Thoughts on Developing a Practice of Clinical Teacher Education, Part I

12.04.11 By Jesse Solomon

This year, as part of our efforts to revise and continue to improve our residency program, we have begun to collaborate closely with Magdalene Lampert, who is serving as a Senior Advisor to BTR – with a particular focus on developing a practice of clinical teacher education.  We are thrilled to be working with Magdalene.  For those of you who don’t know her, Magdalene is a leading teacher educator whose work has always been at the nexus of theory and practice (though she’d probably cringe to hear me say it that way).  Let me put it more simply.  While preparing new teachers, she continued to teach elementary school math at the same time, making her 5th grade classroom and all its associated artifacts part of the “stuff” of her pre-service courses – so that she might help bridge the teaching of children and the teaching of prospective teachers.  Her work has been quite influential in BTR’s development; I highly recommend her book, Teaching problems and the problems of teaching, if you are looking for a place to start.  Magdalene has been working on a project (Learning in, from, and for teaching practice – or LTP) as part of a group of teacher educators from the University of Michigan, UCLA, and the University of Washington that focuses on developing forms of teacher education to prepare and support new teachers to engage in what they refer to as ambitious teaching.  Magdalene is working with us here at BTR to help develop and implement a set of Instructional Activities across content areas.  These Instructional Activities serve as common components in our program for all the Teacher Residents in one area (elementary math, for example, or secondary English).  Teacher Residents are then able to study, practice, rehearse, try in the classroom and improve upon their execution of these activities together, with the support and guidance of their mentor teachers and Clinical Teacher Educators. 

As part of her work with BTR, I have asked Magdalene to write occasional memoranda to our program to describe what she is seeing and what questions her work is raising.  These are meant to be brief and informal – and we will use them for program improvement purposes.  At the same time, I thought it would be interesting to share them more broadly, and to ask for your feedback.  I have pasted Magdalene’s first memo below.  Please feel free to comment and question on what she has written.  We look forward to engaging with you on the overall question of improving the practice of clinical teacher education.

Jesse

On the Challenges of Developing a Practice of Clinical Teacher Education
Memo # 1: On naming and covering the curriculum of practice
Magdalene Lampert

When I was teaching fifth grade mathematics, I engaged my students in learning by engaging them in doing mathematics.  I did that by posing a problem each day for them to work on which involved them in using and developing the tools and language of the discipline.  Giving me a solution to the problem was only part of what I expected of them.  I also expected them to record “experiments” in which they played around with numbers, diagrams, drawings, and words as they interpreted the meaning of the problem and thought about how to solve it, “conjectures” in which they wrote down one or more possible solutions to the problem, and “reasoning” in which they wrote down why they thought what they did was the right thing to do and/or why their conjecture about a solution made sense to them.  During the recording phase of their work on the problem of the day, they were first expected to work alone for a few minutes, then to share their work with the group of four peers with whom they were seated.  While they worked alone and in small groups, I walked around to get a sense of what they were doing.  After about half an hour, I conducted a whole class discussion of their solutions and reasoning, inserting new tools and language where appropriate, and helping them to make their work public so that it was available for everyone to learn from.

I designed these daily problems to engage my students with a particular set of mathematical tools and language.  My choices were aligned with the skills and concepts that are traditionally taught at the fifth grade level.  My students were a diverse group, and the skills and knowledge that they brought to this work ranged all over the map.  I had a “map” in mind – I knew what they needed to work on to progress into middle school, and I did the best I could to help each of them move from where they were to a more competent place.  My map was a connected set of ideas and activities that make up the mathematics that students need to learn in elementary school. I called what I was doing “covering the curriculum one problem at a time.”

Listening to the Clinical Teacher Educators (CTEs) talk about the challenges of their work as we began to work together in July and then met again at the beginning of September, I got the sense that the work of Clinical Teacher Education could be thought of analogously—and that CTEs faced analogous challenges, and more.

Challenge #1
If the work between CTEs and Residents is to be around how teachers can address common and particular problems of teaching practice, then the skills, knowledges, and dispositions that are needed to work on those problems need to be somehow “blended” in the communication that occurs between the CTE and the Residents, and among Residents in a group.  If a CTE works on developing, for example, knowledge of how to represent place value in ways that help students make connections between the concrete and the symbolic, and another CTE works on how second grade boys are likely to socialize with one another, and no one works on what to do in the context of interacting with second graders when you want to write something on the board and have everyone make use of what you are writing, then it is left up to the individual Resident to figure out a routine for writing on the board.  Some will, some won’t.  If the Resident turns away from the class to write a representation on the board, and students act out, some will blame the students.

There are endless ways to write representations on the board, there are myriad ways to represent the connection between the concrete and the abstract, and there are many different ways that a teacher can structure students seating and socializing.  Teachers’ individually experimenting along these dimensions (and more) to figure out which of these is best seems inefficient.  Yet there is pride in figuring it out for oneself, and a sense of ownership.  It feels more “creative.”  How can beginning teachers maintain a sense of agency in relation to their own practice while at the same time CTEs try to design some routines that make blended use of the various knowledges for teaching and get Residents to practice those routines until they no longer need to devote attention to them instead of to students?

Challenge #2
Given the ways in which Residents work in classrooms and their work with CTEs s currently structured, CTEs are not in a position to organize Residents collaborative learning work around a well-designed and carefully chosen “teaching problem of the day.”  Residents see many teaching problems when they are in classrooms and when they come together with the CTE, they have their own set of burning issues that they want help with solving.  They all have their own, which may or may not be the same as those of other Residents.  A CTE might say “You (or we together) are not ready to work on that yet,” but when the Resident goes back in the classroom, he or she may indeed be faced with the problem and required to do something about it.

Challenge #3:
There is no common “curriculum” for teacher education that is analogous with the scope and sequence that exists for Elementary Mathematics Education and with which I was able to become familiar over experience in several schools with many different kinds of students.  There is no common understanding of what everyone needs to be taught and to learn to fall back on, either as a basis for designing the problems we think teacher education students should be ready to face at particular points in their programs, or as a guide for the CTE in crafting responses to Residents’ conjectured solutions that will guide the Residents to move ahead in a more or less agreed upon direction.  At best, every teacher educator has a unique idea of what new teachers need to know before they are set loose on their own in the classroom.  More likely, the CTEs sense of what a “well-started beginner” needs to know is vague, unarticulated, and highly dependent on either the CTEs personal experience or an idea of what should be in the syllabus of a college course.

Challenge #4:
Teacher education is not structured in a way that gives CTEs control over the problems that Residents work on.  The Residents that CTEs teach are in different classrooms with different students teaching different subjects at different grade levels.  As a fifth grade teacher, I could design a math problem in such a way that it would be likely to engage my students with an important and grade-level appropriate piece of mathematics, like figuring out whether the remainder in a division should be expressed as a fraction, or a decimal, or neither.  As a CTE, I don’t get to design, or even choose, what problems my Residents will face, and thus I cannot focus them on the essentials of the practice of teaching that they need to learn.  If I did have such control, I could, for example, get everyone in my class/group/cohort to engage in an activity with their students that would take them into the territory of having to decide which student’s idea to take up with the whole class, and how to engage other students in working on that idea.

So, even if Clinical Teacher Education did have an agreed upon curriculum with some sense of what to work on first and next and next, CTEs would still have to create or work in some kind of social structure that would enable them to choose teaching problems to work on from one session to the next that would bound the practice-territory that the Resident encounters.  If the territory were bounded in this way, the CTE could respond to whatever the Resident does to work on the problem with a move that would push the Resident further toward competency.  If a group of Residents were working on the same problem, they could develop a community of practice with shared tools and language, guided by the CTE.

Challenge #5:
Implied in challenge # 2 is something about whether the CTE works with Residents one-on-one or coordinates their work together in groups on common problems, giving input to the whole group at once. In a group setting, the CTE could plan to provide novices with new tools for teaching in a reasonably sequenced order.  Putting “field work” and “course work” together into the job of CTE creates this kind of group work on practice.  What is now being called “flex time” is a kind of hybrid that needs new systems of work and new thinking about how to move through the curriculum of learning to teach.  Field work was one-on-one; the pedagogy of teacher education in this model is embedded in a routine of prepare for the lesson, teach/watch the lesson, analyze the lesson. Course work, in contrast, happened in groups.  Everyone works on the same thing, but what was the “thing” they worked on?  It could not be much related to a problem of teaching that was happening in a particular Resident’s classroom, because those problems were many and varied and unique to each Resident and not known to the course instructor.

Knowledge and competence can be conceived of as something that grows in each individual as he/she tries out ideas in working on problems and modifies those ideas based on “experience.”  Or it can grow in a “learning community” where members of that community use common tools to work toward common goals, and use common language to identify and analyze the problems they face in reaching those goals.