Exploring the Final Step of Teacher Education: A Study of Student Teachers' Use of New Practices.

Abstract

The final semester in teacher education, known as student teaching, is arguably the most difficult time in the professional training of teachers. Research suggests that student teaching is a clinical experience filled with conflicting visions, competing practices, and insufficient guidance that can undermine the essential aims of teacher education programs. This experience can hinder student teachers’ use of newly learned knowledge and skills in the field classroom.

This dissertation addresses how student teachers use, modify, or disregard practices they learned in their teacher education coursework. Through case studies of seven secondary history/social studies student teachers in an innovative teacher education program seeking to bring coherence between the field and the university, this study sought to understand how pre-service teachers see and experience challenges and supports in using new practices as they enter a traditional student teaching semester. The practices include (a) building lessons around central concepts or big ideas, (b) using historical/historiographic or social scientific problems to launch and organize lessons and units, and (c) employing lessons to hook secondary students in historical or social science content.

A central finding of this dissertation is that regardless of the coherence they experienced in previous semesters, these student teachers perceived a breach between their field experience and their teacher education program during their student teaching semester. They described challenges in using new practices, often with insufficient support from both the field classroom and from the university, to mediate these challenges. My study suggests that some of these challenges affect whether student teachers would use, modify, or disregard the practices they learned. This analysis revealed specific hindrances to teacher education, such as a lack of capacity to effectively support novice teachers in the field and tensions between giving student teachers codified instructions for practices and helping them use practices creatively and malleably. To improve teacher education, this dissertation calls for a more intentional design of the student teaching semester to ensure a more coherent experience for novice teachers. Further, this study calls for the formal training of cooperating teachers in the methods and theoretical foundations of the teacher education programs.