Clinical Experiences in Teacher Education

Critical, Project-Based Interventions in Diverse Classrooms

Kristien Zenkov, Kristine Pytash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367587024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351116688
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Responding to multiple scholarly, policy, and practical calls for a greater focus on clinical teacher preparation, this volume operates on the assumption that few experiences in future teachers' training are more important than their field experiences. This text introduces the model of critical, project-based (CPB) clinical experiences, which provides teacher candidates with exemplary on-the-ground training, honors veteran teachers as school-based teacher educators, and offers university-based teacher educators new roles that ensure their practices and scholarship are explicitly relevant to all of schools' constituents. Answering the call for relevant, high quality, clinically-based teacher education, this volume will offer scholarly and narrative examinations of examples of CPB clinical experiences that will be of interest to all involved in and impacted by educator preparation programs.

1 Critical, Project-Based Clinical Experiences

Their Origins and Their Elements

Kristien Zenkov and Kristine E. Pytash

Background

We both began our careers as university-based teacher educators and scholars in an era when our mentors—established scholars and teacher educators—were ensconced in the traditional culture of academia. Even during our graduate school days, we were aware of a skeleton in our collective professional closet: the fact that so much of the work of teacher education was being done by other people and in other places—mostly veteran classroom teachers serving in nominally compensated and almost invisible roles as mentors. This reality—a source of personal and professional tension for us and one of our key motivations for writing and editing this book—has long been highlighted as one of the reasons for the perceived and actual gap between the university coursework preservice teachers (PSTs) complete and the clinical experience realities they encounter in schools.

In recent years, this fissure has been underscored by many practitioners, policy makers, and scholars. It has also increasingly been the subject of educational research and policy debates, leading to teacher accreditation organizations’ attempts to mandate more intentionally organized field experiences for teacher candidates. As well, over the last two decades, critics of traditional teacher education programs have offered candid and even backhanded appraisals of traditional university faculty members’ roles in teacher preparation endeavors (Levine, 2006; NCTQ, 2013). We propose that teacher educators based in university settings might find new purposes—and more authentic reasons to exist—if our professional roles consisted of boundary-spanning capacities across university methods courses and school-based field experiences.

Specifically, today’s teacher educators might focus on bridging that university/classroom reality divide by making teacher candidates’ clinical experiences and collaborations with youths and preservice and veteran classroom teachers the primary consideration in our teaching and research efforts. We—and the other authors of the chapters in this volume—believe that the field of teacher education needs a new notion and model of field experiences: what we conceive of as “critical, project- based (CPB) clinical experiences” (Pellegrino & Zenkov, 2016). We define these as short-term field experiences with a structure that both supports and is supported by unique school-university partnerships. These experiences dramatically shift our roles as teacher educators and scholars, calling on us to live and work alongside prospective and veteran teachers, and young people in the educational spaces that we have traditionally only visited (Burstein, 2007; Gutierrez, 2008).

Contexts

PSTs’ learning occurs in a variety of educational settings and arenas, leaving teacher education practitioners and scholars, education professional associations and accrediting bodies, and policy makers have long lamented and increasingly document the disconnect between PSTs’ learning in university courses and their clinical experiences and PK–12 teaching work (American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education [AACTE], 2010; Grossman, 2010; Hollins, 2015; National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education [NCATE], 2010; National Research Council, 2010).

Many recent policy proposals and research reports (including from the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Preparation, and Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation) have highlighted the need to put clinical experiences, typically occurring in PK–12 classrooms, at the center of our teacher education endeavors (AACTE, 2010; Flessner & Lecklider, 2017; Gelfuso, Dennis, & Parker, 2015; NCATE, 2010; Zeichner, 2010). As well, school renewal efforts and a Professional Development Schools (PDS) orientation have long suggested that school-university partnerships that include hybrid roles for university faculty, classroom teachers, and school administrators should be at the center of our education preparation models (NAPDS, 2008).

In response, numerous calls for more rigorous sets of expectations to guide clinical teacher preparation efforts have been made, perhaps most significantly from the merged accreditation body represented by the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), 2014). In its Standard 2, “Clinical Partnerships and Practice,” CAEP requires that teacher preparation programs “ensure that effective partnerships and high-quality clinical practice are central to preparation so that candidates develop the knowledge, skills, and professional dispositions necessary to demonstrate positive impact on all P-12 students’ learning and development” (CAEP, 2013, p. 1).

In addition, the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) have recently made discussions about the nature of clinical teacher education central to their program and policy reforms and recommendations (AACTE, 2012; ATE, 2015). ATE has developed “commissions”—short-term, topical committees—on Clinically Based Teacher Preparation and on Classroom Teachers as Associated Teacher Educators, and the association has also established its “Clinical Practice Fellows” structure. With a much larger membership, reach, and policy emphasis, AACTE has formed its own “Clinical Practice Commission,” and forged cross- organizational connections, with ATE, the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS), and the Council of Professors of Instructional Supervision (COPIS).

And, finally, the highest profile publication in the past decade—and, arguably, the new century—that highlights the central place of clinical experiences, details the university/school gap, and troubles teacher educators’ roles is the NCATE Blue Ribbon Panel Report, Transforming Teacher Education through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers (2010). The Blue Ribbon Panel Report went further than underscoring this gap: it went so far as to suggest that these clinical experiences should be at the core of all educator preparation endeavors and for “clinical faculty” to serve in boundary-spanning roles. Speaking to some of the roles, practices, and structures we detail in this volume, the report recognized that a consideration of effective clinical practice and revisions to our roles as teacher educators should occur simultaneously (Feuer, Floden, Chudowsky, & Ahn, 2013; Liu, 2013).

It is the intersection of these boundary-spanning capacities and clinical experience alternatives—and particular models of each—that we and our co-authors address in this volume (Gatti, 2016; Wang, Spalding, Odell, Klecka, & Lin, 2010; Yendol-Hoppey, Allsopp, & Burns, 2016). Specifically, we propose “CPB clinical experiences”—which we describe in the following section of this chapter—as an answer to the myriad calls for enhanced early field experiences. CPB clinical experiences—which might occur at any point in licensure programs’ sequences—move PSTs’ fieldwork well beyond uncomplicated and too often unfocused requirements and toward a model of effective teacher preparation that considers the needs of all constituents of our teacher education ventures (Zeichner & Bier, 2015; Zygmunt & Clark, 2016).

As the authors of this book demonstrate, educator preparation reforms that consider the needs of all public schools’ constituents are particularly important given that our PK–12 students are increasingly diverse, and their relationships to school continue to evolve (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Lucas & Grinberg, 2008; Zenkov & Harmon, 2009). As a consequence, new teachers must be prepared to examine the broadest scope of teaching and learning possibilities (Haj-Broussard et al., 2015; Zeichner, 2013), and traditional, university-based teacher educators must have augmented and more authentic roles and responsibilities across school/university contexts. Ultimately, educator preparation programs might include structures that impact not only teacher education practitioners and PSTs, but also veteran teachers serving as mentors or “school-based teacher educators” and the children and youths in their classrooms (Sleep, Boerst, & Ball, 2007).

Critical, Project-Based Clinical Experiences

CPB clinical experiences answer the clinical preparation and school-university partnership calls we outlined earlier and address teachers’, schools’, students’, PSTs’, teacher education programs’, and university faculty members’ needs and interests. This model of clinical experiences provides teacher candidates with exemplary on-the-ground training, honors veteran teachers as school-based teacher educators, and offers university-based teacher educators new roles that ensure their practices and scholarship are explicitly relevant to all of schools’ constituents. CPB clinical experiences also enhance teacher preparation programs, strengthen school-university partnerships, and connect teacher educators, teacher candidates, and school-based practitioners via collaborations on intervention-oriented instructional and research projects. Finally, a critical, project-based approach to clinical practice redefines all educators’ roles, recognizing all as boundary-spanners who engage daily with youth and in schools.

A primary example of such clinical experiences—one that virtually every PST encounters during her/his training—is the pre-internship field experience, which is most often completed in area schools, and in which PSTs participate by observing and being mentored by veteran teachers. Here PSTs have the opportunity to apply and refine the ideas and strategies they have learned in their university classes and begin to implement these instructional approaches prior to their student teaching internships. However, during these field experiences PSTs tend to replicate the instructional practices currently existing rather than working toward the many possibilities of teaching and learning. In addition, these experiences rarely provide opportunities for PSTs to examine the larger dilemmas of teaching and learning. No such field experience models have sufficiently merged these priorities and pedagogies via the CPB clinical experiences we and the other authors of this volume detail.

The CPB clinical experience model also repositions adolescents as experts and public intellectuals—as the ultimate teacher educators. Young adults are typically viewed as the receivers of educational services, but a CPB approach considers them co-teachers in teacher education exchanges. Via such projects, youths gain a sense of empowerment that is rooted in the reality that adults can value their perspectives on questions about teaching, citizenship, the purposes of school, and other ambitious topics. By outlining how teacher educators might engage with youths and in the authentic contexts of schools, the authors of this volume speak to the now common challenges to the very existence of teacher education programs, thus uniting all parties within the teaching profession, regardless of context or institution or the stage of one’s career.

CPB clinical experiences are intensive, short-term experiences that forefront pedagogies that are critical, justice-oriented, and value all constituents’ voices. These experiences highlight what is possible in teaching and learning (Nolan, 2015). University-based teacher educators are positioned as boundary-spanning teachers, who partner with veteran teachers (or “school-based teacher educators”) to guide teams of PSTs in their teaching of students, particularly those students who are often marginalized or disenfranchised by the current educational model and climate (Dennis et al., 2017; Ronfeldt, 2012). Next, we offer descriptions of the foundational elements of CPB experiences, detailing the rationales and research bases for each.

A Critical, Social Justice Orientation, Authentic Ends, Short-Term Clinical Experiences, and Innovative and Collaborative Pedagogies

CPB structures provide intense, short-term clinical opportunities to allow PSTs to collaborate with school- and university-based teacher educators. One of the goals is to provide an intentional opportunity for PSTs to work with students labeled as struggling learners and those traditionally disenfranchised in and by schools, so they learn the foundations for pedagogies that can serve all students, while challenging the assumptions of pathology that school systems often make about these young people.

CPB field experiences rely on a critical pedagogy foundation (Emdin, 2016; Morrell, 2008) and the belief that all educational practices should empower students, teachers, and teacher educators (Freire, 1970/2000; Sleeter, 2008). While “social justice” is often used as a conceptual framework in educator preparation, teacher educators have historically struggled with ways to facilitate the development of PSTs’ equity dispositions (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016; Hytten & Bettez, 2011). Numerous professional organizations (e.g., National Council of Teachers of English) and scholars have defined “social justice” providing sources that teacher educators can consider as they facilitate PSTs’ dispositional growth (Esposito & Swain, 2009).

Early clinical experiences must not only encourage these dispositions but also explicitly teach PSTs how to respond to the inequitable situations they will encounter in their classrooms, communities, and schools, particularly with young people who have been disenfranchised by this most foundational of our nation’s institutions (Gallup, 2016; Zyngier, 2008). Early field experiences with a CPB orientation can serve as the foundational experience in which PSTs learn to act as socially conscious pedagogues. These experiences provide opportunities for PSTs to learn about pedagogical practices, while reflecting on cultural norms that influence current instructional approaches and policies. The goal is to provide a critical, transformative experience so that teacher candidates engage with current and historical knowledge about the communities in which they teach, develop awareness of these contexts and their challenge and strengths, and, ultimately, take action in their exchanges with adolescents, in their classrooms and beyond (Mason, 1997).

Researchers note that social justice teacher education initiatives are most effective when supported by mentor teachers with similar convictions (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). CPB experiences draw on this idea by giving teacher candidates a greater range of mentoring resources, from both school-based educators and university-based teacher educators, to support teacher candidates’ learning across school and university contexts. These enhanced mentoring relationships are critical because they enhance PSTs’ abilities to construct “patterns of practice for equity” that are embedded within schools and communities (Cochran-Smith, Grudnoff, Ludlow, Haigh, & Hill, 2014, p. 119).

CPB clinical experiences acknowledge that schools are not neutral spaces and that teacher candidates must recognize how teacher pedagogies and ed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Critical, Project-Based Clinical Experiences: Their Origins and Their Elements
• 2 The Affective Archive Project: Engaging Affect Toward Critical Practice in a School-Immersed Literacy Methods Course
• 3 Valuing Uncertainty: The Role of Purposeful, Supported Discomfort in Critical, Project-Based Teacher Education
• 4 Building Critical, Project-Based Clinical Experiences Across an Elementary PDS Program
• 5 Critical Experiences With Assets-Based Literacy Intervention: A Social Design Experiment
• 6 Praxis Meets Praxis: Exploring the Development of Teachers of Writing in a Critical, Project-Based Clinical Experience
• 7 Resistance, Persistence, and a Whole Lot of Wobble: Two Teacher Educators Compare Their Critical, Project-Based Clinical Experiences
• 8 Critical, Project-Based Clinical Experiences and Youths’ Perspectives on “Exceptional” Teaching
• 9 Writing Our Lives: Preparing Teachers to Teach 21st Century Writers In and Out of School
• 10 Citizenship and Power: Perspectives From a Critical, Project-Based Clinical Experience
• About the Contributors
• Index