Dilemmas in Teacher Education

Joyce K. McCauley
Delores E. Heiden
Tara S. Azwell
Anne C. Hamilton

Editors' Note: In this linked series of Web pages (originally posted in the now-discontinued Critical Issues section), the authors share some of the challenges they've faced in their teacher-education courses -- as well as their ideas for improving their own practice. Over the next several months, new “dilemmas” in teacher education will be added on a regular basis, and the list of topics that appears at the bottom of this page will be updated. You are particularly invited to share your own dilemmas and solutions by joining the four authors in the discussion forum attached to this series. A link to the forum is provided at the bottom of each webpage.

If you enjoy this series, click here for links to other postings on related topics.

Stumbling into the Conversation

We all wandered into the same 3 o'clock session at the International Reading Association's convention in San Antonio, Texas, several years ago: Tara Azwell from Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas, USA; Anne Hamilton from the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Alabama, USA, and Joyce McCauley from the University of Guam (since moved to Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, USA). The three of us were strangers, and none of us knew the speaker, Delores Heiden from the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse. Tara was there as a stand-in for the session chair, but she planned only to introduce Delores and then sneak out to meet friends. Joyce and Anne were mildly attracted by the presentation title -- “Letting Go: Preservice Teachers Experience a Portfolio Approach to Assessment” -- but expected little since it was the last session of the day and they were tired. And Delores? This was her first presentation at a major conference, and her objective was simply to get through it.

About 30 people were in the room when the session began. Delores talked about using portfolio assessment in her teacher-education classes, and shared how her ideas were not working out as she had thought they would. She spoke of trying different things, of the changes she had made, of how she was still not satisfied with the results. She told of her determination to find answers, and of her goal of being a good teacher of teachers. Toward the end of her presentation, she encouraged all of us to talk about the challenges we were having teaching teachers. Along with a lively discussion, there was a lot of sharing and laughing. We were invigorated by the realization that we weren't alone in our struggles, that there were other professors who didn't have all the answers, and that we had found ourselves in a small group who were willing to talk about it. The session was over too soon. A few of us -- Delores, Tara, Anne, and Joyce -- hung around to continue the conversation over dinner.

Over the years we four have continued our conversation about the challenges of teaching, and we have found we have many things in common. First, we realized that, in our courses, our students were learning more than content related to literacy education -- they were watching us teach. We were models, and our teaching either confirmed or changed the picture our students had in their minds of what it meant to be a good teacher -- the sort of teacher they were striving to become. Our methods and techniques were just as important (if not more so) as the material to be learned. If our goal was to help our undergraduate and graduate students become the best literacy teachers they could be, then we, too, had to strive to be a picture of the best.

We began to examine what picture we were giving our students. We liked much of what we saw, but there was room for improvement. We realized that in many instances, what we told our students to do was not what we were doing in our own classrooms.

For example, Joyce told her students that it was important to make sure that the concept they were teaching had some meaning for the children in their classes, and that the children understand how learning about the concept was going to benefit them in the long run. Joyce taught that this “why it is important in my life” was absolutely necessary to get across first if children were going to want to learn. But yet, she realized that she spent very little time developing her own students' desire to learn. There didn't seem to be time for that; she had a lot of content to cover.

Anne taught her students about the importance of group work, the necessity of minimizing teacher talk, and the power of collaboration. But yet, she found she lectured for a good part of each period, and she spent limited time helping her students learn to work together.

Delores taught her students about the importance of tapping into children's background knowledge and of building bridges from the known to the unknown. But yet, she realized that in her own courses, she was so busy getting through the syllabus that she paid little attention to the knowledge her students brought to class.

Tara preached choice. She taught her students that it was important for youngsters to have a say in their learning. But yet, the course syllabus she handed out each semester stated exactly which projects and which readings the students were to complete. There was no room for options or self-selection.

For each of us, certain areas of our teaching, certain approaches to presentation of content, didn't match with what we knew about how best to support learning. We began to call these gaps between what we wanted to happen in our classrooms and what actually happened -- between what we were teaching teachers to do and what we actually did -- our “dilemmas.” In order for us to find answers to our dilemmas, we first had to identify the discrepancy between what we believed and how we taught, between what we understood from theory and what we did in practice. What were we violating or ignoring or forgetting?

Alfred E. Whitehead (1929) talks about the importance of beginning all learning with “romance,” with seeing the big picture, with understanding how whatever it is that you're learning fits in with your life. It's a time in the learning process when the learner doesn't care about rules and details but is overcome with awe. There is playing, dabbling, experimenting -- without worry or concern about exactness. After this time of romance, the learner wants to learn more, begins paying attention to the details, is interested in exactly how one accomplishes the task to become an expert. Now the learner enters the stage of precision -- a time when he or she pays attention to important details and rules and wants “to make a good job of it” (p. 35). Most important, Whitehead says, is that if one moves into the stage of precision without the stage of romance, the learning is empty and meaningless: “Without the adventure of romance, at the best you get inert knowledge without initiative, and at the worst you get contempt of ideas -- without knowledge” (p. 33).

Keeping Whitehead's work in mind, we asked ourselves, “Are we beginning with the stage of romance as we introduce new content? Are we making sure our students are interested in and committed to wanting to know first -- or do we jump too quickly into precision?”

Lev Vygotsky (1978) emphasizes the power of speech in learning and the absolute necessity that people talk through difficult concepts. The more difficult the task, the more important it is to verbalize our thoughts. As we looked at our own classrooms, we wondered, “Are we allowing for enough student-to-student discussion? Do we provide enough discussion time after difficult concepts are taught so that students can think through their understandings and learn from each other?”

Brian Cambourne (1995) presents us with a set of conditions for learning . He posits that the learner needs to be immersed in the topic. The teacher must provide multiple demonstrations in which the learner is engaged. He reminds us that we need to expect learning to happen, that approximations are part of the learning process, that feedback is important, and that what is learned is the responsibility of the learner. If we believed that these are among the “indispensable circumstances” needed for students to learn, then we had to ask ourselves, “Do our students believe they will be good teachers? Do we allow our adult learners to 'mess around' with tasks and encourage their approximations? How engaged are our students in our demonstrations?”

Jean Piaget (1965) reminds us that learners construct their thoughts through the interaction of new and existing knowledge, that they use what they already know to make sense of new information. The ultimate aim of education, according to Piaget, is for the individual to develop the autonomy of thought to create new, original ideas rather than just recycle old ones. In learning, the learner progresses from the comfort zone of the known through a sometimes rocky process to reach understanding of information at a new and more in-depth level. As we thought about Piaget's ideas, we asked ourselves, “Do we encourage our students to be creative thinkers? Do we provide opportunities for students to make connections themselves, or do we move too quickly and push for what we consider the one correct answer?”

We four have been together now for seven years, extending that same conversation we began in Texas. We continue to share, question, encourage, challenge, and celebrate. Together we face the dilemmas of teaching, of becoming models for our students, of putting theory into practice. Together we're trying to get better at walking the walk.

Now we invite you to join our small group. You may see yourself reflected in the situations and dilemmas we describe in the pages that follow. By joining our conversation, we hope you may find ideas to apply or adapt to your own challenges in teaching teachers, and we invite you to share your own dilemmas -- and solutions.

The Dilemmas

• Who Reads the Chapter Assignments Anyway?
  by Joyce McCauley (posted April 2000)
• When and Where Does Self-Evaluation of Writing Begin?
  by Anne Hamilton (posted April 2000)
• Creating an Evaluation Rubric in a Graduate Reading Course
  by Delores E. Heiden (posted April 2000)
• Linking New Information to Prior Knowledge in an Inservice Session
  by Tara Azwell (posted April 2000)
• Practice Lessons and Undergraduate Students: When and How to Begin?
  by Joyce McCauley (posted April 2000)
• Pushing Beyond the Comfort Zone: Learning a Strategy May Not Mean Using It
  by Tara Azwell (posted May 2000)
• Hangin' out by Myself on the Assessment Line
  by Anne Hamilton (posted May 2000)
• What Do Students Really Learn from My Quizzes?
  by Joyce McCauley (posted May 2000)
• Why Should I Be a Writer? Helping Preservice Teachers Motivate Young Authors
  by Joyce McCauley (posted May 2000)
• How Will You Get Them to Read If You Don't?
  by Delores Heiden (posted May 2000)
• Acccommodating Individual Differences
  by Delores Heiden (posted May 2000)
• “Wad It Up! Toss It Around! But...Don't Tear It Up or Throw It Away! Playing with Initial Writing Attempts
  by Anne Hamilton (posted June 2000)
• Why Do I Need a Philosophy of Education?
  by Tara Azwell (posted June 2000)
• Theory Is a Bad Word
  by Joyce McCauley (posted June 2000)
• Working in Groups: Disasters Waiting to Happen
  by Joyce McCauley (posted June 2000)
• Making Assessment Authentic: A New Twist on the Final Exam
  by Delores Heiden (posted June 2000)
• Students, Text, and Videotape: Observing Reading Development
  by Delores Heiden (posted June 2000)
• And There's Still Room to Grow: A Final Reflection
  by Anne Hamilton (posted June 2000)
• References