Zeichner & Tabachnick (1981). Are the effects of university teacher education “washed out” by school experiences?

Zeichner, K. M., & Tabachnick, B. R. (1981). Are the effects of university teacher education "washed out" by school experiences? Journal of Teacher Education, 32(2), 7–11.

It now has become commonly accepted within the teacher education community that students become increasingly more progressive or liberal in their attitudes towards education during their stay at the university and then shift to opposing and more traditional views as they move into student teaching and inservice experience

The Commonly Accepted Scenario: The Liberal Impact of Professional Education and a Progressive-Traditional Shift in Teaching Perspectives

British and American studies seem to provide overwhelming evidence for the position that the impact of the college is "washed out" by school experience. Zeichner (1980) has outlined various explanations which have been offered in the literature for the shift in teaching perspectives that occurs with the onset of school experience. Cooperating teachers and others with evaluative power over student teachers and teachers (Edgar & Warren, 1969), the ecology of the classroom (Copeland, 1980), the bureaucratic norms of schools (Hoy & Rees, 1977), teaching colleagues (McPherson, 1972), and pupils (Spradbery, 1976) all have been seen to play major roles in the reversal of views formed at the university.

Alternative Scenario 1: The Low Impact of Professional Training and the Maintenance of Traditional Teaching Perspectives Throughout Professional Education

Lortie (1975) argues a position on teacher socialization that questions the existence of the supposedly liberalizing impact of university teacher education. He sees biography, as opposed to formal training or teaching experience, as the key element in teacher socialization. According to this view, teacher socialization occurs through the internalization (largely unconscious) of teaching models during the thousands of hours prospective teachers spend as students in close contact with teachers ("apprenticeship of observation"). The activation of this latent culture with the onset of school experience is seen as the major influence in shaping one’s conceptions of the teaching role and role performance. Formal training in pedagogy at the university is seen as playing little part in altering earlier and traditional teaching perspectives.

Alternative Scenario 2: Schools and Universities, Partners in the Development of Traditional Teaching Perspectives

Universities and schools work together to provide a powerful conservative force for defending existing institutional arrangements from close scrutiny and challenge. According to this scenario, the effects of the university are not "washed out" by school experience, but are in fact strengthened by school experience.

Bartholomew argues that universities are just as traditional as the schools with respect to practice. Although teacher education institutions encourage students to use liberal phrases and to affirm liberal slogans about the education of people in places other than the university, Bartholomew contends that the facts of social interaction in the colleges (e.g., separation of theory from practice) are similiar to those found in the schools. The emphasis in both the schools and colleges is generally on the transmission of approved views and information, and on students’ demonstration of mastery of this knowledge.

Herman (1998) - Promoting pedagogical reasoning as preservice teachers analyze case vignettes

Herman, W.E. (1998). Promoting pedagogical reasoning as preservice teachers analyze case vignettes. Journal of Teacher Education , 49, 391-397

P.H.D. = pedagogical heuristics device

The amount of class time to explore the detail of the P.H.D. dictated the need for brevity in the classroom stimulus. Written case vignettes were brief (1-2 pages) and offered critical incidents that could lead to depth of analysis and teacher interventions. Many excellent sources of case studies exist (e.g., Kowalski, Weaver, & Henson, 1990; Silverman et al., 1994).

This heuristic device is a general set of questions and tasks guiding future teachers in the process of solving educational problems. Shavelson and Stern (1981) defined heuristics as implicit rules that people are unaware of and use in complex tasks in order to select information, classify objects or persons, or revise their knowledge (p.469). Students learned to use this P.H.D. to interpret case vignettes depicting classroom situations, link theory to the educational context, and develop teacher action plans.

They began by analyzing the situation in terms of such elements as historical time period, emotional states, quality of the relationships, verbal/nonverbal messages, motivations, defenses, and social/multicultural elements.

Next, students were asked to link five theoretical constructs to the scene on the basis of their potential to add understanding to the teaching and learning aspects of the situation.

Students then were asked to describe each selected construct, then generate 10 possible teacher responses along with possible student reactions to these responses.

Finally, students generated and evaluated a five-point action plan based upon internal/external criteria, why it might work or fail, and moral/ethical/ political considerations.

Social interaction and individual understanding in a community of learners: The influence of Piaget and Vygotsky

Brown, A. L., Metz, K. M. & Campione, J. C. (1996). Social interaction and individual understanding in a community of learners: The influence of Piaget and Vygotsky. In A. Tryphon & J. Vonèche (Eds.), Piaget- Vygotsky: The social genesis of thought. (pp. 145-170). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Piaget and Vygotsky have more in common than is usually supposed.

Piaget's Influence

What can children be reasonably expected to learn and understand?

Piaget argued that the development of logical thought is enhanced by the need to defend one's ideas to actual or imagined audiences.

Grade school child as a scientist (or theorist) concept:

children of this age are able to identify variables, determine cause, and refine theories

children's reasoning can be much more sophisticated in familiar situations and well developed knowledge

children's thinking often reflect a natural inductive logic

Vygotsky's Influence

Participant structures:
1. Reciprical teaching
2. Jigsaw
3. Guided writing

Main principles
1. classrooms invoke multiple zones of proximal development
2. a community of academic and scientific discourse is developed
3. meaning is negotiated and refined
4. ideas are seeded and appropriated; and
5. common knowledge and distributed expertise are both essential

Treagust (2006). Conceptual change as a viable approach to understanding student learning in science

Treagust, D. F. (2006). Conceptual change as a viable approach to understanding student learning in science. In Kenneth Tobin (Ed.), Teaching and Learning Science: A Handbook, 25-32. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

The best-known conceptual change model in science education, based on students' epistemologies-examining how students think about their world originated with George Posner, Kenneth Strike, Peter Hewson, and William Gertzog (1982).

In this conceptual change model, student dissatisfaction with a prior conception was believed to initiate dramatic or revolutionary conceptual change and was embedded in constructivist epistemological views with an emphasis on the individual's conceptions and his or her conceptual development.

If the learner was dissatisfied with his or her prior conception and an available replacement conception was intelligible, plausible, and/or fruitful, accommodation of the new conception may follow.

An intelligible conception is sensible if it is noncontradictory and its meaning is understood by the student; plausible means that in addition to the student knowing what the conception means, he or she finds the conception believable; and the conception is fruitful if it helps the learner solve other problems or suggests new research directions.

The extent to which the conception meets these three conditions is termed the status of a learner's conception. Resultant conceptual changes may be permanent, temporary, or too tenuous to detect.

Halliday - Learning Language, Learning through Language, Learning about Language.

Halliday, M.A.K. (2004). Three Aspects of Children's Language Development: Learning Language, Learning through Language, Learning about Language. In J.J. Webster (ed.), The Language of Early Childhood: M.A.K. Halliday, pp 308-326, Ch. 14. New York: Continuum - ISBN - 0826488250

Learning Language (p. 308) - a child starts learning language from the moment he is born. In fact, the baby has started learning language before he was born ... from birth onwards, he is actively involved in communication, exchanging signals with the other human begins around him.

Learning through Language (p. 317) - refers to language in the construction of reality: how we use language to build up a picture of the world in which we live ... the part played by language in shaping and transmitting the world view of each and every human culture

Learning about Language (p. 322)- coming to understand the nature and functions of language itself

Google Books

First published in Yetta M. Goodman, Myna M. Hausser and Dorothy S. Strickland (eds.) Oral and Written Langauge Development: Impact on Schools. International Reading Association & National Council of Teachers of English: Proceedings from the 1979 and 1980 IMPACT Conferences. pp.7-19.

Also see Pauline Gibbon's Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning (2002), Ch. 7, pp. 118-139

Lesh & Clarke (2000) Formulating operational definitions of desired outcomes of instruction in mathematics and science education

Lesh, R.A. & Clarke, D. (2000). Formulating operational definitions of desired outcomes of instruction in mathematics and science education. In A.E. Kelly & R.A. Lesh (eds.) Handbook of Research Design in Mathematics and Science Education, pp 113-49. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

p120: Later in this chapter, other explanations will be given about why teaching to tests, over a long period of time, tends to be a losing strategy. For now, a brief explanation is that: (a) students soon forget disorganized lists of facts and skills; (b) when facts and skills are "mastered" one-at-a-time and in isolation, students may never learn when to chose which one to use in particular situations; and (c) when instruction emphasizes only facts and skills, or content-independent problems solving processes, other exceedingly important goals of instruction are ignored.

p121: high scores on tests often are treated as if they went beyond being indicators of achievement toward actually being the goals of instruction. [JC: see Labaree and his discussion of credentialism]
p122: In past stages of history, educators have tended to think about the mind (and about the nature of mathematical knowledge) as if it were similar to the most sophisticated technology of the preceding age. For example, as civilizations evolved from the industrial revolution through the electronics revolution to the current age of biotechnologies, educators have shifted from machine metaphors (based on hardware) to computer metaphors (based on software) to organic metaphors (based on wetware of the type that characterizes the processes of the human brain). Yet, in the area of assessment, simple input-output models continue to dominate that are based on machine metaphors.

p122: (NCTM, 1989)
In spite of the best intentions of developers and implementors. it was unreasonable to expect that new products or programs would be used as intended in most schools and classrooms. The reason for this is that public schools as they now operate are integrated social systems. Tinkering with parts. such as changing textbooks or the number of required courses, fails to change other components of the system. The traditions of the system force new products to be used in old ways. Current educational practice is based on a coherent set of ideas about goals. knowledge. work. and technology that came from a set of "scientific management" principks growing out of the industrial revolution of the past century. These ideas about schooling need to be challenged and replaced with an equally coherent set of practices in light of the economic and social revolution in which we are now engaged. Current school mathematics operates within a coherent system; reform will happen only if an equally coherent system replaces it. (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 1989)

p126: Behavioral Objectives Involve Three Parts
Given {specified conditions} the student will exhibit {specified behaviors} with identifiable quality {perhaps specified as percents correct on relevant samples of tasks, or perhaps specified in terms of a correspondence with certain criteria for excellence}.

In mathematics and science education, the main problem with behavioral objectives is that not all forms of learning consist of rules (facts, skills, procedures); and, if attempts are made to reduce more complex conceptual systems to checklists of rules, the following sorts of difficulties arise.

For instance, it may be true that a great artist (or a great athlete) should be able to perform well on certain basic drills and exercises (calisthenics); nonetheless, a program of instruction (or assessment) that focuses on nothing more than these checklists of basic skills is unlikely to provide adequate approaches to excellence.

p127: Cognitive objectives function similarly to the ways cyclotrons, cloud chambers, and vats of heavy water are used in physics. That is, they are defined operationally by specifying: (a) situations that optimize the chances that the targeted construct will occur in an observable form; (b) observation tools that enable observers to sort out signal from noise in the results that occur; and (c) quality assessment criteria that allow meaningful comparisons to be made among alternative possibilities.

p130: In particular, in the case of conceptual systems that students develop during the solution of individual problem solving sessions: (i) model-eliciting activities put students in situations where they confront the need to produce a given type of construct, and where the products that they generate require them to reveal explicitly important characteristics of their undedying ways of thinking; (ii) ways of thinking sheets focus on ways of recognizing arxi describing the nature of the constructs that students produce; and (iii) guidelines for assessing the quality of students' work provide criteria that can be used to compare the usefulness of alternative ways of thinking.

p133: Three final characteristics should be mentioned that pertain to operational definitions involving the development of students, teachers, and programs. First, the development of these problem solvers tends to be highly interdependent. Second, when something (or someone) acts on anyone of these complex systems, they tend to act back. Third, researchers (as well as the instruments that they use) usually are integral parts of the systems that they are hoping to understand and explain.

p.135-6: Examples of such teacher-level activities include generating:
(a) observation sheets that colleagues could use to make significant observations about students as they are working in groups;
(b) "ways of thinking sheets" that colleagues could use to give feedback to students about the strengths or weaknesses of their work; and
(c) quality assessment procedures that colleagues could use to lead discussions with students aimed at assessing the quality of the products that students produce.

For the purposes of this chapter, three of the most important characteristics of multitiered teaching experiments are that:
1. They use formative feedback and consensus-building to provide conditions that make it possible for students, teachers, and/or programs to develop in directions that are continually "better" without basing the next steps on preconceived notions of "best."
2. They emphasize the use of self-documenting activities that encourage students, teachers, and/or programs to learn while simultaneously producing trails of documentation that reveal important characteristics about the nature of what is being learned.
3. The preceding trends allow inferences to be made about future developments that are likely to occur.

p.136: One of the most important assumptions underlying the teacher level of multi-tiered teaching experiments is that, to improve teachers' teaching practices, it is not enough to ensure familiarity with a checklist of behavioral objectives; teachers also need to develop productive ways thinking about their teaching experiences. In particular, teachers need to develop productive ways of thinking about their students' learning and problem solving experiences.

p.136: Cognitively guided instruction is a name that's been given to an approach to teacher development that focuses on helping teachers become "reflective practitioners" by becoming familiar with new insights about the nature of students' developing mathematical knowledge (T. Carpenter & Fennema, 1992).

p.137: rather than telling teachers about their students' ways of thinking, thought-revealing activities are used so that teachers can make firsthand observations about their students' ways of thinking.

p.138: in studies of developing expertise of teachers (Lesh & Kelly, 1998), it is not necessary for a given description of expertise to be locked in at the beginning of a study (and used as the basis for a pretest-posttest design). Instead, increasingly sophisticated descriptions can be refined and documented gradually over the course of the study; and, at the end of the study, the validity of the description can be based on the trajectory of development that is revealed. In fact, as teachers, programs, and schools develop, their notions of excellence in teaching are primary factors that change. Therefore, if their progress continues to be measured using conceptions of excellence that existed at the beginning of a study, this practice tends to have significant negative influences on development.

p.139: An alternative to conformance models for curriculum change might be called planned experimentation.

p.140 Contexts that elicit complex performances don't necessarily require the relevant participants to reveal observable ways of thinking; and, they also don't necessarily provide useful tools for comparing or assessing the quality of competing systems. Nonetheless, it often is not difficult to identify situations that require the relevant systems to be elicited and revealed, and it often is not difficult to identify ways to compare and assess the results that are produced. For example, we may not know how to define what makes Granny a great cook; however, it still may be easy to identify situations that will elicit and reveal her capabilities, and it also may be easy to compare and assess alternative results that are produced.

p.141: some important principles to keep in mind include the following:
1. Achievement usually needs to be assessed using something more than brief tests that reduce expertise to simplistic lists of condition-action rules.
2. Students' relevant products or performances usually should include more than those that can be interpreted and assessed easily by a machine.
3. Emphasis needs to shift beyond superficial coverage of a large number of small tasks to the comprehensive treatment of a small number of big ideas.
4. Quality ratings should not ignore the conditions under which complex performances occur, and complex profiles should not be collapsed into simplistic scores on a scale that recognizes only a single dimension along which progress can be made.

p.144: three-fold character of model-eliciting activities: situations, products, and quality assessment criteria This structure focuses attention (as classroom practitioners or as educational researchers, for instance) on activities that create situations conducive to the constructs to be studied, requires products or observation tools through which the construct is made manifest, and produces these products in a form amenable to assessment against specified criteria for quality.

p.144: perhaps the most contentious of the suggestions put forward in this chapter is advocacy of the use of assessment to change the observed system purposefully toward the desired outcomes. In this, the authors anticipate the development of assessment systems that both reveal valued constructs and deliberately prompt adaptations within the systems studied in directions advantageous to the system or to the individual whose performances are assessed.

Tochon - From video cases to video pedagogy

Tochon, F.V. (2007). From video cases to video pedagogy: A framework for video feedback and reflection in pedagogical research praxis. In R. Goldman, R. Pea, B. Barron, & S.J. Derry (Eds.), Video Research in the Learning Sciences, pp. 53-65. Mahwah, NJ: Routledge

p. 56:
Video pedagogy involves the art of choosing the right framework for shared reflection. This constitutes a basic principle of video study groups: The framework of reflection specifies the point of impact of video feedback. The way video is used is closely dependent on the framework chosen by the group. It must be concerted and well defined.

What frameworks are available for video study groups? Several have been found especially helpful to shared reflection. 

• The mastery framework orients activities in light of the desired results of the task to be performed. 
• The psychocognitive framework emphasizes the conceptual structures of information and strategies for learning. 
• In the sociocognitive framework, the process of bringing thought to awareness is linked to authentic experiences that challenge widely held notions. 
• The narrative framework is the foundation for autobiographical or personal approaches to human experience. 
• The critical framework functions in a social and participatory perspective. It proposes empowerment over the act of learning and an examination of those aspects of interaction that turn education into a process of either oppression or liberation. 
• The pragmatic framework is focused on the language of practice. It explicates practical discursive arguments and intentions related to situations.

p. 55:
Following Croue (1997), a typology of video cases could be raised:

• (a) Cases that dealt with the nature of a problem were related to decision making, to assessment or feedback; 
• (b) Cases that dealt with the range of the problem presented a problem or showed the interconnection between various problems; 
• (c) Cases that took a story format presented a story line, with episodes, props, and portraits.

Croue. C. (1997). Introduction a la methode des cas [An Introduction to the case method]. Paris: Gaetan Morin Europe.