Research

That Matters

Campus to Classroom: Longitudinal Study Takes Comprehensive Look at Teacher Preparation

walking

In 2004, the University of Washington teacher education program turned its research lens on itself. For years, methods instructors had prompted teacher interns to probe more deeply into student thinking, to find out what students actually learned from a lesson. Now, it was time for faculty to find out what their own students were taking away from their lessons.

The ongoing research has shown that, despite instruction to focus on student learning, an intense self-focus precedes student-focus in the development of beginning teachers. For these future educators, it was me, the teacher, before you, the student.

“Our students tend to think that teaching is all about what they do instead of being an interaction between what they do and what their students do and how that plays out in real contexts,” says UW educational psychology professor Susan B. Nolen.

in class Along with associate professor Ilana Horn, doctoral student Chris Ward, and a team of student researchers, Nolen followed eight secondary teacher education students from their first days on campus through fieldwork, and tracked seven of those students into their early years of teaching in secondary schools.

Subjects in the case study arrived on campus with their own ideas of what makes a good teacher and how the program could help them master individual classroom styles and goals. One intern’s goal was to use classroom mathematics to promote social justice, helping underprivileged adolescents “beat” the system to better their chances at educational and career advancement.

He entered the UW graduate program mainly to pick up a degree and master some tricks to help students memorize formulas and ace big tests. The intern, who’d had previous experience teaching, had no time for what he saw as the theoretical, abstract nature of most teacher preparation instruction. “I don’t live in that world,” he told researchers in his first interview. He saw himself as a “real world” guy.

“That world” and the “real world” would collide and coalesce over the course of the study.

“As teacher educators, we need to know what knowledge the students bring in, and how that interacts with what we are trying to teach them,” says Nolen.

‘WINDOW DRESSING’

girl studying Those mechanisms slowly came into focus as researchers observed student fieldwork, sat in on conferences with student supervisors, queried cooperating teachers and administrators, examined student work and other artifacts, and conducted hours of interviews with interns, often in informal settings such as coffee shops.

When students in the study moved on to take full-time teaching jobs, the researchers spent full days in observation, followed by lengthy interviews. What the researchers found, to the consternation of UW program faculty, was that the UW students pick and choose what to learn. Some respond to specific ideas and practices saying: “That’s me” or “That’s not me.” Their conceptions of themselves as teachers — shaped in part by their own experiences as students, remembrances of favorite teachers, pop culture images of good teaching — influence what they do or don’t take up from coursework, and how they interpret or misinterpret practices.

Many of the students hold limited views of the sophisticated methods taught on campus, seeing them simply as ways to convey content, like “deployment strategies” or “window dressing,” says Horn, associate professor of mathematics education in the College of Education. “They don’t realize how fundamental these tools are to getting at their students’ thinking.”

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

Faculty members, learning their students had abandoned or misconstrued practices taught on campus, went back to the drawing board to refine coursework. Nolen revised her own class as the data streamed in. “One of the things I knew that I had to disrupt was my students’ blanket assumptions about their students. I wanted to disrupt their interpretations of students’ difficulties as being due to lack of ability, or a poor home life, and provide them with examples of students who could do amazing things when teachers made it clear how they could draw on information they already had.”

One consistent problem brought to light was novice teachers’ oversimplification of the actual act of teaching. Many enter classrooms holding those self-referenced or generalized images of students, often projecting their personal motives onto their students. They still haven’t made it past the “me” to get to the “you.” Do the students like them? Did their lesson go as they had planned?

“Their notion is, ‘If I plan things well and I make the right moves, everything will go fine. That leaves out things like the students, the students’ experiences, the families, the peer relations, and the structure of the department where they’re working,” says Nolen.

When things go wrong, some novices put the blame on their students, not themselves. One research subject said her classroom simply wasn’t “mature enough” for group work in mathematics. Some kids “just won’t get” analytical writing, said another student. “There’s only so much a teacher can do.”

Students in the study sifted everything through what the researchers term “motivational filters.” Some interns initially couldn’t see the value of the time-consuming coursework in an assessment class. “It’s like we will never do this in the real world,” said one. “ … the amount of work that goes into assessing is like, who would ever assess anything?” It didn’t pass her “feasibility filter.”

A math education student who thought all high schools were like the one he’d attended had trouble connecting with the issues presented in his multicultural coursework on campus — until he started doing fieldwork in a lower-income, highly diverse urban school. Suddenly, those issues passed his “utility filter.”

The “real-world” student who had entered the UW program looking for tricks to help math students “beat” the system began shifting his views of good teaching after he was challenged by an instructor who shared his values on social justice. She passed through his “relationship filter.” Instead of breaking instruction down into steps for easy memorization, he began to teach for deeper mathematical thinking in his classroom — what he called “big-picture stuff.” He realized “There’s another way here.”

Teacher educators can tailor their instruction to penetrate these motivational filters, says Nolen. But first they must be able to recognize them. “It’s important for us to know that students are filtering, know what those filters are and know how they might affect our students’ willingness to take up and consider what we try to teach.”

COMPLICATED NEGOTIATIONS

Over time, as teacher candidates in the study moved from coursework into fieldwork and the complexities of practice became apparent, they began to modify those motivational filters. Their teacher identities shifted. Their understanding of their students shifted. “They began seeing students as important sources of information,” says Nolen.

The developing teachers began to adapt their repertoire of practices, weighing options and making difficult decisions as they transferred from campus to fieldwork, from fieldwork to their own classrooms, from one school to the next.

They would use some of our strategies in one setting, then go to a different school and have to renegotiate those practices. The practices might fit in their old school, but not in their new one, where nobody did it ‘that way,’ ” says Nolen. “These are often much more complicated negotiations than we ever hint at anywhere in our instruction or in our books.”

Nolen and her research colleagues continue to pore over data generated by the ethnographic study, looking for new insights and patterns. Their ongoing reports to faculty keep an important conversation going on how teacher candidates learn, how they self-identify, and how that shifting identity affects what they take away from coursework over time.

“Understanding novices’ decision-making processes is critical to teacher educators trying to convince students they need to learn ‘best practices,’ ” says Nolen.

“We need to know our students’ values and their conceptions of teaching so that they can learn more of what we have to teach.”

For more information on the study of beginning teachers see:

Horn, I. S., Nolen, S. B., Ward, C. J., Campbell, S. S. (2008). Developing practices in multiple worlds: The role of identity in learning to teach. Teacher Education Quarterly, 35(3), 61-72.

Nolen, S. B. & Ward, C. J. (2008). Sociocultural and situative research on motivation. In M. Maehr, S. Karabenick, & T. Urdan (Eds.), Social psychological perspective on motivation and achievement (pp. 428-460). Advances in motivation and achievement (Vol. 15). London: Emerald Group.

Nolen, S. B., Ward, C. J., Horn, I. S., Childers, S., Campbell, S., & Mahna, K. (2009). Motivation in pre-service teachers: The development of utility filters. In M. Wosnitza, S. A. Karabenick, A. Efklides & P. Nenniger (Eds.). Contemporary Motivation Research: From Global to Local Perspectives. Ashland, OH: Hogrefe & Huber.