Abstract
Scholars have called for promoting coherence in teacher education programs. Such coherence is often depicted as a state to be achieved. This article reconceptualizes coherence as a dynamic process affected by the simultaneous organizational realities of unity, conflict, and fragmentation; it also aims to clarify factors that can facilitate or challenge the work of enhancing teacher education program coherence. Drawing on a case study of program-wide redesign, we show that promoting coherence requires more than just maximizing unity (instructors’ agreement on means and ends). It also requires addressing conflict and recognizing fragmentation in ways that support what we term “pathway flexibility.” By highlighting the interplay of unity, conflict, and fragmentation, we offer a set of conceptual tools to understand and support the development of program coherence in teacher education.
During the past four decades, teacher education scholars have identified program coherence as a pressing problem and as an important pathway for improving teacher preparation. Scholars highlight two kinds of incoherence in teacher education programs that limit the programs’ impact on beginning teachers’ practice. First, scholars have depicted university-based courses as silos housing ideas that do not build on or connect with each other. The seminal Holmes Group (1986) report, for example, found no “coherent pattern” (p. 56) in how future teachers learn subject area content and observed that professional courses are “not interrelated or coherent” (p. 57). More recent scholarship has pointed out how such incoherent and isolated coursework can lead to “mixed messages” (Hammerness, 2006, p. 1242) and fail to empower beginning teachers to actually enact effective teaching practice (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). Second, scholars have found that lack of coordination or mismatches between coursework and clinical experiences may result in missed learning opportunities (Valencia et al., 2009); the best efforts of teacher education coursework being “washed out” (Zeichner & Tabachnik, 1981, p. 7) or undercut (Smagorinsky et al., 2004) by clinical experience; and novice teachers’ difficulties to learn teaching practices and develop “a professional understanding of teaching and learning” (Grossman et al., 2008, p. 274).
Given these problems, scholars have called for improving coherence in teacher education programs (Hammerness, 2006; Lampert et al., 2013; McDonald et al., 2014). The American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) has called for designing and sequencing courses that complement and align with field experiences (see Tenet 1 of AACTE, 2018). The U.S. accrediting body for teacher preparation programs has similarly called for “coherence across clinical and academic components of preparation” (Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, n.d.).
Although research points to negative outcomes of incoherence in teacher education programs, the concept of program coherence, the challenges of achieving coherence, and factors that may enhance coherence remain undertheorized. This article contributes to scholarship on coherence in teacher education programs in two ways. First, it contributes to emerging scholarship conceptualizing coherence as process rather than a static condition. We bring an organizational theoretical framework to explore how coherence—and efforts to promote coherence—may work in specific settings. Second, given scant empirical research or theory that identifies factors supporting coherence, this article shares a case of teacher education program redesign to explore the nature, facilitators, and challenges of building program coherence in teacher education programs.
To make these contributions, we first review extant research on program coherence. We reconceptualize coherence as a process influenced by organizational unity, conflict, and fragmentation and identify factors that can complicate teacher education program coherence. Next, we present a case of teacher education redesign that increased coherence. Teacher educators often redesign a single certification pathway; however, elementary education faculty reorganizing their work to target specific dispositions and competences required by new standards would impact a limited number of elementary teachers’ courses (i.e., only the upper right box in Figure 1). This article shares a case of whole program redesign, aiming to impact—and promote coherence—across all courses (i.e., all boxes in Figure 1) as a teacher education faculty reorganized their program around core practices.
Whole program redesign addresses shared courses, pathway-specific courses, and all pathways.
We use this case to address our first research question: What is the extent and nature of changes individual instructors made when engaged in a whole program redesign around program-wide adoption of core practices? Our analysis of faculty changes combined with other data from the program redesign let us present this as a case of program redesign enhancing program coherence. Exploring the nature and limits of faculty changes—and juxtaposing the case with our conceptual framework—allows us to address our second and third research questions: What is the nature of teacher education program coherence? What factors facilitate or challenge efforts to promote coherence in teacher education programs?
Program Coherence: From Static Condition to Process
Foregrounding Conceptual and Structural Coherence
Scholars have conceptualized coherence in various ways. Coherence can be a quality of consistency within individuals’ cognition or mental understandings of phenomena (Zarkadis et al., 2021) or agreement among policies (Stosich et al., 2021). Coherence—in texts—means that parts are tightly connected and co-reference each other (Boscolo & Mason, 2003). A “sense of coherence” is the belief that “the world is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful” (Lustig & Strauser, 2002; see Online Appendix G for additional discussion of coherence).
We begin defining program coherence by positing that it involves alignment of conceptual and structural elements of a program, as described below. Consistent with these other conceptions of coherence, such alignment may promote consistency, comprehensibility, agreement of parts, connection and co-reference across parts, and meaningfulness. We start by foregrounding conceptual and structural coherence to help us conceptualize the kinds of coherence that can exist at the level of a teacher education program. Looking at both conceptual and structural coherence helps us see how instructors’ individual work and the arrangement of courses and clinical experiences are important program elements impacting teacher development.
Conceptual coherence
Conceptual coherence reflects Tatto’s (1996) call for “shared understandings among faculty” with regard to the knowledge, skills, and dispositions teachers must develop and a “unified view as to assessment, expectations, knowledge of the subject matter. . .” (p. 176). According to Tatto, faculty within or across programs need not “think alike” (p. 176) because “diversity of thought” (p. 176) enriches learning. Tatto described what Hammerness (2012) will later term a “shared vision” (p. 5) regarding the kind of teachers the program will produce, the practices they should use, and the possibility for preservice teachers to do more than reproduce the teaching they experienced in schools. Consistent with Tatto’s call for diversity of thought, such shared vision does not require the repetition of a single perspective or idea across courses. Programs designed to be more coherent may offer “mutually reinforcing ideas” and “repeated experience with a set of ideas” (Hammerness, 2012, p. 3).
Structural coherence
The structural component of coherence corresponds with what Tatto (1996) termed “the manner in which opportunities to learn have been arranged (organizationally, logistically) to achieve a common goal” (p. 176). When activities, assignments, and experiences across university and clinical settings align with a program’s conceptual vision, the program has “structural coherence” (Hammerness, 2006). Structural coherence includes the “logistical organization of coursework” based on a shared vision and the linkage between “courses and clinical experiences . . . to support, reinforce, and reflect those shared ideas” (Grossman et al., 2008, p. 282).
As illustrated in Table 1, if a teacher education program has a high level of coherence, the conceptual and structural elements of coherence should be evident in both the program and in individual instructors’ work. The sequence of courses and arrangements for clinical or field placements in a specific program could be considered a plan for how conceptual and structural coherence come together to “deliberately build understanding of teaching over time” (Hammerness & Klette, 2015, p. 8). Coherence would exist on paper only if it were not also reflected in less publicly visible behaviors and decisions of individual instructors as illustrated in the last column of Table 1. Our first research question addresses the extent to which one specific case of redesign—in this case, around core practices—had impact on these less visible, instructor-level decisions.
Examples of Conceptual and Structural Coherence at the Level of the Program and the Individual Instructor.
Conceptual Framework: Three Lenses for Conceptualizing the Process and Challenges of Coherence
Most prior scholarship on coherence in teacher education has treated coherence as a condition or state that can be achieved (Richmond et al., 2019). As prior scholarship has not clarified how teacher education programs can promote coherence, we build on Honig and Hatch’s (2004) proposal that we see coherence as a process. Doing so creates the potential to see change over time and factors that contribute to such change, and thus suits our research question about what might facilitate and challenge the work of enhancing coherence.
Building on Honig and Hatch (2004), Canrinus et al. (2019) envision program coherence in teacher education as a process of aligning and sequencing content across university-based courses and with relevant opportunities in clinical experiences. This definition echoes the concept of conceptual and structural coherence delineated above but views such an enterprise as ongoing work rather than a state to be achieved.
To contribute to this nascent line of scholarship on coherence as process, we borrow insights from organizational theory addressing how individuals work within organizations and how organizations may influence individuals. Specifically, we build on Martin (2002) to demonstrate the desirability of simultaneously adopting multiple—if conflicting—lenses to examine three different features of organizations: unity, conflict, and fragmentation. These features are constantly in flux (Martin, 2002) and thus are conducive to conceptualize coherence as a process rather than a state.
Unity: Organizations Foster Unity
One way in which organizations influence individuals is through uniting individual behavior toward shared aims and promoting system-wide consensus. Scholarship documents how individuals adapt to or adopt the mission and cultural practices of larger teams (Martin, 2002). Since the 1980s, research in this vein promised that organizations that develop strong cultures produce employees who share a leader’s view and style (Schein, 1985). In the field of education, professional learning communities’ literature similarly envisions school leaders creating shared vision and organization-wide cultural shifts that improve schools’ effectiveness (DuFour et al., 2005). Professionals’ ongoing collaboration may create language (Horn, 2007; Little, 2003), shared vision of outcomes (DuFour et al., 2005; Levine & Marcus, 2010), pressure (Levine & Bunch, 2007), and tools that facilitate the building of consensus and/or collective action toward shared ends (Anagnostopoulos et al, 2018).
Of the three organizational features highlighted in our conceptual framework, unity comes closest to the predominant view of coherence as a state. Shared vision seems like a state an organization might achieve for a period of time. There may, however, be kinds of unity that are not consistent with real conceptual agreement among individuals. For instance, one could imagine either superficial unity that avoids conflict or a forced unity that silences dissent. Two other organizational features—described below—point to important and inevitable realities overlooked if we only focus on organizations’ capacity to integrate individuals into shared understandings and practices.
Conflict: Organizations Harbor Conflict and Difference
There can be important and consequential differences among individuals and subunits in organizations. These can manifest themselves as conflict (e.g., see Lang, 2009; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Mikkelsen & Clegg, 2019). Scholarship has suggested the inevitability—and, sometimes, desirability—of conflict between individuals or subgroups within an organization, highlighting the potential for individuals and subunits to act in ways that reflect differing beliefs and personal agendas rather than a shared vision. Such differences and conflicts can be seen as functional or dysfunctional (Hignite et al., 2002; Mikkelsen & Clegg, 2019). Conflicts involving tasks—as opposed to relationship conflicts—have the potential to promote innovation and improved performance (O’Neill et al., 2013); however, where individuals and subgroups champion different means and ends, the reality of conflict within organizations seems likely to hinder conceptual and structural coherence.
Fragmentation: Organizations Can Fragment Efforts and Understanding
Focusing on unity and conflict within organizations assumes that organizations act either based on a shared vision or based on conflicts regarding means and ends. This focus also assumes that individuals are aware of the intended goals of others and their preferred means of achieving these goals as well as the groups or individuals who are or should be involved in making things happen. Decisions and actions in organizations, however, involve “problematic goals, unclear technologies, and fluid participation” (Cohen et al., 1976, p. 25) by a variety of actors entering and exiting decision processes at various points without being fully aware of each other’s intentions or actions. It is easy to imagine, for instance, teacher education instructors endorsing the need for change while holding very different views of what should be changed and lacking agreed-upon processes for deciding who will do what to enact change. Faculty committees could issue reports that get implemented in ways that diverge from initial intentions due to discontinuity among participants and resultant misunderstandings rather than clashing beliefs. Fragmentation of people, efforts, and understandings within organizations seems even more likely when roles, preferences, or missions are not clear; participants shift; and actors do not fully understand the means or ends that other subgroups or individuals adopt. This last quality is especially relevant in university-based teacher education programs. Such programs often draw on faculty across departments and/or schools within a university and collaborate with partners in multiple cooperating schools and school districts. They must work with accrediting bodies and state agencies that set policies to regulate teacher preparation.
In sum, when organizations do not promote unified vision and action, that outcome may not reflect individuals’ or subgroups’ conflicting beliefs or conflicting preferred practices. Seeing fragmentation brings into view how individuals or subgroups may not act on a shared vision or adopt shared practices because of misunderstanding, unclear goals, and the absence of agreed-upon processes for doing things such as coordinating action or resolving disagreements.
Defining Program Coherence as Process
We bring together our review of earlier scholars’ understandings about conceptual and structural coherence with the notion of coherence as process to propose a new definition of program coherence: Program coherence is an ongoing process of negotiating alignment among stakeholders’ various views regarding the ends of teacher education (conceptual elements) and aligning intended ends with the means used to achieve those ends (i.e., structural elements like courses, clinic experiences, and assignments). We further posit that an ongoing process of coming into greater or lesser alignment can be influenced by organizational unity, conflict, and fragmentation as these features of organizations coexist and fluctuate within teacher education programs.
To further explore the nature, facilitators, and challenges of enhancing program coherence, we bring this definition of coherence and conceptual framework to a case of program redesign that sought to enhance program coherence. We look within the case first to explore the extent and nature of changes individual instructors made when engaged in a program redesign around core practices. We consider whether the changes we document and other data from the program redesign indicate greater conceptual and/or structural coherence. We then use the data to examine facilitators and challenges of enhancing program coherence. First, however, we look briefly within extant scholarship to identify factors that may hinder coherence in teacher education programs.
Factors Hindering Coherence
Although few have studied the development of program coherence in teacher education (Hermansen, 2019), broader scholarship suggests several factors that would complicate efforts to promote teacher education program coherence.
Stakeholder Autonomy
Higher education faculty enjoy and expect autonomy in deciding course content, objectives, and teaching methods (Gappa & Austin, 2010). Teacher education programs face an additional challenge: Partner teachers in K–12 schools who might be asked to learn and model reform-oriented pedagogies also value their autonomy (Achinstein, 2002). Enhancing coherence would likely require stakeholders to yield autonomy regarding what and how they teach.
Differing Theoretical Lenses
Teacher educators bring diverse professional backgrounds and differing degrees of teaching experience in schools to their work (Cochran-Smith, 2003). They hold diverse world views developed through graduate training in a variety of disciplines. Diverse theoretical lenses are desirable for making sense of education but can complicate faculty establishing a shared vision, the foundation for conceptual coherence.
Challenges of Program Redesign
Efforts to enhance coherence must overcome factors that make program redesign difficult. Although concerns about schools of education and teacher preparation have existed for decades (Labaree, 2008), the structure and curriculum of teacher education programs have changed slowly over the decades for several reasons: State and national regulatory structures promote conformity and complicate innovation; prestige is conferred on faculty producing research rather than engaging in program redesign; at least in the past, limited accountability for the quality of programs and their graduates created limited pressure for change (Andrew, 2005). Factors limiting coherence—faculty autonomy, diverse faculty backgrounds, differing theoretical orientations—also complicate program redesign.
Local Institutional Practices and External Policy
Forces beyond the program itself can inform and limit efforts to promote coherence. Universities, as institutions, have unique characteristics, demands, and practices that affect efforts to enhance program coherence (Hermansen, 2019). For instance, established conventions for how things get done, governance structures, and the latest concerns or directives from university leadership influence how program leaders can and cannot work to enhance coherence (Hermansen, 2019). Beyond the university, governmental policy initiatives and requirements—such as edTPA—incentivize compliance at the expense of coherence (De Voto et al., 2021).
Method
Context: University of Connecticut Teacher Education Reorganizes Around Core Practices
This research occurred at the Neag School of Education, which is part of the University of Connecticut, a public university in the United States. The University of Connecticut Neag School graduates about 200 teachers each year in two teacher education programs, one a combined bachelor’s/master’s program and one a postbaccalaureate program leading to a master’s degree. Figure 1 lists the kinds of teacher certification offered.
More than two decades passed without any systematic effort to rethink or update the program. Starting 4 years before data collection, the Director of Teacher Education, third author of this article, joined the faculty and initiated a 3-year-long program revision process centered primarily on a practice-based teacher education (PBTE) model. Recent efforts to define PBTE highlight refocusing teacher education curriculum around a relatively small number of teaching practices considered “core” both to the daily work of teaching and to the subsequent development of more ambitious practice (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman, Compton, et al., 2009; Lampert et al., 2013). They also call for adopting pedagogies of enactment that build preservice teachers’ understanding of and fluency in enacting teaching practices that support equitable student learning (Boerst et al., 2011; Kang & Windschitl, 2018; Kavanagh, Conrad, & Dagogo-Jack, 2019). PBTE has generated some important concerns—and responses to those concerns—among scholars of teacher education (see Online Appendix A9).
The program redesign at the University of Connecticut, led by the third author, allowed faculty to read about and interact with other scholars and teacher educators who were investigating and implementing a PBTE model in their own programs (see Online Appendix A1 for details regarding shared reading). During the first year of the redesign efforts, a committee co-chaired by this article’s first author included faculty from across the program pathways. The committee nominated 19 core practices around which the program, as a whole, would refocus curriculum and pedagogy. Roughly one third of the practices adopted came from practices identified by TeachingWorks.org (n.d.) with minor revisions, about one third were significantly revised from TeachingWorks, and one third were identified by committee members. The Course Sequence committee presented and received feedback on its emerging work at monthly teacher education faculty meetings and at bimonthly meetings with partner teachers and administrators.
Faculty engaged in substantive conversations and disagreements about which practices the program should adopt during a year of intensive committee work and whole faculty and partner deliberation. Deliberation surfaced conflicting views. When it came to classroom management, for instance, special education faculty advocated for Positive Behavioral Supports (now known as PBIS) based on their expertise and a body of supportive scholarship. General education faculty wanted to emphasize student engagement, cultural responsiveness, and teachers’ knowledge of and relationship with their specific students as approaches to classroom management. In the face of this difference—and also in deciding whether/how to include explicit instruction and/or inquiry-oriented instruction as practices all teachers learn—faculty decided to include both approaches within the document specifying core practices.
Faculty and partners also integrated social justice frameworks into the core practices we adopted. As we interrogated our different understandings of equity and social justice, we added some specific practices (e.g., invite students to social action; use knowledge of students as individuals and members of cultural and social groups to inform instruction) and expanded others (e.g., design and sequence research-based pedagogical activities responsive to cultural, linguistic, ability, and other student differences). After several rounds of discussion and revision, the teacher education faculty and our K–12 partners voted unanimously to adopt a statement of 19 practices.
We used the newly adopted core practices as a tool to examine the nature, scope, and sequence of courses in the program, leading to the adoption, deletion, and resequencing of courses. Several existing courses were significantly revised. New courses included a second course on multicultural education and an early methods course with a field component in the secondary and elementary pathways. (The revised course scope and sequence is explained in Online Appendix A3.) The core practices also served as the basis on which many faculty chose to investigate and move toward pedagogies of practice identified by Grossman, Compton, et al. (2009) as useful for helping teacher candidates learn to enact practices:
Representations of practice, such as videos or transcripts of accomplished practice that make discrete practice visible and available for interrogation (Hurlbut & Krutka, 2020; McDonald et al., 2013);
Decomposition of practice, that is, identification of underlying principles and components of practice (Janssen et al, 2015; McDonald et al., 2014);
Approximations of practice, that is, bounded and scaffolded opportunities to try enacting or rehearsing practices in the university courses and/or field experiences (Kavanagh, Metz, et al., 2019; Lampert et al., 2013).
Readers interested in learning more about the actual redesign process or considering a redesign using core practices can consult (Anagnostopoulos, et al., 2018) or Online Appendices E and F, which provides a timeline of key events in the redesign and additional discussion about core practices.
The redesign efforts created the potential for improving conceptual and structural coherence at the program level. Conceptually, redesign specified a shared understanding of good teaching and learning in the form of the core practices that undergird effective instruction. In terms of structuring experiences that would help realize this shared vision, PBTE provided some teacher education pedagogies that could create more powerful opportunities for learning to enact core practices and created a shared vision to guide revisions to the course sequence.
Addressing Factors Hindering Coherence
The last section of this article identified factors hindering teacher education program coherence. Our redesign tried to address some of these factors.
To address the challenge of asking faculty to engage in collective program development that is not institutionally incentivized, we sought to limit others’ engagement to regularly schedule teacher education meetings and a few extra meetings; we also found some limited funds to pay faculty for summer work. While the diverse theoretical orientations and professional training of education faculty can hinder coherence, our next section describes how we sought to leverage such differences, putting diverse faculty in conversation with each other throughout our process. In addition, we honored stakeholder autonomy—another challenge for promoting coherence—by continuously inviting feedback and conversation that engaged both faculty and professionals in our partner schools, as described in the context section below. Online Appendix H further explores how this particular case of program redesign appeared to make progress with some factors that typically hinder coherence in teacher education programs.
Data Collection
We collected data to explore whether the redesign actually impacted instructors’ work and whether redesign promoted conceptual and structural coherence. To answer those questions, we interviewed 16 faculty members who engaged in the redesign—attending teacher education meetings where the core redesign work was done—and who taught required courses in the bachelor’s/master’s program. As the redesign focused on the junior and senior years of the program, we invited the most frequent instructors of courses required during these years to an interview. We obtained participation from faculty across the program pathways, as shown in Figure 2.
Participating faculty represent a variety of roles/pathways within the program.
Participants had between 3 and 18 years of prior experience teaching in the program. Additional details about participants, including their experience appear, in Online Appendix A4.
Instructors were interviewed regarding how they believed the redesign impacted them broadly before being asked more specifically about whether the redesign impacted: their course content; pedagogy; assignments; conversations with others regarding their teaching and how their course either led to or built on previous or subsequent courses; and the program at large. We then asked participants about their perceptions of shifts in the quality or quantity of unity, conflict, and fragmentation in the program (see interview protocol in Online Appendix B). The interviews averaged 44.94 min in length and consisted of eight main questions asked of everyone and eight prompts with follow-up questions asked whether participants had not already addressed a topic. As this exploratory case (Yin, 1994) aimed to illuminate key and complex phenomena in a real-world context, interviews were used to help capture the richness of participants’ experience and insights. Semi-structured interviews (Brenner, 2006) allowed follow-up questions and exploration of unexpected phenomena.
The first author conducted all interviews. While the first author’s intimate knowledge of the redesign efforts provided “insider” knowledge that helped facilitate rapport and trust with participants, it created potential pressure on interviewees to maintain face or change answers based on what they believed he might want to hear. Given this concern, the first author designed questions to reduce pressure on participants to report changes in their teaching/work based on the redesign. He followed up on vague answers about change, probing for specific changes in content, pedagogy, assignments, or consultation with colleagues. (For more on the nature, dynamics, and limitations of the interview, see Online Appendix A6.) We also invited faculty to provide corroborating documents (syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, etc.) to confirm and provide more insight into changes faculty self-reported during interviews. We received 20 syllabi and 22 other artifacts of instruction; see Online Appendix D for further detail about these documents.
While constructing our account of the redesign and supporting appendices, we also drew on teacher education faculty meeting minutes, a new form used by the Courses and Curriculum Committee, a new observation form focusing student teachers on core practices, and plans of study listing required courses before and after the redesign.
As a member check, we sent descriptions of changes we identified faculty making to nine participants. No one corrected our descriptions. We incorporated additional information participants provided into our analyses.
Data Analysis
The first author transcribed interviews to become familiar with the data. He read all interview data at least 5 times. He first wrote memos about individuals and captured emergent questions. He then engaged in iterative rounds of coding, starting with open coding (Brenner, 2006), allowing codes to emerge from data. He moved to closed coding informed by the conceptual framework. He checked on coding while reading all individuals’ responses one last time.
The first author devised and refined a coding tree. Codes allowed us to count the presence of things we wanted to identify—for example, self-reported changes in pedagogy—and to find and compare the qualities of things we had identified, that is, to look for patterns in how instructors reported shifting their pedagogy. Online Appendix A7 includes examples of inductive and deductive coding, the coding tree, and additional information about coding and double-coding.
The second author coded randomly selected data that the first author had also coded, discussed, and raised questions about codes and coding procedure, gave feedback on emergent results, and proposed additional implications.
The first author read the 42 artifacts of teaching provided by participants to illustrate key changes in practice they had identified. He identified sections of the documents that corroborated these changes and identified any of three PBTE pedagogies—representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice—that seemed to apply to new assignments.
The third and fourth author helped to design the study, develop implications, review findings, and draft this article.
Limitations
Researchers told interviewees that we would not mask the institution involved when sharing results given that another publication—Anagnostopoulos et al, 2019—and conference presentations had already identified our institution as a rare case of whole-program adoption of core practices and given our intention of citing the publication in this work. It is possible that interviewees were not as forthcoming or felt pressure to inflate what they said on the chance they would be identified. While interviewing, we could not sense interviewee’s concern about this, but we did suspect that some interviewees felt pressure to report impact of the redesign to look good in the eyes of a peer.
When interviewing in general—and interviewing fellow faculty in particular—power dynamics can influence what people will reveal. It is possible that the limits of asking individuals to self-report during interviews and/or the power dynamics of interviewing—especially with one untenured and three clinical faculty—influenced what participants chose to say. Our concerns about this are partially lessened by the fact that the first author—who conducted the interviews—has no supervisory role or authority over participants. Furthermore, the untenured and clinical faculty participating in this study were more likely than other participants to share criticism of the redesign or discuss the limits of redesign’s impact on their work.
Additional limitations of interviews conducted by insiders appear in Online Appendix A6.
Many—But Not All—Faculty Revised Course Content, Pedagogy, and/or Assignments
This section shares findings regarding whether and how participants in our case changed course content, pedagogy, or assignments in ways that appeared to promote coherence. In this case of whole program redesign around core practices, a majority—but not all—faculty responded to the redesign by making substantive changes in content, pedagogy, and/or assignments. Participants attributed these changes to the redesign. At the same time, some faculty made only superficial changes in ways that would make only minor contributions to coherence.
Shifting Content and/or Pedagogy in Response to Redesign With Core Practices
Of 16 instructors, 12 indicated that they changed their course content, pedagogy, and/or added or revised an assignment as a result of the redesign. The first three rows of Figure 3 show how many—and which—participants self-reported such changes and/or other actions that may reflect greater program coherence.
How participants self-reported change during—or impact of—redesign with core practices.
Course content
Of 16 faculty members, eight indicated that they had added or revised course content as a result of the redesign. Three instructors, for instance, stated that they now included direct instruction as a topic to be addressed in the course and linked this inclusion to the redesign’s exploration of including explicit instruction versus inquiry-oriented instruction. Other instructors added content related to facilitating instruction, inquiry, assessment, eliciting student ideas, and writing lesson objectives, all of which are practices specified in the Core Practice document; in other words, there is evidence that half of the instructors were adding content responding to a newly shared vision, thus helping to build conceptual coherence. Half of the instructors, however, either did not add new content to their course itself or only added assignments or pedagogies that got at core practices they had already been teaching. We take this as evidence that the redesign increased conceptual coherence among some instructors and courses but not among all.
Of the eight instructors who provided evidence of changing content, two added core practices specific to their discipline. The first of these instructors had focused on teaching or changing dispositions rather than practices before the redesign. Discussion of core practices led him to drop his resistance to directly teaching about practice. In his own words, he “radically reorganized” his course around a sequence of specific practices; he also used “a lot more peer teaching”—all students get 12 chances to rehearse these specific practices with peers—“with me giving direct coaching.” His 2017 syllabus showed both that these were new assignments compared with his 2013 assignments and that these assignments—listed as “Assignments to gain abilities in core practices”—counted for 2,200 of the total 4,000 points students could earn in the course. The new content consisted of six practices he had identified as being critical to his discipline rather than the program-wide core practices. He thus concluded of the redesign work that . . .the way it has changed my practice has been a very individual thing. . . I went off and made it my own. That’s what I found more valuable than the mapping of when we’re going to address each practice. . . I think obviously the practices are important, and there are a good set of practices we have. But . . . I’ve kind of developed my own core practices.
A second methods instructor sought out a textbook that addressed core practices specific to her discipline and then did an explicit “crosswalk”—or cross-referencing—of these practices, her field’s national standards, and the program’s core practices to see how she might integrate and expand on them. This professor—who was new to teacher education—said the core practices gave her “something to kind of construct my curriculum around.” She shared evidence suggesting that she had designed her courses around core practices from both our program and her discipline and was using pedagogies associated with PBTE. The first objectives for her methods courses were to “allow you to identify and deconstruct high leverage teaching practices” and “enact these practices.” The instructor created (and shared with us) two matrices she made. One helped her identify where all 19 of the teacher education program’s core practices were being addressed in courses across the program’s 3 years; it also showed where and how she addressed eight of the core practices in a junior year methods course and 10 of the core practices in a senior year methods course while seeking to build on her preservice teachers’ prior courses and experience with core practices. Another matrix helped her see how she was assessing various core practices through “microteaching,” online discussion of how teachers were seeing practices represented in clinical experiences, and other assignments.
Pedagogy
Of 16 faculty members, eight indicated that the redesign led them to adopt a new pedagogy. In addition to refocusing the curriculum on core practices, as noted earlier, a PBTE model refocuses teacher educators’ pedagogy around three learning experiences: (a) decomposition of practices into their elemental parts, (b) representations of core teaching practices, and (c) approximations of practices in which candidates gain experience and feedback while enacting practices (Grossman, Compton, et al., 2009). We identified four examples of decomposition of practice, four examples of representing practice, and six uses of approximations of practices that instructors linked to the redesign and that we corroborated using syllabi or other artifacts of instructors’ work. These do not include several cases where instructors were already using microteaching or decomposing practice in some form before the redesign. When talking about adopting such pedagogies, one of these instructors noted that she is “definitely not a content deliverer anymore, that has gone out the window.” She saw the redesign as one of several influences that led to that outcome.
Assignments
Looking at changes in assignments provides another data point to explore whether instructors made important shifts in response to the redesign. Of 16 professors, 10 added or revised one or more assignments.
Three instructors adopted new video assignments that required planning and/or implementing core practices with students and then reflecting on the video of their instruction. One professor, for instance, created a new “Explicit Instruction Lesson Plan” project that included a lesson template and directions to scaffold preservice teachers “using explicit instruction” in one lesson and designing a second “that includes exploration, investigation, and/or problem solving,” according to the assignment instructions. During our interview, the instructor described how ongoing interactions during the redesign helped her learn “clear guidelines for explicit instruction” and “helped me think about this stuff, so yes, it [the redesign] impacted my teaching.”
Four instructors created assignments requiring approximations of practice—microteaching focused on one or more practices—in class. In one case, this was a rehearsal for later doing some teaching in clinic. One team of instructors created a new course that “intentionally included” an assignment that provided candidates opportunities to lead discussions in the class and get feedback. The assignment sheet names five key components of effective discussions—reflecting what PBTE scholars consider decomposition of practice into key parts or principles—and a second set of prompts further scaffolds teachers developing this targeted practice.
Minimal Impact on Some Faculty
The redesign appeared to have limited or no impact on five of 16 participants.
For two of the instructors we placed in this “minimal impact” category, we could see changes in their syllabi, but what they told us during interview—and what we saw in syllabi—made clear that they were responding to new national standards in their field and their desire to focus on disciplinary practices.
Two of the five faculty in our “minimal impact” group stated that they adopted new language to help link content or skills they already taught to the core practices without providing evidence of making substantive changes in content or pedagogy. While one of these instructors referenced a pedagogical approach associated with PBTE—approximations of practice—which we had read about and discussed in our meetings, our probing during the interview suggests this instructor had not changed his pedagogy. Another instructor we put into this minimal impact category told us “to be 100% honest, I don’t think I’ve changed a thing. It’s probably more it reinforced or helped me think about how these things I’m already doing fit in with the core practices.”
Impact on Conceptual and Structural Coherence
The data shared above show that in this case of program redesign, work with core practices enhanced program coherence even as it had minimal impact on some faculty. Many—but clearly not all—faculty made changes in response to a newly shared vision of good instruction involving core practices. We relied first on interviews to help us understand these changes and how participants experienced their relationship to the redesign. We have corroborating data to show instructors making 11 specific changes in course content (see Online Appendix D Column 2 for descriptions of changes and corroborating data). These data suggest that the redesign promoted a common vision for good instruction that led instructors to include new content related to core practices; that shared conception and the shifts many faculty made to address it comprises enhanced conceptual coherence. With regard to structural coherence, faculty intentionally created opportunities for candidate learning that aligned with their shared conceptual vision. We corroborated 13 examples of such pedagogies with more than one data source, as detailed in Online Appendix D Column 3; we corroborated 14 new or revised assignments (see Online Appendix D Column 4).
The Facilitators and Challenges of Coherence
Although increasing coherence has been viewed as important to improving teacher education, few efforts have been made to identify and theorize the factors or processes that support its development in teacher education programs (or program redesign; see Carroll et al., 2007; Hammerness, 2006; Online Appendix C). Earlier in this article, we reviewed literature to suggest factors that can limit coherence earlier in this article. We now step back to consider how viewing the case through our conceptual framework suggests some specific factors that can promote coherence and some additional challenges to program coherence. We close with our reconceptualization of coherence as a process affected by unity, conflict, and fragmentation.
Viewing Our Case Through the Lens of Organizational Unity
Participants thought redesign increased organizational unity
We gave interviewees a definition of organizational unity (see Online Appendix B) and asked whether the redesign process was “shifting the balance—or changing the nature—of the
Working on shared and consequential products as a facilitator of coherence
While nine participants saw faculty having more sense of shared vision or outcomes, one explicitly noted her belief that “we aren’t necessarily united around a shared cause 100%. . . I still kind of feel like we’re all working in our own little silos.” This faculty member joined the program after the process of articulating core practices—of producing the “core practice document”—was largely completed. Her perception raises the possibility that the initial deliberations about core practices were important in helping others achieve the sense of shared vision and shared outcomes that they reported. This possibility is further supported by what participants told us while talking about organizational unity. One participant pointed to the agreement on the core practice document as both an important outcome and a process that newly defined “who we are as an organization”: For sure I think we have defined maybe too many [core practices], but we have defined some clear outcomes. I think that’s really important. As I said, I think the process of getting there illuminated a lot within our program. . . the end result is we all have a document that whether we agree with every word or semi-colon or whatever in the document, we have agreed to sort of live by, and those are the skills we want students in our program to leave with, and that defines who we are as an organization and what a Neag education should mean.
Others, when asked broadly about the redesign process’s impact “on the teacher education program as a whole,” said the process created “a kind of common vision of what the shared outcomes could be,” “defined clearly what we want our students to leave with,” or stated that “we’re all focused on the same set of practices.”
We thus propose that a redesign which focuses participants on creating a shared product that has consequences—such as new assessments, a new vision and mission statement, or a core practice document—may promote organizational unity and coherence.
Program redesign as a facilitator of coherence
The redesign not only led faculty with differing views and commitments to agree on a shared document conceptualizing good teaching; it also led to coordination and communication across courses. Of 16 faculty members, nine gave us specific examples of conversations they had had to better understand the content and nature of others’ courses and/or to coordinate with other faculty. Of these nine, six cited examples of work that would promote understanding of and coordination with content covered in required courses shared across the program rather than courses within their own certification pathway. Of the 16 interviewees, 11 teach in specific program pathways where at least one other colleague teaches courses for the pathway; six of these 11 participants described how the redesign facilitated their efforts to communicate and coordinate across courses within their own pathway. We view these as examples of organizational unity—of organizations’ potential to unite individuals into both adopting shared outcomes and acting in ways that help an organization achieve those outcomes. Our case shows that redesign can promote such coordinated action as a result of an intentional redesign and that more coordinated action can result in enhanced structural and conceptual coherence.
Too much unity as a potential challenge
Our focus on organizational unity also revealed downsides to promoting organizational unity. Several faculty members indicated that full unity should not be the goal and/or had potential downsides. One preferred to have “more diversity of ideas” than to have “a program where preservice teachers keep getting the same thing over and over.” Another stated, “innovation, change, and learning occur when people deal with their differences. So I don’t think you ever want to have total unity.” A rigid or imposed unity may lead instructors to “go underground” and do their own thing in their individual classrooms, increasing fragmentation. Thus, we posit that coherence may not only require maximizing unity while minimizing conflict and fragmentation. It might also require harnessing conflict and fragmentation. We next explore how conflict may contribute to coherence.
Viewing Our Case Through the Lens of Organizational Conflict/Difference
Participants thought redesign surfaced organizational conflict
Our conceptual framework highlights the sides of organizations revealed by focusing on “conflict” and “fragmentation,” that is, organizations’ capacity to harbor significant differences in what individuals and subgroups believe or value and the potential for individuals and subgroups to act without knowing each other’s values, actions, or practices.
Although we did not ask participants to assess whether conflict was good or bad, six participants indicated that the presence of conflict—or the work of exposing it—was a good thing. Other instructors who did not directly assess the role of conflict as good or bad remembered key points of difference during the process that seemed to be important for the redesign. The redesign seemed to bring conflict to the surface rather than drastically increasing or reducing the presence of differing beliefs and disagreements over them. One instructor told us that “there have been some really good productive conversations around. . . tension between a more explicit instruction approach and a more constructivist inquiry-based approach. . . this has maybe given us a way to grapple with this.” Another observed that it “felt like the conversations haven’t tried to gloss over the differences or conflict. It has been helpful . . . people have changed in their perceptions and understandings of those different approaches to teaching.”
Exploration of conflicting beliefs or practices as a facilitator of coherence
At the broadest level, we conclude that the work of actively exploring differing beliefs—of creating tools, activities, and/or safe spaces for identifying and exploring why and how faculty hold differing prized values and approaches—creates the opportunity to turn mixed messages into complimentary tools or ideas that are intentionally juxtaposed or included. One general education methods instructor, for instance, told us she changed in her understanding of direct instruction after seeking out and learning from a special education colleague and participating in small group discussions as part of redesign. She was now incorporating explicit instruction—a core practice—more deeply while giving preservice teachers the support and requirement to practice writing lessons instantiating inquiry-oriented instruction and direct instruction. Other participants similarly attributed their shifts regarding explicit/direction instruction or inquiry-oriented instruction to explorations of difference that occurred during the redesign. Exploring conflicting views may help individuals adopt or at least understand and consciously compliment their peers’ differing values, practices, and expertise. Further research might seek to clarify whether, when, and how faculty addressing the organizational reality of conflict can contribute to rethinking the means and ends of teacher education.
Work with core practices may surface conflict and promote conceptual coherence
Program-wide articulation and adoption of core practices could be particularly helpful for surfacing otherwise unexplored conflicting beliefs. One participant said that the process of working with core practices “highlighted some differences. . . that’s a good thing. I think it’s important to understand a variety of different views on teaching. . . I’m more aware of some of those differences and the overall skills covered in our program because of the work.” Another faculty member specifically identified coming to consensus on core practices as useful for exposing conflict: I think the process gave us a way to expose and talk about differences that wasn’t there before. So prior to trying to identify these core practices, I might have had assumptions about who thought what, but there wasn’t a way to directly talk about it or sort of hash things out . . . the process facilitated a way to have some of those conversations that both made the conflict more apparent, but also provided a way to kind of work through—or a purpose for it [working through difference] as opposed to you know, before the process, it didn’t really matter if someone had a different view.
This case study suggests that diverse faculty with preexisting differences in beliefs—and instructors whose work has become fragmented and less familiar to each other—may benefit from jointly identifying core practices. Articulating core practices can prompt generative exploration of opposing views—and consensus-seeking—about the initial set of teaching practices that novices should master. Online Appendix F offers additional discussion of core practices in program redesign, including whole program versus pathway-specific adoption of core practices and the affordance of PBTE for promoting structural coherence.
Viewing Our Case Through the Lens of Organizational Fragmentation
Participants thought fragmentation was reduced by redesign and persisted
Of 16 instructors, 10 indicated that fragmentation had decreased as a result of the redesign. Ten instructors also told us that fragmentation continued to exist in some way. One instructor saw the redesign process as more successful in surfacing fragmentation than resolving it.
Fragmentation can continue through redesign and limit coherence
Based on theory, fragmentation—of people, efforts, and understandings within organizations—is a force hindering coherence in the absence of efforts to address misunderstandings and uncoordinated efforts.
Some scholarship has suggested that intentional efforts can overcome fragmentation and influence participating instructors and supervisors in ways that enhance coherence (Canrinus et al., 2017; Hammerness, 2006). In the case presented in this article, five of 16 instructors seemed minimally impacted by redesign, suggesting an insight complimenting such scholarship: Fragmentation can continue to limit coherence, even in cases where teacher education programs promote a collective and inclusive process of reimagining the ends and means of teacher education.
“Pathway fragmentation” may be inevitable and “pathway flexibility” may be desirable for program coherence
Choosing to engage in whole program redesign rather than pathway redesign creates the potential for more coherence across more courses (see Figure 1; see Online Appendix F for additional discussion of whole-program vs. pathway-specific redesign). Whole program redesign can also be stymied by fragmentation. This case of whole program redesign helped us see the potential for faculty engaged in a common redesign to return to their programs and implement redesign differently. Below, we discuss such “pathway fragmentation,” the possibility of reconceiving of this fragmentation as “pathway flexibility,” and such flexibility’s complex relationship to program coherence.
Three faculty members in our case prioritized disciplinary practices and imperatives over core practices the program adopted. A fourth was seeking to give equal attention to program-wide core practices and discipline-specific core practices. These choices were not the result of conflicting beliefs, that is, conflict. These participants praised the core practices they were not adopting. Their choice did not result from lack of awareness of this program-wide vision of good teaching, that is, from organizational fragmentation. On one hand, their choice revealed fragmented effort and outcomes coming out of the redesign. These instructors’ disciplinary identities and the structure of the teacher education program seemed to produce “pathway fragmentation,” or a lack of unified action toward shared ends resulting from the presence of multiple pathways. Thus, in whole-program redesign, individual faculty in different pathways may quietly redirect or adapt an initially coherent redesign approach or set of beliefs. Such quiet individual decisions could be seen as undesirable as they likely weaken efforts to promote coherence.
On the other hand, the instructors’ responses to the program redesign illustrate the importance of recognizing and allowing for “pathway flexibility,” or room for individuals to adapt and enact changes in ways that suit their differing needs and responsibilities. Figure 1 captures a structural reality of most teacher education programs: Different certification pathways exist. Pathways position participating faculty to be torn between serving shared needs of a whole program and the specific needs of preparing teachers for different roles and disciplines.
Faculty have indicated a preference for bottom-up redesign that engages faculty (Hurlbut & Krutka, 2020; see also Gappa & Austin, 2010). Faculty who do not engage with, shape, and understand a specific redesign may resist changes or respond to them only superficially. Teacher educators responsible for preparing different kinds of teachers or playing different roles in a teacher education program may need room to interpret and instantiate redesign in different ways. Thus, pathway flexibility—the ways in which faculty in different certification pathways shift the nature or intent of some broad redesign approach of focus to suit their own vision and the needs of their preservice teachers or disciplines—may even contribute to coherence to a degree if these different pathways’ decisions are not orthogonal to the shared vision or focus adopted by a specific redesign. The teacher educator who said, “I went off and made it my own,” identified disciplinary rather than adopting program-wide core practices, but this instructor did make a significant shift to emphasize practices and to use pedagogies of enactment as a result of the redesign. One other faculty member adopting disciplinary practice alongside the program-wide core practices chose to adopt pedagogies of enactment she had not been using, thus structuring learning opportunities consistent with the redesign.
To the extent that pathway flexibility represents incoherence, it might be desirable incoherence. Redesign that aims to eradicate pathway fragmentation may deprive programs of differences that help create a positive and necessary space for subgroups to do things differently. Those differences may also allow teachers graduating from different pathways to bring differentiated and complementary skills to their future schools. Further research might explore the nature, types, and desirable or problematic outcomes associated with pathway fragmentation and flexibility.
Coherence as a Process Affected by Unity, Conflict, and Fragmentation
What is the nature of coherence? Coherence in teacher education programs has often been described as a condition or state (Richmond et al., 2019); it has been seen as having conceptual (Hammerness, 2012; Tatto, 1996) and structural components (Hammerness, 2006). We defined program coherence as an ongoing process of conceptual elements—stakeholders’ various views regarding the means and ends of teacher education—coming into more or less alignment with each other and with the structural elements (courses and clinic experiences) of the program.
Based on our participants’ ability to describe the past and present existence of shared vision, differences in opinion, and fragmentation, we propose that coherence unfolds over time—it is an ongoing process—influenced by a dynamic flux of three features of organizations: unity, conflict, and fragmentation. Unless surfaced and addressed, conflict and fragmentation seem likely to hurt coherence by producing “contradictory practices and mixed messages” (Hammerness, 2006, p. 1245). Efforts that produce some increased coherence also seem likely to have short-lived impact if they do not acknowledge and work with conflict and fragmentation.
If instructors are aware of and explicit about some different ways of seeing issues, they can enhance coherence by helping future teachers see the affordances of different practices and the different benefits of various approaches to or conceptions of good teaching. Conflict and fragmentation are not simply the opposite of coherence, or negative qualities to be overcome to maximize unified views of the means and ends of teacher preparation. In the case presented in this article, participants observed and valued “a diversity of ideas,” the chance to “hash things out” when they had differing ideas, and the opportunity to explore the differing beliefs or practices they had not previously understood, such as direct instruction. A majority of instructors observed that fragmentation had decreased; a majority also contended that fragmentation continued. All of this suggests that conflict—differing notions of ends and means—and lack of understanding about others’ work (fragmentation) existed before the redesign, were surfaced by it and will persist even in a case that enhanced coherence. Surfacing conflict and fragmentation contributed to coherence.
What we saw also confirms theorists’ contention that conflict and fragmentation are inevitable features of organizations (Martin, 2002). The constant presence and flux of these organizational realities along with features supporting unity bolsters the case for seeing coherence as an ongoing process rather than a state that is achieved.
Conclusion
Scholars have called for promoting coherence in teacher education programs. Many factors make program coherence difficult to achieve; however, scant research has sought to examine what promotes program coherence. This article shared a case of one program redesign showing how program coherence is a process of working to align faculty’s vision of the means and ends of teacher education with each other’s vision and with structural opportunities for candidate learning. This process happened amid—and was affected by—the simultaneous organizational realities of unity, conflict, and fragmentation. Promoting greater coherence can be understood as more than just maximizing unity, or unified views of the means and ends of teacher preparation. Both theory and the case data suggest that the presence of conflict and fragmentation may be inevitable features of organizations and that the work of surfacing conflict and fragmentation contributes to a dynamic process of creating greater coherence. We identified the potential for pathway fragmentation or for the presence of multiple different certification pathways to produce fragmentation of efforts and understanding that challenge coherence. Programs that reconceive of this fragmentation as “pathway flexibility” may allow redesign efforts to proceed while being adjusted to suit the differing needs of different kinds of teachers. In addition, this article’s case study has shown that program redesign and/or the use of core practices may impact many—and not all—faculty members’ decisions about course content, pedagogy, and assignments in ways that promote program coherence.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-jte-10.1177_00224871221108645 – Supplemental material for Exploring the Nature, Facilitators, and Challenges of Program Coherence in a Case of Teacher Education Program Redesign Using Core Practices
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jte-10.1177_00224871221108645 for Exploring the Nature, Facilitators, and Challenges of Program Coherence in a Case of Teacher Education Program Redesign Using Core Practices by Thomas H. Levine, Glenn Tatsuya Mitoma, Dorothea M. Anagnostopoulos and Rene Roselle in Journal of Teacher Education
Footnotes
Author Note
Glenn Mitoma, the second author of this paper, is now affiliated with the University of California Santa Cruz.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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