Building activities and assignments from the K-12 websites
Teachers adopt practices from a myriad of sources, including books,
colleagues, and teacher education courses. The K-12 web sites offer
teacher educators several possibilities to introduce promising literacy
practices that may be absent from student teaching classrooms. At
times, the work of experienced teachers proves to be most useful to
student teachers, as veteran teachers often articulate strongly held
beliefs that underlie their practice. At other times, images of newer
teachers who are perhaps nearer in age or of teachers who share a
similar teaching context might provide more easily accessible examples
of practices.
The elementary literacy teachers' sites on Inside Teaching include an
array of teaching strategies. Several sites focus on Reader’s Workshop,
and feature students and teachers reading aloud, partner reading, and
making recordings of reading. In addition to these activities, the
strategy of making connections (e.g., text-to-text and text-to-self) is
explored from both student and teacher perspectives. Teachers offer
insight into their teaching decisions and describe how they choose
literature that connects to students' lives and to their units of
study.
Strategies for teaching prospective teachers with images of practices
The teaching approaches of the teacher educators featured here may
be helpful to other teacher educators who would like to incorporate
K-12 sites web sites into their elementary literacy courses. The
strategies for making use of the K-12 web sites mirror the trajectory
of the elementary literacy course. Initially, teacher educators
structure activities and assignments that provide a broad spectrum of
images for the student teachers to explore and discuss, such as the
assignment that Cindy Pease Alvarez constructed. Alvarez's assignment
asked students to view a literacy lesson in pairs. To structure the
students’ subsequent discussion of Reader's Workshop, she provided a
set of questions focusing on the rationale for the teacher’s actions.
Following the discussion, prospective teachers wrote a reflection paper
about what they learned from the images of practice and the discussion.
In this way, Alvarez helped her students become familiar with the web
sites and supported them in thinking about a high leverage practice.
After such introductory activities, the student teachers may
participate in classroom assignments designed to provide first-hand
experience and the opportunity to critique and reflect, such as Linda
Kroll's structured observation of one K-12 teacher's teaching, Jennifer
Myers. As students viewed video footage of Myers’ literacy classroom,
they posed questions and drew connections between the web site
materials and their own field placements experiences. To help novices
to better understand the strategies under discussion, some teacher
educators ask students to adapt and enact these practices in their
student teaching placements. Linda Kroll, for example, extended the
initial observation by asking student teachers to conduct a Guided
Reading Lesson, to videotape it, and to write a reflection about the
experience. Teacher educators may use such strategies in an iterative
manner rather than in a strictly linear progression, aiming to expose
student teachers to images of K-12 practice in ways that enrich and
expand notions about what is possible in elementary literacy
classrooms.
Examples of prospective teacher learning
The elementary literacy teacher educators documented here offer
multiple images and representations of prospective teacher learning,
from students' written reflections to conversations focusing on the
K-12 sites. The variety of prospective teacher work evident in the
teacher educator websites reflects the range of approaches to teaching
literacy as well as the influences of local context. For example, Kathy
Schultz's website captures - through text and images - a student's
three-fold progression from investigating the literacy practice of
reading texts aloud, to trying it out in her fieldwork, to her
reflection on her experience.
We have just begun to develop strategies such as these to capture
what student teachers learn from the K-12 web sites. We aim to grow
more sophisticated with our future efforts as we follow student
teachers during their first few years of teaching. We hope we will
capture what student teachers learn from this work and how it shapes
their practices and abilities to make decisions and to negotiate
curriculum - and the new and sometimes difficult circumstances of
literacy in elementary classrooms.
Perspectives