Journal of Teacher Education

The study was designed to trouble the commonsense notion in the field that cohorts, groups of students who move through an educational program together, provide the optimal structure for preparing future teachers. Using collaborative inductive methods, this study by two university researchers of their teaching within a preservice education program explored the following questions: What is the relationship between the positive aspects of being a community and students’ ability and willingness to become critical practitioners? What happens to relationships between students and between students and faculty when there are ruptures or critical incidents within the community? How is the role of faculty members teaching cohorts different from the role of faculty members teaching classes organized in more traditional ways? The study raises questions about various factors that affect community within the cohort and about differences between students’ and faculty’s perceptions of critical ruptures within the classroom.

Prompted by the continuing attrition rate of novice teachers, this study examines 1st-year teachers’ needs in the context of a university-regional partnership sponsored support program for novice teachers, the Novice Teacher Support Project (NTSP). Using the concept of reality shock as occurring in the interaction of person and environment, the authors examined novice teachers’ expressed needs and how those needs are met. Throughout all the findings, the novice teachers expressed a need for safety, a mix of support and challenge that was best provided by a combination of both internal resources from the district and external resources such as the NTSP. The authors suggest conceptualizing support as an interactive process that includes person, school context, support context, and personal relationships. This can help support the creation of the type of emotionally and professionally safe environments new teachers need to develop their professional lives.

The authors trace their work with mentor teachers in a southwestern U.S. professional development school. These mentors met to tell, write, share, and analyze stories of their experiences as mentors to preservice teachers. As the authors worked with several groups of teachers, they began to analyze the processes involved in the sessions. An outcome of the authors’ discussions was the idea of transactional inquiry, a method grounded in narrative inquiry, transactional literacy theory, and literary analysis. Transactional inquiry provides a vehicle for teachers to reflect on their own and others’ professional development, identify lessons from their teaching, and connect with other teachers through the inquiry process. This article describes the evolution of transactional inquiry as well as the mentors’ stories and sharing.

Feminist poststructural theories of subjectivity posit a notion of the self as a site of disunity and conflict that is always in process and constructed within power relations. In teacher education, this theory of subjectivity troubles the notion of a predetermined, unified teacher identity assumed to emerge if a novice follows a linear, already-completed path of the student teaching experience. This article presents the story of Annie, a young woman learning to teach under the guidance of two cooperating teachers, Candace and Sheila, who espoused opposing discourses of teaching and mentoring. Deconstruction of Annie’s experience illuminates how her subjectivities shifted between competing discourses within the discursive field of her student teaching experience. Annie’s becoming a teacher was a wrenching, uneven process as she constructed her teacher subjectivities while situated within the unstable relationships between power, knowledge, and experience. Annie’s experience of learning to teach offers a postmodern perspective on the normalizing assumptions and discourses embedded in current teacher education practices.

Student teacher supervision, with few exceptions, remains a teacher-centered enterprise. Typical supervision policies, procedures, and forms focus on teachers’ observable behaviors. They grant authority to the perceptions of the supervisor/teacher. The concerns, questions, professional knowledge, and deliberative processes of the student teacher/learner are secondary, if they are considered at all. In this self-study, the authors explore alternatives to teacher-centered supervision by first supervising each other in their own learner-centered college classrooms, then extrapolating what was learned to their student teaching supervision. Data analysis yielded themes of responsibility, power, and purpose; challenges to the lesson as the unit of analysis and standard sources of data on student teachers’ work; and the importance of the social construction of roles and meanings. The authors’ intent is not to put forward yet another model of student teacher supervision but to describe a process of coconstructing supervision with student teachers so that the student teacher/learner is at the center.