Assessment360: A Promising Assessment Technique for Preservice Teacher Education

The call for preservice teachers to exercise reflective practices has echoed through U.S. education policy and research for a number of years and is evident in U.S. preservice teaching standards. As a result, educator preparation programs are challenged to design learning experiences and assessments that foster reflection skills. This study describes a promising assessment technique, named Assessment360, which can be implemented during coursework to prepare future teachers to be reflective practitioners. Assessment360 is a formative assessment technique in which students reflect on the content of a quiz individually and collaboratively in order to develop a deeper and more integrated understanding of the material. Thirty-one preservice education students enrolled in an undergraduate educational psychology course participated in this research. Results of the questionnaire suggested participation in Assessment360 potentially (a) fostered reflection, (b) encouraged peer interaction and learning (i.e., collaboration), and (c) promoted timely and frequent feedback. Implications and significance are discussed.     

Dispositions Toward Families and Family Involvement: Supporting Preservice Teacher Development

This article highlights the importance of nurturing preservice teachers as they develop the dispositions essential to establish empowering relationships with children’s families. The authors identify and describe several key dispositions necessary for working with families and offer suggestions for ways that these elements might be integrated into early childhood teacher preparation programs.     

Rehearsals in Clinical Placements: Scaffolding Teacher Candidates' Literacy Instruction

ABSTRACT

Rehearsals are lesson enactments with feedback prior to implementation with students, and are one facet of practice-based teacher education with an aim to promote ambitious teaching in all contexts. This study explores how rehearsals, related to literacy instruction, were enacted in an urban K–8 school between teacher candidates and their mentor teachers. Data collection included two structured interviews with each mentor and teacher candidate, and two rehearsal observations. Results indicate classroom mentors (a) provided specific, contextualized, individualized feedback in a range of ways, (b) connected feedback to underlying principles, and (c) asked teacher candidates to “rewind” and reteach rehearsed segments integrating feedback, which garnered additional and more refined practice opportunities. This study suggests that in the right circumstances rehearsals, which typically occur in higher education coursework, can enhance literacy instruction in clinical settings. Limitations and recommendations for if and how to integrate rehearsals in K–12 settings are also provided.     

A Conceptual Framework for Assessment Literacy: Opportunities for Physical Education Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

Although more nuanced understandings of assessment have been proposed in the physical education literature, assessment practices remain relatively underdeveloped, and when used, tend to focus on traditional, summative evaluations of learning. However, physical education teacher education programs can be used as an intervention to help pre-service teachers develop assessment knowledge and skill. Toward this end, the purpose of this article is to propose an evidence-based framework for helping pre-service teachers develop assessment literacy that is rooted in occupational socialization theory. The framework provides a four-phase approach to integrating assessment into teacher education, and includes suggestions for how physical education teacher educators can progressively help build pre-service teachers’ assessment knowledge in line with the focus given to instruction and planning. These suggestions acknowledge the technical and sociocultural aspects of learning to use assessment. Implications are discussed along with the need to help graduating pre-service teachers transfer lessons learned into the workplace.     

“教师学习”研究的发展及其对职前教师教育的启示

20世纪70年代以来,人们对教师学习、教师专业发展、教师在教育改革中的角色的理解有了很大的转变。教师学习与职前教师教育密不可分,是教师个人专业成长的过程。近年来,有学者对国际上有关教师学习的研究领域的相关重要概念进行了梳理和分析,并探讨了其对职前教师教育课程的设计与实施的启示,他们的研究既能丰富教师教育中的实践元素,也能适时地补充当前我国教师教育课程改革的理论空隙。     

Advocating for Young Children: A Preservice Teacher Education Project

As experts on the nature and needs of young children, early childhood educators are in prime positions to advocate for the health and well-being of young children. Advocacy can take the form of personal, public, or private-sector endeavors. Personal advocacy is usually informal and involves educating others on an issue about early childhood education. Similarly, public advocacy involves educating policy makers, and private-sector advocacy is directed toward businesses. The project described here is a course assignment for undergraduate teacher candidates in which they learn about advocacy strategies and design and implement authentic advocacy projects. Sample projects are discussed. Engaging in this project has raised awareness for teacher candidates about the importance of and strategies for being advocates. The response from early childhood teacher candidates has been positive.     

ARTICLE WITHDRAWN: Teacher Educators as Cultural Workers: Problematizing Teacher Education Pedagogies

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on what we learned as online teachers about relational contexts in our online courses using a self-study of teacher education practices methodology. Using the curriculum commonplaces of teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu, we inquired into the design and implementation of our online courses. A responsive audience at the 2018 international self-study conference moved our work forward. We consider the ways the curriculum commonplaces interact and inform each other. A significant aspect was the shaping of milieu across distance. The ontological basis of Self Study of Teacher Education methodology resides in attention to practice and relationship, which clearly supports a focus on the relational in this online teaching context.     

Incorporating Research into Preservice Teacher Education

Few teachers keep up with educational research and make use of research findings in their daily work. Also the number of teacher educators actively engaged in research is limited. This paper describes how preservice teachers can be introduced to educational research by carrying out ‘minisearch’ projects under guidance as part of their methods classes. Examples of topics which lend themselves to this kind of research include identifying pupils’ alternative conceptions and ‘shadowing’. Such research projects are regarded by most preservice teachers as interesting and very useful, and teaching staff are able to pool together the findings of their student teachers to form a publishable article. Research data collected in this way can provide significant information, yet can be obtained relatively simply at low cost. Further research is needed to find out the impact of involvement in research within preservice education on the use of research by practising teachers.     

Contract Staff in Preservice Teacher Education

Staff with a limited-term appointment, whether part-time or full-time, are being used increasingly in teacher education today. This raises the question of how it is possible to offer a balanced preservice program when only a small proportion of the staff are permanent academics with a career commitment to formal theory development. In this paper we first describe a program that has attempted to resolve aspects of this problem by means of a cohort and faculty-team approach. We then report on a study we conducted with contract staff from this program on their experiences in the program and their perceived effectiveness in their role.     

Preservice Teachers' Beliefs About Family Involvement: Implications for Teacher Education

Teacher educators have long recognized the importance of adequately preparing preservice teachers for their work with families. Preservice teachers express many concerns that they believe may impact the development of comfortable and collaborative relationships with members of children's families. In a previous study, the authors found that preservice teachers expressed concerns about the quality of the teacher–family relationship, meeting children's basic needs in school, and the role of parents in education. These concerns, along with some recommendations for incorporating family involvement across the teacher education curriculum, are the focus of this article.     

Parent Teacher Education Connection: Preparing Preservice Teachers for Family Engagement

This article describes the Parent Teacher Education Curriculum, a Web-based curriculum focused on instructing teachers about best practices in family involvement and assesses its impact on the knowledge and attitudes of preservice teachers related to family involvement. Pre- and post-measures of preservice teacher candidate knowledge of and attitude toward parent involvement were analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and paired-samples t-tests. Findings revealed a significant multivariate main effect for the time of knowledge assessment administration (pre vs. post): Wilks' λ = .613, F(6, 449) = 47.308, p < .001, partial eta squared = .387. This suggested that overall Knowledge increased significantly from pre- to post-administration. In addition, multivariate analysis for the time of attitude assessment administration (pre vs. post) was Wilks' λ = .982, F(3, 1548) = 9.65, p <. 001, partial eta squared = .018. This suggested that overall Attitude increased significantly from pre- to post-administration.     

Using Arts-based Methods in Pre-service Teacher Education: Perzine Pedagogies

The possibilities afforded by perzine pedagogies to nurture reflexivity in pre-service student teachers are presented and explored in this article. Perzine pedagogy as arts-based inquiry is grounded in the events of practical life and may provide a learning context for exploring the problematised nature of teaching. It considers how this reflexive and inquiry-oriented method offers opportunities to interrogate past learning, to accommodate the affective, to challenge constructed beliefs and to build adaptive behaviours. Employing the narrative inquiry lens of the researcher artist/teacher educator and the narrating and reflective voice of a visual arts teacher, this article illustrates how perzine production may inform insights into construction of teacher/learner identities. Perzines offer opportunities for experiential, critical and experimental encounters to move beyond the competency rhetoric to meet a new ethic: a personal desire for self-reflection and expression through opportunities to re-represent the teacher/learner self.     

Fostering Data Literacy Through Preservice Teacher Inquiry in English Language Arts

Data literate educators can generate questions about learning in their classes; collect and analyze classroom data to answer them; and develop inferences and explanations. Two elements may promote data literacy: (a) breadth of classroom-based data collection and (b) depth of analysis. We examined these in inquiries conducted by 80 preservice teachers of secondary English in diverse classrooms over a 6-year period. Analyzing products, processes, and self-reports, we found inquiries evidenced a range in breadth of data collection and depth of analysis. Qualitative themes and two cases illustrate data analysis processes and challenges of pattern finding, initially crude analyses in striving for depth, and the need for data literacy mentoring.     

Assessment Literacy Overlooked: A Teacher Educator's Confession

This article presents reflections and guidance concerning assessment literacy in teacher education. Previous inadequacies in teacher training in educational assessment highlight the need for teachers to be assessment literate. Assessment literacy consists of an individual's understanding of the fundamental assessment concepts and procedures deemed likely to influence educational decisions. Due to the current focus on accountability assessments, it is in teachers' best interest, and also the students', that teachers develop a level of understanding in assessment. Assessment, when used appropriately, is also a powerful tool for learning. What is needed to facilitate assessment literacy in teacher education is more than a brief mention of assessment in a course. A course in assessment with an appropriate text is necessary to bring a more complete understanding of assessment to beginning teachers.     

Conceptualising Art Education as Environmental Activism in Preservice Teacher Education

This article explores how art and design education can contribute to the imperative of climate change and help societies adapt to living more sustainably. Drawing on methods from arts‐based research and qualitative case study, it reports on an investigation into what can be learned from creating environmental art installations with preservice teachers (those training to be K‐12 teachers), as part of an environmental art education programme in a leading Canadian university. Findings support that preservice teachers experienced behavioural and attitudinal shifts towards sustainability after engaging in the processes of creating environmental art; involvement in the programme also provided opportunities for building community, engaging multiple domains of learning, modelling sustainable art‐making practices and prompting environmental activism. The results of this study inform a developing pedagogy for environmental art education in higher education settings.     

Aligning Mathematics Teacher Work Sample Content with Selected NCTM Standards: Implications for Preservice Teacher Education

Teacher Work Sample Methodology has been described as an alternative means/set of procedures for assessing teacher effectiveness in producing student learning that are more authentic than traditional means of teacher certification. To investigate the degree to which the methodology aligns with state/national standards, 50 work samples produced by student teachers at Western Oregon University between fall 1991 and spring 1999 were analyzed to determine: (1) the efficiency of Teacher Work Sample Methodology in moving state and national standards, for example, the NCTM standards, into the classroom; and (2) the extent to which Teacher Work Sample Methodology promotes alignment of standards, content, instruction and assessments of instruction. The research found that a majority of the student teacher work samples demonstrated weak alignment or no alignment between stated instructional objectives and selected NCTM Curriculum and Evaluation Standards (Problem Solving, Communication, Reasoning, and Connections). However, in most of the work samples, more than half of the pre/post-assessment methods (performance, knowledge) were aligned with the instructional objectives.     

Approaches to Multicultural Education in Preservice Teacher Education: Philosophical Frameworks and Models for Teaching

The authors in this article connect teacher education to multiple theoretical frameworks around the ongoing debate and issues of multicultural education. Connecting conservative, liberal, and radical theories of multicultural education particularly to preservice teachers, the authors argue that a more eclectic theoretical avenue must be striven and struggled for if there exists any hope in transforming schools, particularly, as they note, in urban environments. Practical avenues are discussed that promote such a multilayered interpretive/analytical approach to social change.     

Cultural Memory Banking in Preservice Science Teacher Education

This study focused on the exemplification of cultural memory banking as an ethnographic tool to understand cultural practices relevant to science teaching and learning in a rural coastal village in a central island of the Philippine archipelago. Using the collaborative action ethnography as a research methodology, 10 prospective science teachers and a science teacher educator/doctoral candidate formed a research team and documented community funds of knowledge relevant to science teaching and learning through their participation in a Community Immersion course. The study employed the use of the cultural memory banking as a meditational tool to analyze, make sense of, and represent interview, focus-group discussion, and observation data, among others, for the development of culturally relevant science lessons. Originally used as an anthropological tool to preserve cultural knowledge associated with the cultivation of indigenous plant varieties, the cultural memory banking, as adapted in science education, was used, both as a data collection and analytic tool, to locate relevant science at the intersection of community life. The research team developed a cultural memory bank exemplar, ??Ginamos: The Stinky Smell that Sells,?? to highlight the learning experiences and meaning-making process of those involved in its development. Dilemmas and insights on the development and use of cultural memory banking were discussed with respect to issues of knowledge mining and mainstreaming of indigenous/local funds of knowledge, troubling the privileged position of Western-inspired nature of science.     

Investigating Preservice STEM Teacher Conceptions of STEM Education

Surrounding the national emphasis on improving STEM education, effective STEM educators are required. Connected, yet often overlooked, is the need for effective preservice STEM teaching instruction for incoming educators. At a basic level, preservice STEM teacher education should include STEM content, pedagogy, and conceptualization. However, the literature suggests no leading conception of STEM education, and little is known about how preservice STEM teachers are conceptualizing STEM education. In order to explore preservice STEM teacher conceptions of STEM education, preservice teachers at a large, Midwestern research university were given an open-ended survey eliciting both textual and visual responses. Here, we report and discuss the results of employing this instrument in relation with the current STEM conceptualization literature.