ABSTRACT
Adopting a place-based stance to better prepare teacher candidates for local schools, researchers investigated elementary students’ reading, writing, listening, and speaking opportunities. Observations included two literacy lessons of 14 preservice and inservice teachers and analysis identified instructional influences, including best practices (e.g., differentiated instruction), standards, and standardized assessments. Findings indicated students’ opportunities varied from little to no reading during literacy lessons to rich, authentic opportunities to read meaningful texts. Little writing was evident, only some lessons substantively supported state standards, and many speaking and listening opportunities occurred at the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Implications for teacher educators are discussed.
CHAPTER DESCRIPTION
The research study described in this chapter took place in the United States, where public school teachers work within a context shaped by curriculum standards and, in some cases, curricular programs. The purpose of the research study was to investigate ways to structure supervisory conferences after lesson observations of teacher candidates in ways that encourage noticing. Similar to others in this book, we define ‘noticing’ as paying attention to educational phenomena and interpreting, prioritizing and responding to improve educational outcomes for students (Philipp, Fredenberg, & Hawthorne, 2017; Thomas, 2017).“Noticing” is a concept closely associated with reflective practice and adaptive teaching expertise:“ Adaptive teaching experts are pedagogical experts that engage in a process of self-assessing and strategically adjusting their decision-making before, during, and after teaching episodes”(Soslau, 2012, p. 768). Reflective practice, as explained in our state’s system for teacher candidate evaluation, is another way of describing the self-assessment and adjustment process of adaptive teaching expertise. Candidates need to show evidence of regularly reflecting “on the effectiveness of lessons, units, and interactions with students, both individually and with colleagues” and using “insights gained to improve practice and student learning’”(Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education [DESE], 2016a, p. 26).