Teacher Education and Its Chamber of Secrets (Part 5)

This is the fifth and final entry of my project. We made it.

In this entry, I will discuss how this course has informed my understanding of teacher education and what it means to be a teacher educator.

Before this course, I thought teacher education prepared people to become better teachers. That part is the same, but it’s how the preparation is done. I imagined teacher educators as experts who had all the answers and told pre-service and in-service teachers what worked and didn’t. I realize there is more nuance to it.

Throughout this course, I uncovered several secrets about teacher education. Three key ideas changed how I look at teacher education: teacher educators should foster agency, teacher education depends on trusting relationships, and teacher education should be justice-centered.

The image above is from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2, and I chose this image because I think it represents teacher education well. The comparison isn’t exactly perfect because the Hogwarts professors teach students instead of teachers. But teachers are still students, so I guess the analogy isn’t too far off.

The professors guide the students without making every decision for them. All the while, the professors develop relationships with their students and among students. By the end of the series, the students had developed their own agency and stood up to the antagonist. Yay.

Lumos! Illuminating Teacher Agency

I’m not sure why, but I thought that teacher education was largely about telling teachers what to do.

Try these classroom management skills. Differentiate your lessons like this. Rearrange the classroom like that.

Now, instead of giving teachers all the answers, it’s more about helping them come up with their own. My first takeaway is that teacher educators aim to build teachers’ capacity to exercise their own professional judgment. Three ways of accomplishing this are through inquiry, critical reflection, and collaboration.

For example, the doctoral students in Jacobs et al.’s (2015) study engaged in practitioner inquiry and saw themselves as capable of producing knowledge about teacher education. For them, inquiry “served primarily as a vehicle for their own professional development and learning as teacher educators” (p. 392). It also empowered them to identify problems with their program and discuss how to improve teacher preparation. 

In this case, inquiry helped the educators question existing practices, co-create knowledge, and push for change. Knowledge isn’t set in stone, and teachers and teacher educators can shape and produce it. 

Timperley (2008) also makes a similar point. Inquiry isn’t supposed to immediately provide a solution to every problem, but rather to have teachers engage in a process that can help develop one. It helps teachers monitor their thinking, evaluate actions, and make adjustments.

To go even deeper, Korthagen (2017) argues that teacher education requires critical reflection to consider our “gestalts,” such as our beliefs, feelings, and motivations. Reflection, simply, is the process of looking back on an experience, but Korthagen wants teachers and teacher educators to critically reflect on how, why, and what we are interpreting from our experiences.

“Why did I do that?” and “What assumptions did I make?” are far more effective than “What should I do next time for my lesson?”

In my future practice, I would like to co-create similar spaces where teachers can examine themselves and collaborate with others to solve problems. I am starting to believe that approaching our world through inquiry and examining the deepest parts of ourselves can help unearth viable solutions to our line of work.

Whether I model these myself or share them with others, these features may be necessary to build capacity among my colleagues and to see ourselves as problem solvers and knowledge producers. Or agents of change.

Ultimately, I don’t want teachers to depend on me for answers or to necessarily think like me. I want them to develop their own professional judgments. 

“It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.” - Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The Room of Requirement of Trusting Relationships

Along the way, I started to notice some imperfections with teacher education programs. Even with standards from organizations like CAEP and ATE, programs can look very different.

At first, I thought more standards would mean more consistency. But I also think there is more nuance to it.

The idea of standards isn’t bad, but the problem occurs when programs distort their intended purposes. There’s a difference between meeting a standard because it aligns with their values and meeting it out of compliance.

Goodwin and Kosnik (2013) question teacher education preparation and how curriculum cannot be simply delivered through isolated classes. Instead, they say programs need to be holistic, integrated, and flexible.

With this in mind, how do you standardize this? How do you prevent important ideas from being boxes on a checklist? When important ideas are done out of compliance, their purpose can be distorted or forgotten.

Teacher education is deeply relational. It requires trust and personal and professional relationships.

Patton and Parker’s (2017) study followed physical education teacher educators in their communities of practice. The participants acknowledged how strong relationships set up a safe space where they could take risks, share ideas, and challenge each other.

But programs can require collaboration on paper, but can they force them to trust each other? In other words, can you standardize meaningful dialogue and genuine commitment to the cause?

In my future practice, I like the idea of leading professional development or coaching sessions. I also keep coming back to modeling my thinking aloud.

What beliefs are guiding my decision right now? Why am I doing this work? Who do I trust? Who can challenge me? Maybe I can tell a colleague, “This is why I am making this decision,” or “I trust how you see things, so I need you to challenge me if I’m missing something.”

I also need to become more comfortable speaking up to challenge supervisors and colleagues. But it all starts with knowing who I am and building trusting relationships. Yes, there are standards to meet, but it’s up to me how far I’m willing to go beyond them.

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.” - Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Defense Against the Dark Arts By Teaching Against the Grain

Finally, I think teacher education has to be justice-centered. If we’re talking about building agency and developing trusting relationships, that’s only part of the work. Good schools can still harm students. 

That’s because there’s a missing ingredient: justice and equity. Okay, so two ingredients.

We need to ask ourselves: Who do our practices benefit? Who do our choices harm? Whose knowledge is upheld? Whose voices are missing?

I have to keep remembering that teacher education is never neutral. One of the first points that Cochran-Smith (2020) emphasizes is that “teaching and teacher education are always political (p. 50), and that they both shape and are shaped by power and systems. She proposes democratic accountability as a response to the automation of teacher preparation. This means centering democracy and equity by bringing people with different interests together around the public good. 

Teacher education may work in a system, but it also needs to be challenged. This also means that we need teachers that are “willing to teach against the (new) grain” (p. 53). 

Speaking of democratic accountability, Allen et al. (2017) say that our teacher education perpetuates institutionalized racism. About 80% of teacher candidates are White females, while about half of public school students are students of color. They describe this as a “cultural mismatch” (p. 10). Yet, teacher education programs have consistently struggled to prepare teachers to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population.

This suggests that those missing ingredients, justice and equity, need to be fully integrated across teacher education. The authors propose incorporating more culturally relevant pedagogies (CRP), but they also caution that CRP is a “state of being versus simply doing,” not “checking items off a list” (p. 8). Allen et al.’s framework includes critical reflection, critical consciousness, and critical questions. This isn’t something that can be delivered in a single class.

This also connects to Lynn and Smith-Maddox (2017), who used inquiry as a space for reflection and dialogue between preservice teachers and the meaning of being a social justice educator. One of my favorite parts was when student teachers inquired about the role of ability grouping.

Accepting normalized practices is easy, but questioning them is the challenge. So how do we question them? Well, it starts with inquiry. Before making decisions or accepting things the way they are, I need to seriously consider who is helped, who is harmed, and who is missing.

In a data literacy class, I learned to appreciate qualitative data. This meant listening to students, families, and communities instead of assuming I knew the entire picture. If I can draw on those voices to present an alternative perspective to my colleagues, maybe they will understand its significance. 

I also need to seek out colleagues who are also interested in equitable learning, such as a little PLC. Talk about a particular curriculum. Instead of teaching it, challenge it. If we expect education to be better, we need to teach against the grain.

“We all must face the choice between what is right and what is easy” - Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Conclusion

Agency, relationships, and justice. They all connect. How to teach, who we learn with, and who our work serves.

I’m still putting my foot down about the Harry Potter image. The professors guide the students, but they are also learners. Teachers and teacher educators aren’t that different after all. We are all still students. 

While I don’t have all the answers, I think I have an idea of how to come up with them. I need to inquire, model my thinking, ask questions, trust others, embrace being challenged, and speak up. All the while, I have to remember that they all come down to one thing: the students.

References

Allen, A., Hancock, S. D., Starker-Glass, T., & Lewis, C. W. (2017). Mapping Culturally Relevant Pedagogy into Teacher Education Programs: A Critical Framework. Teachers College Record (1970), 119(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811711900107

Cochran-Smith, M. (2020). Teacher Education for Justice and Equity: 40 Years of Advocacy. Action in Teacher Education, 42(1), 49–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/01626620.2019.1702120

Goodwin, A. L., & Kosnik, C. (2013). Quality teacher educators = quality teachers? Conceptualizing essential domains of knowledge for those who teach teachers. Teacher Development, 17(3), 334–346. https://doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2013.813766

Jacobs, J., Yendol-Hoppey, D., & Dana, N. F. (2015). Preparing the Next Generation of Teacher Educators: The Role of Practitioner Inquiry. Action in Teacher Education, 37(4), 373–396. https://doi.org/10.1080/01626620.2015.1078758

Korthagen, F. (2017). Inconvenient truths about teacher learning: towards professional development 3.0. Teachers and Teaching, Theory and Practice, 23(4), 387–405. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2016.1211523

Lynn, M., & Smith-Maddox, R. (2007). Preservice teacher inquiry: Creating a space to dialogue about becoming a social justice educator. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23(1), 94–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2006.04.004

Patton, K., & Parker, M. (2017). Teacher education communities of practice: More than a culture of collaboration. Teaching and Teacher Education, 67, 351–360. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.013

Timperley, H. (2008). Teacher Professional Learning and Development. Educational Practices Series-18. In UNESCO International Bureau of Education. UNESCO International Bureau of Education.

Wizarding World Digital. (2017, February 2). The chapter that made us fall in love with… Professor McGonagall. Harry Potter. https://www.harrypotter.com/features/chapter-that-made-us-fall-in-love-with-professor-mcgonagall