Developing Novices' Professional Scripts for Teaching: An Investigation of Teacher Education Practice

Abstract

This dissertation is my effort to better understand how teacher educators teach professional, anti-racist teaching practice to novice teachers. I argue that one important way to interrupt systemic racism in schooling is to design teacher education that both teaches novice teachers what anti-racist practice is and helps them gain some initial skill with how to enact it. I develop a conceptual tool, professional scripts for teaching, to identify, parse, and, in this study, teach the anti-racist teaching practice of assigning competence (Cohen, 1973; Cohen, Lotan, Scarloss, & Arellano, 1999; Featherstone et al., 2011) to novices. Professional scripts for teaching help to define what “counts” as acceptable professional practice by describing patterns of practice that reflect anti-racist professional ethics to bound the work of teaching. Professional scripts for teaching foreground the relationships among teachers’ professional ethics, decision-making, and in-the-moment patterns of practice. This study comprises a first-person inquiry (Ball, 2000) into my teacher education practice for using professional scripts for teaching to teach assigning competence to a group of novice teachers. First-person inquiry is a form of qualitative case study closely related to methodological approaches such as action research, teacher narratives, and reflection in or on teaching, which demand an intentional and disciplined marrying of the enactment of practice with the analysis of practice. I investigated my own work to use professional scripts for teaching to design and teach the practice of assigning competence in a secondary methods course. I used my teacher education practice as the site of inquiry because the kind of teacher education work that I sought to study is different from what is most commonly practiced in the field. I designed, delivered, and analyzed a practice-focused teaching methods course for a group of novice secondary English Language Arts teachers in an alternative certification program. I examined transcripts of bi-weekly planning meetings held in collaboration with another teacher educator, course materials generated across the semester, videos and transcripts of class sessions, and written reflections on instruction composed immediately after each class session to answer: What is involved in the work for a teacher educator to translate anti-racist practice from the research literature into a professional script for teaching that can be taught in practice-based teacher education? I identify four endemic requirements of practice-based teacher education work aimed at anti-racist practice: (1) the importance of forming productive pedagogical relationships with novices in order to teach anti-racist practice; (2) the need to connect instruction in the practice to the professional ethics of the practice; (3) the requirement to develop decompositions of focal practices that both capture their complexity and reflect enactment; and (4) managing challenges associated with designing meaningful approximations of focal practices. The work to move from ideas about teaching anti-racist practice to the teaching of anti-racist practice is not straightforward, even for a teacher educator who has relevant knowledge, experience, and commitments to do such work. Some of the complexity arises from common features of programmatic contexts that perpetuate practices that are rooted in structural racism and can interfere with teacher educators’ efforts to teach anti-racist practice. Some of the complexity stems from the inherent difficulty of making anti-racist practice accessible to novices in practice-based teacher education. I offer what I have learned as a possible resource for other teacher educators involved in this necessary and difficult work.