Research That Illuminates Enduring Dilemmas in Teacher Education

Identifying Enduring Dilemmas in Teacher Education

In the paper that leads off this issue, Jack Schneider identifies major issues facing teacher preparation over the years, and distinguishes between what he calls “problems,” which he considers to be linear in nature, responsive to careful treatment and which can yield positive outcomes, and “dilemmas,” which he proposes to be parabolic; here, ineffective strategies are employed and fail to yield positive outcomes. In addition, as time progresses, key stakeholders and policy makers return to strategies previously employed and discarded. Thus, he concludes, no progress is possible on dilemmas. Schneider identifies three issues which constitute specific dilemmas. First, Length versus Volume, in which the perceived need for extended teacher preparation programs (length) is in tension with the challenge of recruiting the large number of teachers needed (volume), given teachers’ relatively low salaries and status. Second, Specificity versus Generality, in which the need for broadly applicable, context-free or at least context-agnostic approaches to teacher preparation (generality) is in tension with the significant role that specific contexts play in the development of effective teaching practices (specificity). And third, Flexibility versus Security, in which the desire to permit a variety of models for teacher preparation (flexibility) is in tension with the goal of ensuring that all students have a capable teacher (security).

Schneider’s characterization of dilemmas is a promising way to examine a broad range of challenges in teacher education. As a case in point, we draw attention to how each of the papers in this issue addresses one or more of these enduring dilemmas. Below, we use Schneider’s lens of enduring dilemmas to characterize the issues addressed by authors of the other papers in this issue. We hope that doing so will generate useful conversation and work moving forward.

Exemplary Practices as an Approach to Addressing Schneider’s Dilemmas

Acosta, Foster, and Houchen (2018) look to the history of African American schooling prior to the desegregation of public schools to identify the community- and citizenship-focused pedagogical approaches of successful Black teachers—“African American Pedagogical Excellence”—and propose that these approaches be considered as “exemplar practice for teacher education.” They emphasize the inclusion of these approaches in teacher education programs for preparing Black teachers, but they also suggest—and we agree—that these practices, including addressing citizenship goals and connecting to the social and political histories and contexts of communities, might be more broadly relevant for reorienting the field’s approach to teacher preparation. However, in light of Schneider’s dilemmas, incorporating such practices into teacher preparation requires a choice: These practices cannot be in addition to other preparation program priorities, but must become the focus of teacher preparation. Given Schneider’s point about the challenges in focusing on techniques and skills at the expense of context, Acosta and colleagues’ focus on ideology and beliefs as well as practices holds promise. As they note, our lack of progress as a field on addressing persistent gaps in access and opportunity suggests a need to reframe the ways we think about the curriculum, pedagogies, and outcomes of teacher preparation. In the authors’ words, we must “re-conceptualize pedagogies for social justice” and one way to do that is through “reorient[ing] the discourse toward African American approaches to teaching, learning, and being” (p.).

The Dilemma of Integrating Special Education Content in Teacher Preparation

Over the last century, waves of reform in teacher education have often highlighted the importance of preparation for teaching in classrooms enrolling pupils with a diverse range of talents, interests, and needs. Following changes in federal policies that brought more students with special needs into mainstream classrooms, the list of essential knowledge and skills for beginning teachers was expanded. Teachers were expected to learn more, in programs whose length was unchanged.

In their historical account of the ways in which special education figured into teacher education reforms, Blanton, Pugach, and Boveda (2018) describe how the aspirations of those in special education and general teacher education were often similar, but teacher educators were seldom successful in tightly integrating special education into the curriculum for general education teachers. These authors cite policy, funding, timing, and norms of separation as the reasons for the repeated failures make the changes that appeared necessary. Schneider’s dilemmas suggest that expectations for tight integration should be modest. Teacher salaries did not rise to recognize the additional responsibilities for working with special needs students, making it difficult to add to the lengths of programs. Learning to work with special needs students may require practice in a specific context, yet teachers must still learn to master the skills needed to work with a range of other students. The optimistic conclusion of this article, pointing to increasing numbers of dual-certification programs, gives hope that some progress is possible, even in the face of these dilemmas.

The Dilemma of Supporting Teachers for Responsive Teaching

If one examines recent publications in the field of teacher education, it is easy to see that as the diversity of the school-aged population has grown, so too has the attention being paid to supporting teachers and schools in the inclusion of culturally responsive and sustaining practices (CR/SP). Despite this emphasis on CR/SP, there has little systematic examination of the effectiveness and rigor of interventions, assessments, and outcomes of instructional approaches, and using this knowledge to create an evidence-based foundation for meaningful work at scale. In their paper in this issue, Bottiani et al. (2018) employ a systematic review of the literature to provide a set of recommendations for future work on effective Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) interventions. Their findings are reflective of an area of investigation still in its infancy, with relatively little consistency in construct operationalization or study design, and challenged by unique contextual factors which limit generalizability. In light of their examination, the authors propose useful directions for meaningful CR/SP work moving forward, including the need to achieve clarity and consensus on outcomes, both for teachers and for students; attention to equity as an outcome in and of itself; the need for identifying meaningful assessment instruments or measures; and the need to describe the breadth and depth of interventions.

This article reminds us of a dilemma raised by Schneider: If we agree about the need to prepare teachers with the knowledge and skills to enact CR/SP in their classrooms, do we need to focus this work on the specific contexts in which such practices are critical, or take a more general approach? In addition, what experiences do teachers need to develop such practices? Is it sufficient to address their own worldviews and the extent to which these views are misaligned with their students’ needs? Or must they be given opportunities to learn to enact specific practices in specific contexts? It may be that the field has not yet matured enough to assess what the most critical experiences must be.

The Dilemmas of Teaching at the Intersections of Culture, Content, and Context

Unlike most of the other articles in this issue, which focus more broadly on the potential of preparing teachers to enact African American pedagogies, culturally responsive pedagogies, and/or inclusive pedagogies across contexts and content, Leonard and her colleagues (2018) focus specifically on the use of culturally responsive pedagogy in a particular context and content area. They describe the preparation of experienced teachers in rural school districts to use culture and robotics/game design to teach computational thinking to students in a rural context and explore how this experience shifted teachers’ beliefs and practices related to both culturally responsive teaching and computational thinking. The framing and the findings of their study suggest that one way to make progress on the dilemmas identified by Schneider is to conduct much more focused and larger scale research on specific features of teacher preparation or professional development experiences as they play out in relation to very specific content and contexts. This kind of focus might allow us to identify and understand particular productive practices for particular content and contexts, as well as challenges and tensions that can be involved in enacting these practices, such as the tensions that Leonard and colleagues identified in relation to connecting to culture to game design in the rural context.

The Dilemma of Preparing Teachers to Work With Immigrant Children

In their paper on teachers’ approaches to cultural diversity, Gutentag, Horenczyk, and Tatar (2018) shift the outcome focus for teacher preparation from teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions to burnout and self-efficacy. They highlight an aspect of contexts for teaching and learning that become increasingly prominent—worldwide increases in immigration, with consequent increases in the cultural, linguistic, and national diversity in classrooms. Their survey study of teachers in Israel finds that teachers are more likely to feel effective and less likely to burn out if they see immigrant students as an asset, rather than as a problem. Their study found no significant effect of the proportion of immigrants in the classroom, once their perception of immigrant students as an asset was taken into account.

Although the authors caution that their correlational approach does not support a causal interpretation of the effects of attitude, it does provide some hope that the dilemma of specificity versus generality might be managed by encouraging teachers to approach the diversity of students in their classroom as a resource, rather than thinking that they need particular skills for each category of student.

Conclusion

Joseph Schwab (1959) once wrote about “the impossible role of the teacher in progressive education.” He was referring, in part, to the fact that teachers must have mastered the many skills of teaching, with knowledge of content, students, teaching, and context. But they must also have the capacity to reflect on their practice in a particular setting, evaluate it using a range of broadly applicable criteria, and judge how to make appropriate changes. Something similar might be said of teacher education programs, which must prepare teachers to work with a wide range of students, in varying school and community settings, and in constantly changing policy environments, while also educating them to be reflective practitioners who will adapt their practice in light of their current circumstances. The enduring dilemmas that Schneider describes highlight three ways in which it is impossible to achieve all the aspirations educators have for teacher education. What is possible is to manage the dilemmas in ways that are productive, using thoughtful analysis of experience to modify that management. just as Lampert’s (1985) work has considered how teachers manage their dilemmas, scholarly work about teacher education offers insights into how teacher educators have managed these dilemmas over time, and how they are being managed in the present.

Schneider’s historical analysis describes how the dilemmas of teacher education have played out through several eras. The other papers in this issue highlight particular versions of these dilemmas. In some cases, they depict how the dilemmas have been managed; in other cases, they call for change. Those designing teacher education will always wrestle with decisions about what to emphasize and what expect teachers to learn in the future, on their own or through formal professional development. Those decisions can be informed by studies like those published here, each of which presents evidence about the consequences of programs and contexts for teacher learning.