Teachers College Record

This study investigates how people are prepared for professional practice in the clergy, teaching, and clinical psychology. The work is located within research on professional education, and research on the teaching and learning of practice.

The purpose of the study is to develop a framework to describe and analyze the teaching of practice in professional education programs, specifically preparation for relational practices.

The research took place in eight professional education programs located in seminaries, schools of professional psychology, and universities across the country.

Our research participants include faculty members, students, and administrators at each of these eight programs.

This research is a comparative case study of professional education across three different professions—the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. Our data include qualitative case studies of eight preparation programs: two teacher education programs, three seminaries, and three clinical psychology programs.

For each institution, we conducted site visits that included interviews with administrators, faculty, and staff; observations of multiple classes and field-work; and focus groups with students who were either at the midpoint or at the end of their programs.

We have identified three key concepts for understanding the pedagogies of practice in professional education: representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice. Representations of practice comprise the different ways that practice is represented in professional education and what these various representations make visible to novices. Decomposition of practice involves breaking down practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of teaching and learning. Approximations of practice refer to opportunities to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practices of a profession. In this article, we define and provide examples of the representation, decomposition, and approximation of practice from our study of professional education in the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. We conclude that, in the program we studied, prospective teachers have fewer opportunities to engage in approximations that focus on contingent, interactive practice than do novices in the other two professions we studied.

Các thực hành phân loại trường đã được ghi nhận nhiều lần là có tác động tiêu cực đến sự phát triển bản thân và thành tích của học sinh, đặc biệt là đối với những học sinh được phân vào nhóm thấp hơn. Dù có những ghi chép này, việc phân loại vẫn tồn tại như một thực hành chuẩn mực trong các trường trung học của Mỹ, có thể một phần là bởi vì chúng ta thiếu những mô hình mà các khoa và giáo viên có thể tổ chức giảng dạy một cách thành công trong các lớp Toán học trung học đa dạng. Bài viết này cung cấp một mô hình như vậy thông qua phân tích định tính và định lượng.

Nhằm nâng cao hiểu biết trong lĩnh vực về giảng dạy công bằng và thành công, chúng tôi đã tiến hành một nghiên cứu dài hơi tại ba trường trung học. Tại một trường, Railside, học sinh đã chứng minh sự tiến bộ vượt trội hơn so với học sinh tại hai trường còn lại và đạt thành tích cao hơn tổng thể trên nhiều tiêu chí. Hơn nữa, sự chênh lệch thành tích giữa các nhóm dân tộc khác nhau tại Railside, vốn tồn tại ở các bài kiểm tra đầu vào, đã biến mất gần như hoàn toàn vào cuối năm thứ hai. Bài viết này cung cấp phân tích về thành công của Railside và xác định các yếu tố đã góp phần vào thành công này.

Thành phần tham gia bao gồm khoảng 700 học sinh khi họ tiến bộ qua ba trường trung học tại California. Railside là một trường trung học đô thị với nền tảng học sinh đa dạng về chủng tộc, ngôn ngữ và kinh tế. Greendale tọa lạc trong một cộng đồng ven biển với nền tảng học sinh đồng nhất hơn, chủ yếu là học sinh da trắng. Hilltop là một trường trung học nông thôn chủ yếu là học sinh da trắng và Latino/a.

Nghiên cứu dài hơi này sử dụng phương pháp nghiên cứu trường hợp đa dạng kết hợp. Ba trường được chọn để cung cấp một phạm vi rộng về chương trình học và dân số học sinh khác nhau. Dữ liệu về thành tích và thái độ của học sinh được đánh giá bằng các kỹ thuật thống kê, trong khi các thực hành của giáo viên và học sinh được tài liệu hóa bằng các kỹ thuật phân tích định tính như mã hóa.

Một trong những phát hiện của nghiên cứu là thành công của trường Railside, nơi mà khoa Toán đã dạy các lớp học đa dạng bằng cách tiếp cận hướng đến cải cách. So với hai trường còn lại trong nghiên cứu, học sinh tại Railside đã học hỏi nhiều hơn, yêu thích Toán học hơn và tiến bộ đến các cấp độ Toán học cao hơn. Bài viết này trình bày bằng chứng quy mô lớn về những thành tựu quan trọng này và cung cấp phân tích chi tiết về các cách mà các giáo viên tại Railside đã tạo ra điều đó, với sự chú ý đến các tương tác dạy và học trong các lớp học.

Recent racial incidents on college and high school campuses throughout the United States have catalyzed a growing conversation around issues of race and racism. These conversations exist alongside ongoing concerns about the lack of attention given to race and racism in the official school curriculum. Given that the field of education is generally located as a space to interrogate why these difficult issues of race in schools and society still persist, this study illustrates how contemporary official school knowledge addresses historical and contemporary issues of race and racism. To do this, we examine how historic acts of racial violence directed toward African Americans are rendered in K–12 school textbooks. Using the theoretical lenses of critical race theory and cultural memory, we explicate how historic acts of racial violence toward African Americans receives minimal and/or distorted attention in most K–12 texts.

We examined the knowledge constructed about racial violence and African Americans in the United States. Using the theoretical lenses of critical race theory and cultural memory, we show how the topic of historic acts of racial violence toward African Americans receives minimal and/or distorted attention in most K–12 texts. The purpose of this study is to illustrate that although accounts of racial violence that historically have been excluded from textbooks are now being included, this inclusion matters little if it is presented in a manner that disavows material implications of racial violence on sustained White privilege and entrenched African American inequities.

The findings from this study come from a textbook analysis of 19 recent U.S. history social studies textbooks adopted by the state of Texas. Drawing from the tradition of recent critical textbook studies, this study used a literary analysis methodology.

In this study, we found that although narratives of racial violence were present throughout the texts, they often rendered acts of violence as the immorality of single actors or “bad men doing bad things.” Additionally, these presentations portray violence as disconnected from the institutional and structural ties that supported and benefited from such acts.

The findings from this study illustrate the limited historical and sociocultural knowledge about race and racism provided to teachers and students through K–12 social studies textbooks. These findings have direct implications for how teachers and students conceptualize and grapple with real issues of race and racism in schools and society. We suggest that the knowledge contained in school texts must go beyond simply representing acts of racism, situating such acts of racism within the discursive and material realities that have shaped the lives of African Americans in the United States.

Teacher evaluation is a major policy initiative intended to improve the quality of classroom instruction. This study documents a fundamental challenge to using teacher evaluation to improve teaching and learning.

Using an observation instrument (CLASS-S), we evaluate evidence on different aspects of instructional practice in algebra classrooms to consider how much scores vary, how well observers are able to judge practice, and how well teachers are able to evaluate their own practice.

The study includes 82 Algebra I teachers in middle and high schools. Five observers completed almost all observations.

Each classroom was observed 4–5 times over the school year. Each observation was coded and scored live and by video. All videos were coded by two independent observers, as were 36% of the live observations. Observers assigned scores to each of 10 dimensions. Observer scores were also compared with master coders for a subset of videos. Participating teachers also completed a self-report instrument (CLASS-T) to assess their own skills on dimensions of CLASS-S.

For each lesson, data were aggregated into three domain scores, Emotional Support, Classroom Organization, and Instructional Support, and then averaged across lessons to create scores for each classroom.

Classroom Observation scores fell in the high range of the protocol. Scores for Emotional Support were in the midlevel range, and the lowest scores were for Instructional Support. Scores for each domain were clustered in narrow ranges. Observers were more consistent over time and agreed more when judging Classroom Organization than the other two domains. Teacher ratings of their own strengths and weaknesses were positively related to observation scores for Classroom Organization and unrelated to observation scores for Instructional Support.

This study identifies a critical challenge for teacher evaluation policy if it is to improve teaching and learning. Aspects of teaching and learning in the observation protocol that appear most in need of improvement are those that are the hardest for observers to agree on, and teachers and external observers view most differently. Reliability is a marker of common understanding about important constructs and observation protocols are intended to provide a common language and structure to inform teaching practice. This study suggests the need to focus our efforts on the instructional and interactional aspects of classrooms through shared conversations and clear images of what teaching quality looks like.

This article describes how we refined an innovative methodology for equitable collaboration between university researchers and classroom practitioners building and refining theory together. The work builds on other coinquiry models in which complementary professional expertise is respected and deliberately exploited in order to question, understand, and improve practice. Drawing on research using digital video to help make explicit teachers’ pedagogical rationale, our approach involved intensive critical scrutiny of video recordings of teachers’ own and others’ practices.

The study explored and reformulated definitions of classroom dialogue—in which teachers and students exchange, evaluate, and build on ideas—in the context of interactive whiteboard (IWB) use. This article focuses on the collaborative theory-building process itself, whose aim was to exploit insights derived from research to stimulate and inform thinking, guide principled development of new classroom practices, and refine the theory.

Three university researchers and three (primary, middle and secondary school) United Kingdom teachers, along with their students aged 10–14, took part in the research. The teachers were all experienced, reflective practitioners with an established dialogic pedagogy. They taught personal education, English, and history.

A case study design was used to collect qualitative observational data. A series of three in-depth workshops focused on the construct of dialogue and critiqued associated literature. Subsequent joint review of lesson videos and other data plus two further workshops served to characterize effective strategies for supporting dialogue.

The three initial workshops prepared teachers to design and teach three consecutive lessons employing a dialogic approach supported by IWB use. Teacher and university researcher pairs jointly reviewed the lesson videos, along with unstructured teacher diaries, interviews (three per teacher), and other contextualizing data, and two further team workshops took place. Cross-case analysis of the data, including interview and workshop transcripts, follow-up questionnaires, and accreditation reports, characterized teacher perspectives on the reflexive—and itself dialogic—coinquiry process and its outcomes.

Preconditions, critical features, and scalable benefits of our evolving approach are identified for other research partnerships. The process additionally yielded negotiated, recontextualized understandings of dialogue and strategies for fostering dialogic pedagogy. These were framed in accessible language, spontaneously shared within the schools and adapted for wider use, thus forming a springboard for further critique and modification in new settings.

For the past century, mathematics education in the United States has been effective at producing outcomes mirroring society's historical inequities. The enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 was intended to address these differential educational outcomes. Given the scope of this legislation's impact on the way in which states, districts, and schools evaluate mathematics learning and conceptualize reforms in the teaching of mathematics, it is critical to examine the possible effects this may have on how mathematical proficiency is determined and distributed.

This inquiry raises questions about the manner in which the No Child Left Behind Act aims to improve mathematics education through an increased reliance on “objective” science. Specifically, the argument put forth here is that the policies of the No Child Left Behind Act leverage and intensify the “dividing practices” instituted in the early 20th century as a means of justifying the differential stratification of students in schools, thereby making equitable educational outcomes less likely than not. The questions guiding this inquiry are: How did these dividing practices first develop? What are the taken-for-granted assumptions under which they operate? How might technologies related to these practices, given renewed status due to the requirements of the NCLB Act, impact mathematics education?

This inquiry takes the format of an analytic essay, drawing on both a historical perspective of efforts to improve education in the United States through a reliance on scientific methods, and an examination of recent evidence as to how the No Child Left Behind legislation's policies are bring implemented in relation to the assessment and teaching of mathematics.

Although the intent of the No Child Left Behind legislation is to identify schools in which students are not being educated well and to compel improvement, its approach to doing so is built on a model from which long-standing disparities were constructed in the first place. The use of high-stakes standardized testing and direct instruction (DI) methods of teaching—both likely effects of the policies of the NCLB Act—reify the idea that mathematics is something to be put into students’ heads, apart from their lived experiences and daily lives. This approach to mathematics education provides a rationale for students’ (continued) stratification within an “objective” system of standardized testing and instruction. When considering reforms that aim to reduce inequities in educational outcomes, particularly in mathematics, forms of assessment and instruction must be developed and promoted that get away from the divisiveness of the traditional truth games and move toward a focus on students making sense of mathematics in ways that are meaningful, flexible, and connected to their sense of self.