Posts Tagged ‘pedagogy’

Home/School: Research Imperatives, Learning Settings and the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has made home settings an essential and, in many cases, the only place of formal learning for students. This shift has pulled parents, caretakers, and other family members even closer to the education of young people as they assume the work of schooling that has been substantially reconfigured by both the pandemic and online platforms. However, in faculties of education, homeschooling is often marginalized with limited funded research (Howell, 2013). Additionally, as Kennedy and Archambault (2012) argue, teacher education programs should have been taking a more proactive role in terms of K-12 online learning with a focus not simply on the technology (Ko & Rossen, 2017), but on the unique aspects of the pedagogy associated with this mode of instruction. Teachers may be ill-prepared to deliver online content, and many families are overwhelmed by the shift in the learning environment. The long-term impacts of this shift are unknown. Yet this uncertainty reasserts opportunities to both (1) leverage home and community settings as reservoirs of knowledge deserving greater attention for teachers and teacher educators and (2) consider how educational technology can be used to support pedagogies that are more centered on students’ interests, assets, and needs (Means et al, 2013).

Revolutionizing Education: A Call for Stories

Ed Prep Matters features the “Revolutionizing Education” column to spotlight the many ways AACTE, member institutions, and partners are pioneering leading-edge research, models, strategies and programs that focus on the three core values outlined in the current AACTE strategic plan: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Quality and impact; and Inquiry and Innovation.

Diverse college classroom

AACTE recently released its 2020-2023 Strategic Plan, which includes a new vision statement: AACTE, its members, and partners collaborate to revolutionize education for all learners. Aligned with the new strategic plan, Ed Prep Matters is launching a new column called Revolutionizing Education to showcase the many ways the Association and member institutions are moving beyond traditional perspectives and are pioneering positive change in educator preparation.

The Revolutionizing Education column is an opportunity for member institutions and partners to share the leading-edge research, models, strategies, programs, and initiatives that focus on the three core values outlined in the new AACTE strategic plan:

  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  • Quality and impact
  • Inquiry and Innovation

Co-Teaching: More Than Just a Model

. Meghan Crosier and Shellie Pence led Making Co-Teaching Possible: When Two Brains Work As One as invited speakersCollaborative. Encouraging. Communicative. Supportive. Empowering. These are characteristics that contemporary educator preparation programs are committed to building within their traditional teacher candidates. For co-teaching teams, however, these traits are more than preferred; they are essential to success. 

Co-teaching is an innovative pedagogical model adopted to maximize instructional impact and engagement amongst preservice and in-service teachers. Thanks to the support of the AACTE, the “Co-Teaching in Clinical Practice” Topical Action Group (TAG) is able to advocate for co-teaching and support co-teachers in schools throughout the nation.

Team Wins 5-year, $1.98 Million NSF Grant to Improve Teacher Preparation


A team of Penn State College of Education faculty led by P. Karen Murphy has won a five-year, $1.98 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the preparation of undergraduate preservice elementary teachers.

Murphy, distinguished professor of education (educational psychology), is the principal investigator (PI) on the study. She is joined by co-PIs Gwendolyn Lloyd, the Henry J. Hermanowicz Professor of Teacher Education and professor of education (mathematics education); Amy Voss Farris, assistant professor of education (science education); and Rachel Wolkenhauer, assistant professor of education (curriculum and supervision).

With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources, this project aims to serve the national interest by investigating whether teaching preservice elementary teachers how to use discussion-based pedagogy improves the quality of mathematics instruction in their classrooms. Specifically, the researchers will adapt Quality Talk (QT), a small-group, teacher-facilitated discussion approach, for use by teacher educators in STEM methods courses and classroom-based field experiences for future elementary teachers.

Highlights from Sept./Oct. JTE Issue

Journal of Teacher Education logo

The  September/October 2019 issue of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE)  is now available online, while printed copies are arriving in the mail to subscribers around the country. Below is a summary of the articles included in Vol. 70, Issue 4, 2019:

In “Teacher Agency and Resilience in the Age of Neoliberalism,” members of the JTE editorial team, Tonya Bartell, Christine Cho, Corey Drake, Emery Petchauer, and Gail Richmond, address how the articles in this issue provide insights into ways educator preparation programs can support teachers in developing and enacting agency. They discuss how making small shifts or adaptations in everyday teaching practices can create more just and equitable teaching and learning.


In the paper, “Whiteness as a Dissonant State: Exploring  One White Male Student Teacher’s Experiences in Urban Contexts,” Stephanie Behm Cross of Georgia State University, Nermin Tosmur-Bayazit  of Fitchburg State University, and Alyssa Hadley Dunn of Michigan State University, suggest that Whiteness itself is a dissonant state. The authors argue that

The Teacher Educator Journal Releases Top 10 Articles

The Teacher Educator national peer-reviewed journal recently shared the top 10 most downloaded articles in the first three months of 2019. The most downloaded article in 2018 was “Current Issues in Teacher Education: An Interview with Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond” with 2,726 downloads. Other popular articles cover a range of topics including multicultural teacher education, perceptions of ELL students, student stress and coping, and teaching reflective practice. The full list of the top 10 articles are included in the table below.

AACTE President and CEO Lynn M. Gangone serves on Editorial Advisory Board of The Teacher Educator, a forum for promoting discussion among educators who seek to challenge existing boundaries in the field. The journal invites AACTE members to submit notable work on current

A Conversation with Donald Easton-Brooks on Culturally Responsive Practice

AACTE board member Donald Easton-Brooks is widely known as a scholar of educational policy and culturally responsive teaching. This year, he released his book Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color. In a recent Q&A with AACTE President and CEO Lynn M. Gangone, Easton-Brooks talked about the book and how his research shows diversifying the teaching profession will ultimately improve student’s success. The following summary highlights the conversation.

Donald Easton-BrooksHow would you describe the concept of ethnic matching and its importance to student learning?

What ethnic matching initially suggests is that teachers of color can play a significant role in enhancing the academic experience of students of color. As this research and other research progress, findings have shown that teachers of color can play a significant role in also enhancing the academic experience of white students and can assist in enhancing a more culturally responsive profession as a whole.  Therefore, the concept and research related to the concept suggest that we need to diversify teacher education. Mainly because as our communities are becoming more diverse, we are seeing our public schools also becoming more diverse. Yet what is happening is that our educator profession is not growing at a similar rate as these communities of students. The research around the concepts shows that perceived knowledge or knowledge from a preceptive culturally lens can play a role in students’ understanding of concepts, learning, and processing of information. This often can lead to these students being misinterpreted by teachers and feeling somehow misunderstood by teachers if they do not have that cultural lens to understand them. That is what teachers of color can bring to the table that can be of assistance to educational systems.

JTE Author Insights: Measuring Secondary Math and Science Residents


Read the latest 
JTE Insider blog interview by the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) editorial team. This blog is available to the public, and AACTE members have free access to the articles in the JTE online archives—just log in with your AACTE profile.

This interview features insights from the article “Measuring Teaching Quality of Secondary Mathematics and Science Residents: A Classroom Observation Framework” by Imelda Nava, Jaime Park, Danny Dockterman, Jarod Kawasaki, Jon Schweig, Karen Hunter Quartz, and José Felipe Martínez. The article was published in the March/April 2019 issue of the Journal of Teacher Education.

Findings on Black Women Educator Professional Experiences


Read the latest 
JTE Insider blog interview by the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) editorial team. This blog is available to the public, and AACTE members have free access to the articles in the JTE online archives—just log in with your AACTE profile.

This interview features insights from Melanie M. Acosta, author of the JTE article “The Paradox of Pedagogical Excellence Among Exemplary Black Women Educators.” The article is published in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of the Journal of Teacher Education.

Q1. What motivated you to pursue this particular research topic?

I was compelled to study the professional experiences of exceptional Black women educators for many reasons. One of the most important reasons was related to my own positionality as a Black woman educator with a record of success in teaching. Another crucial reason I wanted to pursue research on Black women educator professional experiences was related to expanding and complicating the dialogue on diversifying the teaching force to focus on issues affecting Black teacher retention, which includes teachers’ positionalities and the treatment of Black women educators in schools.

Workshop Offers Opportunity to Practice Pedagogies


TeachingWorks at the University of Michigan is presenting its second annual Practice-Based Teacher Education Workshop, an opportunity for teacher educators to examine and try out practice-based teacher education pedagogies. The workshop, will take place on July 8-10, 2019 at the University of Michigan School of Education, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The presentations will include artifacts of practice such as videos and transcripts to create more time for teacher educators to practice teacher education pedagogies.

Towson University Builds Clinical Curriculum Through Virtual Simulation

In Fall 2017, AACTE member institution Towson University’s College of Education launched a pilot program, SIMTeach@TU, to strengthen its clinical and practice-based curriculum through virtual simulation. The program features eight faculty who develop problem-based case scenarios for teacher candidates to experience real-world human interactions with avatars via the virtual reality technology called Mursion. The training simulations recreate the most demanding interpersonal challenges that teacher candidates may confront in the classroom with PK-12 students. It allows preservice teachers to practice and master the complex interpersonal skills necessary to be effective in difficult situations.

“We see simulation—or approximations of practice—work as part of the trajectory of getting our preservice teachers ready to work with real students in classrooms,” said Laila Richman, associate dean of the College of Education at Towson. “We think about this as the first phase of a university-based clinical curriculum that moves them towards being able to work with students.”

AACTE Award Winner Discusses Empathy in Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Have you seen the JTE Insider blog managed by the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) editorial team at Michigan State University? This blog is available to the public, and AACTE members have free access to the articles themselves in the full JTE archives online–just log in with your AACTE profile here.

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Chezare Warren, assistant professor at Michigan State University, received AACTE’s Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2014 for his study Empathic Interaction: White Female Teachers and Their Black Male Students, which was completed in 2012 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Reminder: AACTE is seeking submissions for the 2019 Outstanding Dissertation Award now through August 20.)

Study Investigates Nuances of ‘Closed-Mindedness’ in Preservice Candidates

Have you seen the JTE Insider blog managed by the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) editorial team? Check out the following interview with the authors of a recent article. This blog is available to the public, and AACTE members have free access to the articles themselves in the full JTE archives online–just log in with your AACTE profile here.

The following interview features insights from the authors of the article “Early Childhood Open-Mindedness: An Investigation Into Preservice Teachers’ Capacity to Address Controversial Issues,” published in the March/April 2018 issue of JTE. The article is written by Nazan U. Bautista, Thomas J. Misco, and Stephen J. Quaye, all of Miami University (OH), and is summarized in the following abstract:

Panel Promotes Teacher Preparation for Deeper Learning

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Cindy Gutierrez of the University of Colorado Denver listens as fellow panelist Steve Wojcikiewicz of the University of Portland (OR) discusses institutional supports for “deeper learning” teacher preparation.

A “Deeper Dive” session held March 3 at the 70th AACTE Annual Meeting shared lessons on how to engage preservice teacher candidates in the kinds of meaningful learning experiences they are expected to create later for their own students. Organized by the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), “Walking the Talk: Teacher Preparation for Deeper Learning” highlighted findings from a national study of seven teacher preparation programs that are organized in ways that align with deeper learning approaches – meaning less emphasis on rote learning and more on experiential, innovative, collaborative, and equity-focused pedagogy.

LPI researcher Maria Hyler opened the session by describing the primary features of successful programs identified in the study, details of which will be published by Harvard Education Press in a book later this year. These features include opportunities for candidates to experience learning that is applied and transferred, developmental and personalized, collaborative and social, contextualized, and socially just. Hyler then invited panelists representing several programs in the study to outline one of the key domains.

AACTE Commission Issues Proclamations for Effective Clinical Educator Preparation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For interviews, contact Jerrica Thurman
(202) 478-4502 or jthurman@aacte.org

(January 17, 2018, Washington, D.C.) – Clinical practice and partnership are central to high-quality teacher preparation, and although a variety of delivery models can coexist, they all must incorporate key principles to be effective, according to a report released today by a commission of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).