Thoughts on Teacher Education

In the most recent edition of Action in Teacher Education, teacher educators at Henderson State University (Harrison, Smithey, McAffee, Weiner 2006) discuss their attempts to operationally define appropriate dispositions for new teachers and incorporate them into their admissions standards for the teacher education program.

First, they defined teacher disposition as encompassing “a mood, an attitude, or a tendency or inclination to behave in a certain way” (72). For them, teacher dispositions include the intangibles, the ‘heart of a teacher,” and are most commonly associated with caring for students, efficacy, and enthusiasm, etc. They identify six dispositions that they seek to assess and promote throughout the course of their program:

1. caring for students and their families
2. sensitivity to diversity
3. sense of fairness
4. sense of efficacy
5. personal reflection, and
6. sense of professionalism

They operationally define these dispositions by analyzing the observable behaviors of what the candidate writes, says, and does.

If the article had ended at this point, I would have felt very intrigued by the process and the aims of the authors. Instead, the Henderson group then detailed how they use an interview method to assess candidate dispositions. (These interview questions are nothing new in teacher education and have been used extensively—thanks to the work of Martin Haberman—in alternative route programs searching for STAR teachers.)

A student not meeting the required dispositions in the interview had the option to try again. Here, I quote the authors:

“[After the interview] Candidates received a summary of their performance during the interview and a statement that they had ‘passed’ or ‘not yet passed’ the interview requirements for admission into the teacher education program. Candidates who received ‘no yet passed’ had the opportunity to interview again at a later date or meet with university faculty who gave the candidate another opportunity to demonstrate the dispositions in question….If the candidate still did not ‘pass’ the interview, he or she was advised to develop the disposition and interview again at a later date or to consider another profession more suited to his or her dispositions” (76).

I find the Henderson approach troublesome for several reasons. First, it assumes that certain individuals can readily adopt new dispositions. Because the assessment is based on a verbal interview, a second assumption is that what people say about their beliefs will correspond with how they will teach. (More on this in a moment.) Finally, the fact that these dispositions are distributed to candidates openly (students are even given a self-assessment test that highlights each category which is administered in an introductory course before the interview) suggests that students may be inclined to tailor their statements about teaching so as to emphasize these previously stated dispositions. (This habit of giving/telling the professor what he/she wants to hear characterizes the strategy of many successful college students...Of course, I am an exception, most, most certainly.)

Mary Kennedy (1999) summarized a key finding from her work on evaluating preservice teacher education programs through the Teacher Education and Learning to Teach (TELT) study. She described “the problem of enactment.” Basically, she discovered that although preservice teachers espoused certain beliefs, such as a belief in caring or in student ownership, when given specific situations to respond to, the preservice teacher might not have actually acted upon those beliefs. She offered possible explanations for this discrepancy. First, many beliefs are abstract in nature and, thus, ill-defined. Therefore, when a professor speaks about caring for students, the preservice teacher might have a completely different view of what that entails. Second, it might be possible that the preservice teacher is able to hold different, sometimes contradictory beliefs simultaneously and refer to one set of beliefs in one context and another set beliefs in different context. Third, although the preservice teacher might sincerely hold a specific belief, such as caring for all students or accepting diversity in the classroom, he/she may not know how to actually turn those beliefs into actions. The danger is that the preservice teacher might fall back on his/her own past experiences (the “apprenticeship of observation”) that most probably centered on traditional ways of teaching.

What does this mean for the Henderson group? It means that it is quite possible for students to espouse beliefs in each of the six dispositions, but not actually act upon them. If the Henderson group refers to what the candidate writes, says, and does, then the writing and saying may not be connected with the doing. And, as is the case for many undergraduate programs, professors rarely have access to witness the candidate “doing” in the context of the public schools with real kids and in a real classrooms.

Note on sources: Harrison, J., McAffee, H., Smithey, G., Weiner, C. (2006). Assessing candidate disposition for admission into teacher education: Can just anyone teach? Action in Teacher Education, 27 (4), 72-80.

Kennedy, M. (1999). The role of preservice teacher education. In Darling-Hammond, L. & Sykes, G. (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession (pp. 54-85).—This chapter is a MUST READ for any teacher educator. You can find this chapter at Mary Kennedy’s Website under publications: http://www.msu.edu/~mkennedy/publications/ValueTE.html

A.J. Castro, www.thoughtsonteachered.blogspot.com