position as a classroom teacher of 3 years at a rural high school in
middle Georgia and had not yet officially started my work at the university.
TS4 consisted of a 5-day summer session followed by monthly meetings and regular
contact through an electronic message board for the remainder of the academic year.
The initial summer session was used as a time for the participants to discuss the
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effective mentoring of beginning teachers and to plan action research projects on
some aspect of our mentoring practice in the coming school year. My study benefited
from this prolonged collaboration as my colleagues helped me to frame my research by
encouraging me to think about such necessary aspects of the research process as
delimiting the scope of inquiry, engaging in a literature review, identifying sources of
data, and distilling the information through analysis (Stringer, 2004).
My action research project was distinguished from the rest of those in the seminar in
that it was the only self-study. Self-study as a formal approach to research seeks to
increase understanding of “oneself; teaching; learning; and the development of
knowledge about these” (Loughran, 2004, p. 9). While the specific methods used in
self-studies may vary from one to the other, “the common element is the reflective,
critical examination of the self’s involvement both in aspects of the study and in the
phenomenon under study” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998, p. 240). Self-study seemed
like an appropriate mode of inquiry for me to make sense of my transition from
classroom teacher to teacher educator.
Data Sources
The data sources for this study consist of written, reflective journal entries that I
regularly made over the course of the academic year. At the outset of the study, I wrote
the following rationale and plan of action for my research: “I imagine that this will be a
year full of tremendous growth and change. To document this expected growth and
change, I have decided to keep this log. I intend to write an entry after any activity that
is directly related to my evolution as a social studies educator” (Journal, September 3).
From this initial statement of purpose, I settled upon a specific course of action in
which I wrote an entry after every class, student teacher observation, university
supervisor meeting, and any other event that seemed significant to me during the
course of the academic year. In this regard, I used writing as a method of inquiry to
learn more about myself and my research topic (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005).
I managed to follow through with my stated course of action as I juggled a schedule
that included six graduate classes and over fifty field observations with fourteen
student teachers. The journal entries were intended to address the question of how I
was changing, if at all, as I “became” a teacher educator. Some of my entries explicitly
attempted to answer this question; however, most of the entries touched on it
indirectly as I simply expressed the difficulties that I was experiencing.
Data Analysis
Data analysis occurred in the summer of 2005, although I informally analysed data
throughout the study as I regularly wrote about my experiences. Reading through my
journal entries, I realised that many of my responses expressed confusion or
frustration regarding what I was reading, learning about, and experiencing first-hand
with my student teachers. Upon closer examination and subsequent readings of the
data, I discovered that the confusion and frustration were usually related to
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pedagogical tensions and the resistance that I felt as I was confronted with new
obstacles and challenges in my own thinking and in my work with student teachers.
Using a basic coding scheme, I initially attempted to situate relevant journal entries
into one of two categories based on the perceived source of resistance (i.e. internal or
external). These categories proved too simple for my data, as some of my feelings of
resistance seemed to properly fit into both categories while others did not seem to fit
into either category. After reevaluating relevant journal entries, I settled on more
nuanced categories that seemed to more accurately capture and convey the primary
difficulties that I experienced as I was compelled to forge a new teacher educator
pedagogy. Finally, sub-themes emerged from within these core categories and helped
to fill in the overarching narrative.
While I was not concerned with the validity of my research in terms of its
generalisabilty, I did want my methods of analysis to be sufficiently articulated and
rigorous for my provisional findings to be considered trustworthy “to generate local,
situated, provisional knowledge of teaching” as well as to “trigger further deliberations,
explorations, and change by other educators in their contexts” (LaBoskey, 2004,
p. 1170). I strove to accomplish such trustworthiness by engaging in a process of
“self-critical reflexivity,” described by Ham and Kane (2004, p. 129) as an “iterative
and consciously self-analytical reflection on, repetition of, and gathering data about,
the purposeful actions that are the center of the study.”
The first part of this reflexive process involved my journaling, and offered me a venue
to formally reflect and engage in dialogue with myself whenever I was presented with
situations that did not make sense. According to Guilfoyle et al. (2004, p. 1141), such
“inner dialogue can take the form of a dialectic between one’s beliefs and one’s
practices or between one’s values and the norms of the institution.” This stage of
analysis served the purpose of capturing my initial attempts to makes sense of uncertain
situations as well as preserving them as sources of data to be revisited later. As the study
drew to a close, the second part of the process involved critically reflecting on and
reevaluating each of these pieces of data. According to Wilkes (1998),
Brookfield (1995) suggests that reflection becomes critical when it has two distinctive
purposes: the first is to understand how considerations of power undergird, frame, and
distort educational processes and interactions. The second is to question assumptions
and practices that seem to make our teaching lives easier but actually work against our
own best long-term interests, and I would add those of our students. (p. 206).
I recognise that my social and cultural positioning limits my ability to recognise
certain relationships or insights. Therefore, I attempted to be as transparent as
possible in my methods to help readers make their own decisions regarding the
trustworthiness of my findings.
The broad nature of my entries helped me to recognise a greater number of
difficulties that I had confronted over the year than if I had only responded to more
structured and focused sets of questions. These perceived difficulties fit into three
categories: (1) establishing my professional identity as a teacher educator, (2)
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navigating the ambiguous role of teacher educator as both advocate and evaluator,
and (3) dealing with external sources of resistance.
The Challenges of Establishing a Professional Identity as a Teacher Educator
Professional identity refers to how individuals define themselves, what they do, and
how they judge success in their professional lives. This section seeks to illustrate how
each of these aspects of my professional identity was challenged as I transitioned from
classroom teacher to teacher educator.
Professional Identity as a Classroom Teacher
From my earliest days as a student in a Catholic school in the suburbs of Philadelphia
to my later years as a student in several public schools in the suburbs of Atlanta, I
attended classes almost exclusively with other middle-class white students. This
monocultural schooling experience continued throughout my undergraduate and
master’s programs as well. Along the way, my teachers embraced “banking” models of
education (Freire, 1970/1993) whereby they viewed their sole responsibility as
depositing appropriate information into my mind. Appropriate information usually
consisted of nothing more than mainstream academic knowledge, masquerading as
objective and unbiased (Banks, 1993). Although I was good at playing the game of
school, I never felt challenged by anything that I experienced.
As a new classroom teacher, I had internalised banking models of education as the
way schooling was supposed to be done. There was nothing about my upbringing that
really encouraged me to question the status quo, including my preservice teacher
education program. As Richert (1997, p.74) suggested, “rather than confronting the
issue of necessary change, it is more likely that teachers who teach in schools as we know
them teach as they were taught.” This claim certainly held true for me as I uncritically
modelled my professional identity and practice after what I had experienced as a
student. In short, I thought effective classroom teachers were individuals who knew
their content area, who found ways to deposit appropriate information into their
students’ minds, and who produced students who were able to pass standardised tests.
During my 3 years of teaching high school social studies, I recognised that I enjoyed
working with my students enough for classroom teaching to remain my profession for
a long time. I viewed earning another degree as a way to make teaching more lucrative,
not as a way to improve my teaching. My successful experience as a student had
already taught me that schooling was more of something for me to endure than it was
something for me to learn from. I thought that I knew who I was as a teacher and I
aligned myself strongly with that identity.
Classroom Teacher Identity as a Source of Expertise
I began observing student teachers in early September of my first semester as a
doctoral student. From this moment, I was a teacher educator. I had limited formal
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training regarding how to conduct such work (the TS4 week-long summer seminar),
and I was plagued by a deep sense of inadequacy and uncertainty as I carried out my
earliest observations. This sudden immersion into the unknown initially led me to
invoke my classroom teacher identity as a source of expertise in my new role as teacher
educator. I yearned for the security that comes with a well-defined role to play.
I naturally assumed that I was supposed to be the expert over my student teachers and
that it was my responsibility to deposit into their minds appropriate information about
effective teaching.
My prior conception of effective teaching suggested an approach to working with
student teachers emphasising procedural elements that could be used to strengthen
what amounted to standards-driven lessons. As an example, consider the following
journal entry made after my first student teacher observation:
I picked up on all of the weak parts of his lesson and I led him to reach these
conclusions for himself by asking questions. He seemed to respond to my advice
well. Primarily, we discussed increasing the level of Bloom’s taxonomy that he was
asking his students to perform at, incorporating transitions, and summarizing after
activities. (Journal, September 7)
Although I claimed that I was able to get this student teacher to reach his own
conclusions about his teaching, I also make it clear that I provided him with explicit
advice. This seems to fit with the notion that I embraced as a classroom teacher:
Appropriate knowledge exists, and it is my responsibility to deposit that
information into the minds of my students. In this case, appropriate knowledge
included understanding that transitions and summaries were necessary to teach
effectively.
I continued to rely on my expertise as a former classroom teacher as I conducted the
remainder of my earliest observations. After finishing my first 6 observations, I wrote
the following journal entry:
This was the last of my first round of student teacher observations. Overall, I found that I
kept giving the same advice: start a lesson with some kind of a “hook” to generate
interest, pay attention to transitions, summarize as often as possible, and think of ways in
which you could assess student performance. (Journal, September 15)
The advice that I gave during these early conferences only concerned matters upon
which I considered myself more skilled because I had taught and the student teachers
had not. This kind of a focus during my early conferences meshed well with my
classroom teacher identity and allowed me to retain my authority over my student
teachers as I provided them with what I thought was appropriate information for their
absorption. In the end, for better or for worse, invoking my classroom teacher identity
represented the primary method of navigating my early transition into teacher
education.
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Classroom Teacher Identity as a Source of Resistance
Within the first month of graduate school, the belief system that supported my work as
a classroom teacher began to erode. The banking model of education that served me
so well was rapidly called into question, and I was simultaneously fascinated by, and
resistant to, what I was learning. While invoking my classroom teacher identity
initially provided me with the support that I needed in order to conduct my university-
based work, I resisted changing the pedagogical beliefs that I embraced as a classroom
teacher because I was afraid of discrediting my former work in the classroom and
because I was afraid of selling out to higher education. A meeting of a doctoral
seminar in social studies education prompted the following:
This class is helping me to situate myself within the more formal, academic world of
social studies that never seems to get any attention until one pursues this level of
understanding. This almost makes me wonder “what is the purpose?” I think that I was
functioning well as a teacher before I was exposed to all of these new theorists and their
writings. (Journal, September 8)
Perhaps, like many teachers, I thought that I was doing a good job before I ever
immersed myself in the world of educational theory. Nonetheless, the feeling of
resistance that permeates this entry suggests my graduate coursework was revealing
questions about how I understood good teaching and was leading to a reexamination
of what I did and did not accomplish in my not-so-distant past as a classroom social
studies teacher.
Coupled with my fear of not wanting to discredit my work as a classroom teacher,
I resisted changing my pedagogical beliefs because I did not want to sell out to higher
education. I expressed this fear early in my journaling when I wrote, “Why do I always
feel the need to defend traditional teaching practices and beliefs? It feels almost like I’d
be selling out if I embraced some of these new ideas whole-heartedly” (Journal,
September 15). I believe this view stems from the common perception of higher
education held by many practising teachers (including myself): namely, the ideas it
puts forth are too idealistic and impractical for use in the classroom. I still remember
the request that some of my colleagues made when they discovered that I was
returning to graduate school—“Just don’t turn into one of them.”
For a time, I actively tried to hold on to my prior conceptions about teaching and
learning. As an example, consider the following journal entry:
I still find myself clinging to my conservative traditional beliefs. My attitude seems to be:
why change? I know that this attitude is unproductive in many ways, yet I wonder about
the benefits of fully embracing all of these new things that I am reading ... I would rather
be brought kicking and screaming to the truth than just readily accept it without some
serious convincing. Is this being too stubborn? (Journal, September 22).
I now realise that my steadfast views were probably rooted more in my privileged
upbringing and contentment with the status quo than they were in any kind of
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a serious and thoughtful critique of higher education. Regardless, over the course
of my first year of doctoral studies, I was reluctantly brought to some new
understandings about teaching and learning.
Cognitive Dissonance and Reflection
Although it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly compelled me to begin critically
evaluating my former classroom teaching practices and beliefs, two forces clearly
contributed to the weakening of my resistance. First, my observations and
conferences with my student teachers led to cognitive dissonance and self-reflection
regarding the efficacy of my prior work. Second, doctoral coursework and discussions
with my peers challenged my larger belief systems and, subsequently, my views on the
purpose of teaching social studies.
As I began working with my student teachers, many of whom came from
backgrounds similar to mine, it became obvious that many of them aspired to the
same traditional image of a teacher that I once accepted but was now in the process of
reevaluating. As my assistantship regularly put me in a position to observe my student
teachers enacting this model of teaching, I slowly developed a more critical sense of
what I believed was actually occurring in such classrooms: namely, not much of
anything. Observing student teachers provided a window into my not-so-distant past
as a classroom teacher. These observations caused me to consider how ineffective I
must have often been with my students.
When I observe student teachers, they often attempt to play it safe by lecturing on
standardised subject matter that they presumably know better than their students.
Early in my work as a teacher educator I started questioning the efficacy of such an
approach. After one of my earliest observations, of a student teacher lecturing to her
class for almost the entire period, I wrote: “the students appeared highly disinterested
in this class. A little strange – I wonder if my students would have looked the same to
an outsider while I was talking” (Journal, September 14).
Several weeks later, my response to this same kind of teaching became even more
passionate:
Probably the biggest thing that struck me about this visit was the total lack of engagement
on the part of the students while the student teacher was giving a lecture-type, teacher-
centered review. Why the hell bother to talk if nobody is listening? Looking back at my
own practice, I could have asked myself the same question numerous times. It just
doesn’t make sense. (Journal, September 30)
Basically my observations made it possible for me to more easily see, or maybe just to
admit, that the way in which teachers commonly use lecture as a pedagogical method
is often ineffectual. This and other examples illustrate how aspects of my professional
identity were challenged by my experiences observing student teachers.
The slow revolution in my thinking about powerful social studies pedagogy
spawned by my field observations helped me to gradually see its absence in my student
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teachers’ practice. Conversely, there were also instances when I saw examples of
powerful teaching that made me question my own beliefs and practices:
I saw a very good activity today that simulated life in a dictatorship. While there were
weaknesses in the lesson, the overall positive impression that I was left with served to
show me the value in experiential learning. I now wonder why I did not put myself out
there more often and try some of these activities. (Journal, November 4)
The powerful and not-so-powerful teaching that I observed prompted me to rethink
my professional identity. Two months into my assistantship I noted: “my observations
have really caused me to think about what transformative teaching would really look
like” (Journal, October 18).
Aside from my experiences observing student teachers, my classroom teacher
identity was also challenged by doctoral coursework and discussions with my peers.
These experiences served to challenge my larger belief systems and subsequently my
views on the purpose of teaching social studies. As an example, consider the following
entry written after a social studies doctoral seminar in which my colleagues and I
discussed a particularly controversial piece of literature:
The most striking comment of the night was made by one of my fellow field instructors.
As most of us were questioning the value of exposing students to such injustices in their
own lives that they actually get pissed enough to throw a chair in the classroom, he
asked, “Well, what’s better? Anger or apathy.” Our instructor suggested that we already
know what happens with apathetic students—nothing. This argument makes sense to
me. (Journal, October 6)
I had never before considered anger as something that might be more desirable from
students than complacency. This entry illustrates how the free and open exchange of
ideas with my peers in certain graduate classes facilitated new ways of thinking.
Although it is not the intent of this paper to detail all of the ways in which my views
on education changed as a result of my participation in graduate school, the following
journal entry reveals my newfound questioning stance:
The problems facing education reform as we have been discussing it seem profound.
Emphasizing thinking as a form of education versus indoctrination as a form of education
requires teachers to give up their “expert” status. Abandoning this long-standing status
raises many questions, not the least of which are teacher authority, interactions with
students, and pedagogical methods employed. (Journal, October 20).
My maturity, recent life experiences, professors and colleagues, and the questions
raised as I worked with student teachers all appeared to stimulate my questioning
stance. Importantly, the power of the revolution in my own thinking helped to
establish new aims for my practice as a teacher educator, even as I felt at a loss about
how I might accomplish these aims.
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Professional Identity Reconsidered
Within a semester, my work in the field with student teachers coupled with my
experiences in graduate school pushed me to rethink my professional identity as a new
teacher educator. The self-study methods I employed in this research allowed me to
capture the critical incidents in this process of change. Writing journal entries,
returning to them, and analysing them fostered self-awareness that I believe hastened
both the transformation of my views about social studies and the development of a
new teacher educator identity. An entry written halfway through my first year as a
graduate student and beginning teacher educator highlights the extent of the rapid
growth I experienced:
Although the transition had been happening for awhile, I did not fully realize it until I said
the words out loud in today’s meeting. I do not see the point in wasting time in my four
meetings with each student teacher talking about the practical concerns of the classroom.
If I am specifically asked a question about such concerns, I will make suggestions.
However, I don’t know the context of their situations and I think they are more heavily
influenced by their cooperating teacher anyway. My time seems better spent on the
theoretical and abstract. I want to inquire about their reasons for teaching and I want to
challenge their understandings. Ultimately, I think that education will be better served by
posing these types of questions to student teachers and letting them deliberate about the
possible answers. I think that this process necessarily encourages reflection which is a
much better tool to equip a teacher with than my advice on classroom management.
(Journal, January 28)
After only one semester, I was willing, if not eager, to relinquish my status as an expert
whose role was to deposit appropriate information into the minds of my students.
Indeed I was no longer even sure what counted as appropriate information.
To relinquish control as an expert and recognise that I do not always know the
answers signalled the early development of an inquiry stance towards my work in
teacher education. Embracing such a stance requires constant negotiation as both
what and how to teach depend on the context of the situation and the needs of the
students involved. I appreciate and agree with Fecho’s (2004) notion of the purpose of
inquiry as well as the teacher’s role in facilitating that purpose:
The intent was and remains to help students not rest on superficial ideas, but instead
complicate and deepen their understandings. My purpose is not to impose my ideas on
my students—my stances are as open to interrogation as all others in the classroom—but
to help my students learn how to more deeply investigate and more clearly articulate their
own evolving views. I want to help them understand that what they understand today is
not necessarily what they will understand tomorrow. (p. 126)
This stance suggests a notion of expertise founded on teacher educators as co-
constructors of knowledge with students through the joint interrogation of ideas.
Teaching as inquiry bolsters the notion that developing an identity and practices in
teacher education is a process of becoming.
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Navigating the Ambiguous Role of a Teacher Educator
Another source of difficulty that I encountered as I forged a pedagogy of teacher
education was the tension between my dual role as both an advocate for and evaluator
of my student teachers. Although a similar tension exists for many classroom teachers,
this study points to circumstances unique to teacher education that make such a
balancing act especially difficult to achieve. This section seeks to identify and describe
those circumstances.
Evolving Expectations
My rapidly evolving ideas about what it means to work with beginning teachers are
closely linked to changes in my thinking about the purpose of teaching social studies.
I became increasingly drawn to the idea of teaching social studies for social
transformation as opposed to teaching for transmission of the existing dominant order
(Stanley, 2005). In particular, I moved closer to subscribing to the views of Counts
(1932/1978) and his call for schools to serve as a force for social reconstruction
toward the ideals of a true participatory democracy.
This ideological shift problematised the expectations I held for the student teachers
I supervised. I often found it challenging to support student teachers who seemed
primarily interested in transmitting the existing social order. After one of my more
traditional student teachers told me that she did not plan to go into teaching, I wrote:
Secretly, I was happy. This happiness seemed a little out of place for a number of reasons.
First of all, she is nice as hell so I felt guilty. More importantly, she could have passed her
student teacher experience and gotten a job—no problem. She presents herself very well,
and ...is probably just as good a social studies teacher as any that I had in high school.
Nonetheless, I was happy that she is not going into teaching. I was happy because I expect
more. In fact, my new expectations might have affected myself just a few short months
ago when I was teaching. I will have to be careful to temper my new expectations with
understanding and encouragement. I feel that I am learning a lot as a field instructor, but
I must remember the way I thought about things before in order to continue to be able to
relate to the student teachers and to effect the type of changes that I envision. (Journal,
October 19)
In my mind, the pedagogy I brought to my work as a teacher educator was predicated
on shifting expectations that caused me to interrogate my sense of what to expect from
preservice teachers, most of whom were not student teaching in school environments
supportive of calls for social reconstruction.
When I was able to set aside my new ideological commitments to a theory of social
studies for critical democracy in favour of the more practical support desired by many
of my student teachers, the troubling question of assessment remained. I oftentimes
pondered the question, “But how good is good enough?” I wrote:
While these student teachers are not always performing or thinking about things in ways
that I might hope for, they are still doing fine when compared to most other teachers.
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Additionally, I feel that most administrators in the schools would be glad to have these
student teachers work for them. Where is the balance? I want these student teachers to
buy into what our program is putting out there, but I am not sure that I should damage
their careers if they don’t get it. (Journal, Oct. 19).
Several semesters of experience later, I am not much closer to knowing how to balance
my ideological expectations against the traditional, pragmatic support that my student
teachers want.
Limited Encounters
My interaction with student teachers was limited to four observation visits and
informal contact through email and phone calls. This amount of contact posed
challenges as I attempted to navigate my role as advocate and evaluator. The
unfavourable conditions that marked my relationship with my student teachers often
led to situations in which I found it difficult to assess whether or not they were feeling
challenged. I asked myself, “am I causing these student teachers to think in new ways,
or have they merely figured out what I want to hear? Do I, in fact, want to hear certain
things? If so, how does this help/hinder my work with the student teachers?” (Journal,
March 30). My lack of familiarity with my student teachers created situations in which
I was never sure what we were actually accomplishing together, thereby making it
difficult to judge when to support them and when to be more evaluative.
Furthermore, I found my role as an evaluator served to hinder open and honest
communication by making student teachers more hesitant to engage in dialogue.
It turns out my suspicions were correct. Many, many students are still struggling with the
idea of student engagement. They are very concerned about the ways they are going to be
assessed. They don’t seem to understand that they should be active participants in this
process of student teaching. (Journal, October 5)
My experience suggests that most of my student teachers considered how they were
going to be assessed as one of the more significant aspects of our relationship. This
desire to do well, coupled with the fear of failure, encourages many student teachers to
view their student teaching as something to get through as opposed to something to
learn from. This realisation weighed heavily on my thinking about a pedagogy of
teacher education.
Almost counter-intuitively, one welcome response was the relief I experienced in
several of the more contentious post-observation conferences I had with two student
teachers. The emotional responses apparent in these conferences were almost
comforting, as I read the student teachers’ challenges as indicators that they at least
cared about the process of our work together. I reflected, “These conferences made
me question whether or not some of my student teachers are dodging the tough
questions. After all, why are only a few having such adverse reactions to my
questioning? Are they the only ones being affected by it?” (Journal, February 15). In
an effort to determine why these two reacted so much more strongly to my
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observations and conferences than others, I tried to consciously pay closer attention to
what was occurring differently in my other conferences.
Well, today’s post-observation conference only took about 30 minutes. Why does that
matter? I think that the individuals who felt I was being harder on them got that
impression after talking to this student teacher (and possibly some of the others). The
fact that this conference only lasted half the usual amount of time almost lends credence
to their claims. But the truth is that it is hard to have a substantive conversation with a
person who is unwilling and/or unprepared to be involved in that discussion. While I need
to formulate ways to remedy this situation, I do not want my solution to involve letting up
on the student teachers who are ready for such dialogue. By the same token, I don’t want
them to feel punished. (Journal, February 23)
This response captures many of the challenges I faced in trying to play a role of
support as well as a role of evaluation in such an impersonal environment.
Student Teachers’ Belief Systems as an External Source of Resistance
I use the term belief systems to refer to student teachers’ principles, conceptions and
beliefs about the purposes of teaching. My induction into teacher education was in a
social studies program that placed a great emphasis on helping preservice teachers
develop rationales for their teaching practice. Perhaps mirroring my own experience
as a beginning teacher, I learned that many of the student teachers with whom I
worked struggled to articulate their developing rationales. Many have not yet realised
the potential influence that they might have on their students’ lives.
Well, this was my last observation with this student teacher. More than any of the others, I
am unsure if he really bought into our program. I don’t know how to make somebody
receptive to new ideas when they seem more interested in just securing their passing
grade. (Journal, March 22)
Perhaps it has always been the case that future teachers do not seem to take their
responsibilities seriously enough for teacher educators.
Most of the pre-service teachers with whom I have worked have shared similar
backgrounds to my own—the kind of privileged existences that make it easy to be
wholly uncritical and content with the status quo of life in US schools. Many of my
student teachers were drawn to traditional methods of instruction even when these
methods contradicted their expressed goals. They seemed to believe the
pedagogical methods they experienced as students were legitimate and effective
ways to teach.
I am quite concerned about this one. He told me that he taught his last unit almost
entirely using methods that the university frowns upon because he was very unfamiliar
with the content. More troubling than this is that he told me the student test scores went
up on the unit that he taught more traditionally. I think that he is trying to rationalize his
way into taking the easy way out. (Journal, November 11)
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Student teachers might be encouraged to teach according to traditional methods
because of their preoccupation with evaluation—in this case, the evaluations provided
by their mentor teachers. In other words, they consider such methods as safe and sure
ways to get through their student teaching.
While most of the student teachers are looking more comfortable in front of the
classroom, I am worried that they are starting to abandon the big concepts of “active
student engagement” in “worthwhile learning” for more safe and traditional methods
such as lecture. I need to somehow make them realize that these two concepts are what
make teaching an actual process of learning and discovery. (Journal, October 5)
Although I understand the appeal of traditional programs, I struggled with how to
respond as a teacher educator. I learned that belief systems of student teachers matter
and should always be considered when teacher educators attempt to develop and/or
implement their pedagogies.
Norms of the Public Schools as an External Source of Resistance
The norms of the public schools represented a source of resistance to the evolution of
my pedagogical beliefs as a teacher educator. I developed ideas about effective teacher
education by helping student teachers work within school climates characterised by an
increasing fixation with standards, testing, and accountability. The “teaching against
the grain” commitments of the teacher education program in which I worked have
always been difficult to realise (Cochran-Smith, 1991). The standards and testing
movement has made this work even more difficult by providing student teachers with
apparent school and state sanctioning of traditional methods of teaching to the test.
When asked to describe what they hope to accomplish as teachers, most of my student
teachers mentioned admirable goals such as critical thinking, social justice, and
historical consciousness. Their intended goals rarely were translated into practice as
the student teachers apparently succumbed to the pressures associated with the norms
of the school system, especially those pressures related to standardisation. As I
suggested in my second semester:
It seems that one of the biggest challenges that student teachers face is trying to reconcile
teaching what they know is important with teaching the standards. It is amazing to me
how quickly the culture of the school makes them discard things that they know are
important in favor of teaching the standards. (Journal, February 24)
Following another similar student teacher observation, I wrote a comparable
reflection:
As soon as this student teacher succumbed to the pressure of “covering” content,
everything that we push in our program disappeared. For example, his lesson today
lacked student engagement, higher order thought, and critical thought. Perhaps even
worse, his lesson today did not serve to engage the students in worthwhile learning, even
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according to his own understanding. With that said, what was the point? What good did it
do to disregard the program goals in order to “cover” content? (Journal, March 17)
Covering the content in this manner represents nothing more than a pedagogy of
compliance. I do not think that teachers would claim that what students were being
asked to remember represented anything particularly meaningful or worthwhile.
Nevertheless, my struggle to become a teacher educator was, in part, a story of my
struggle to find ways of helping student teachers understand that good teaching can
coexist with the push for high test scores.
Conclusion
This study highlights the primary challenges I encountered as I moved from being a
classroom teacher to becoming a teacher educator. These findings contribute to
understanding the challenges that new teacher educators may face as they are
compelled to modify their existing classroom teacher pedagogies to suit their new
positions as teacher educators. The mere presence of such challenges refutes the
“assumption that educating teachers is something that does not require any additional
preparation and that if one is a good teacher of elementary or secondary students, this
expertise will automatically carry over to one’s work with novice teachers” (Zeichner,
2005, p. 118).
My experience suggests that the process of becoming a teacher educator is far more
complex than is typically acknowledged, as it involves modifications to professional
identity as well as to pedagogy. While there are certain similarities between the work of
teachers and that of teacher educators, there are also differences that must not be
ignored. By bringing to light some of these differences, this study reinforces the claim
that teacher education
demands skills, expertise and knowledge that cannot simply be taken for granted. Rather
there is a need for such skills, expertise and knowledge to be carefully examined,
articulated and communicated so that the significance of the role of the teacher educator
might be more appropriately highlighted and understood within the profession.
(Korthagen et al., 2005, p. 107)
This investigation of my move from classroom teacher to teacher educator suggests
questions for future research. How do different program contexts influence the
process of becoming a teacher educator? How does adopting an inquiry stance help
beginning teacher educators better serve their students? What role does experience
play in shaping the process of developing better teacher education pedagogy? Does
the process of becoming a teacher educator look different for someone with years of
experience in the field? What sorts of research, teaching, and field experiences best
promote the development of competence in teacher education? By understanding the
challenges involved in this important transition, we are better positioned to consider
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how novice teacher educators are inducted into their new roles. I will never again take
for granted the skills, expertise, and knowledge required to be a teacher educator.
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