TEAM 5

PT3 Proposal
Steve Koziol and Les Burns

In the English education program, we feel that it is important to provide more and more authentic kinds of teaching experiences to pre-service teachers in order that they may begin to move toward automaticity in their inquiry and reflection as teachers. "In order to move toward automaticity, one must practice the frame "until its application…becomes fluent" (Schank, 1995, p. 48). Perkins (1987) explains, when making a thinking frame automatic, one first must practice on simple examples. We believe that our students would be best served by creating a set of case studies based on their own teaching, both as individuals and as a community of collaborating pre-service teachers. Web-based hypermedia technology offers a valuable set of resources for the development of such a program, and we are eager to explore its possibilities in order to learn how technology can support, inform, and expand our repertoires as both teachers of English and English teacher educators.

We propose a design project in which English education faculty and graduate assistants develop a web-based hypermedia platform for creating and utilizing a case-based curriculum for seniors in the TE 401/402 English methods sequence. These 401/402 experiences would serve as a foundation for students as they engage in the performance expectations and assessment tasks of the internship year.

Significance of the problem:

We have speculated that pre-service teachers often struggle to learn a stance of inquiry that will help them to connect theories presented in a methods course with their own past experience and with their early experiences in the field as they learn to teach. Lacking a context for use of theory beyond the abstract reinforces the belief in student teachers that such theories are impractical and blocks most transfer of theory to practice. Libby, Koziol, and Allen (1992) found that the "contextualization of knowledge in cases enables the pre-service teacher to anchor new knowledge and concepts in pedagogy more substantially in relation to their own prior knowledge and experience as students, their beliefs and value structure about teaching and learning, and evolving perspectives about teaching from classroom teaching and observing experiences." We feel that such a context provides student teachers with the means of addressing important central tasks of learning to teach, especially the early identification and exploration of assumptions about teaching and learning that otherwise serve as tacit filters for what is and is not valuable in theory for learning to teach, and the development of a beginning repertoire of teaching methods (Feiman-Nemser, 2000).

While there is already a developing body of evidence supporting the use of case studies in teacher education, we would like to explore the ways in which technology could be used to both broaden and focus such a curriculum to facilitate the creation of inquiry communities through the use of student-created texts in the teaching of English. In the current conception of the English teaching laboratory, pre-service teachers read and respond to a set of published cases on central issues in the teaching of English and practice designing and teaching focused lessons on topics and concepts in the English curriculum as well as participating as "students" in the lessons of their peers. These practice lessons are videotaped. Time constraints limit the opportunities for group discussion of these episodes during the lab, although each lab student prepares a detailed self-analysis of each practice experience using the videotape and following a debriefing protocol. While Schon (1987) suggests that artificial environments such as these do not allow for the uncertainty and instability inherent in authentic teaching performances, cases and laboratory experiences are not intended to expose students to every bit of information a teacher ought to know or to capture the full complexity of diverse classrooms. Rather, cases are meant to be generalizable and to portray "…dramatic contexts of real problems that English teachers might face in relation to the teaching of reading, writing, literature and drama in the English classroom" (Minnick, 2000) and laboratory experiences are intended to provide intentionally less-complicated environments for prospective teachers to engage in initial teaching acts involving priority teaching actions.

The current curriculum for TE401/402 in English education attempts to provide students with the opportunity to teach in a laboratory environment in conjunction with their participation in the 401/402 seminar. But, it is our feeling that these experiences could be better articulated to create sites for student inquiry across the seminar, lab, and field components of the course. Further, we feel that in using cases created in the context of the lab as central texts for the entire course, our students would be better served by learning how to examine and reflect on their own practice as a legitimate application of theory, inquiry, and collaboration in teaching. Dewey (1904/1965) called for teacher educators to help pre-service teachers learn how to value and use experience educatively as they learn to teach, and Sibbert (1997) found that in lab work "consistent patterns of discourse emerged in which student teachers identified issues of …case studies by first relating those issues to personal experiences in order to understand them, and, in doing so, pointed to solutions that called for a broader pedagogical viewpoint than first imagined" (Cited in Minnick, 2000).

Team Leadership, Technology, and Impact

We would like to create a PT3 design team led by Dr. Stephen Koziol that takes the creation and use of student-generated teaching cases to a more articulated and well-scaffolded level. Digital video recording of initial teaching performances in laboratory classrooms during the fall and in field placements during the spring semester would allow those performances to become the text and site of inquiry for both craft and pedagogy in the teaching of English. More than using technology as a method of display, the creation of video cases would involve the use of multi-media platforms to explore pedagogical problems across cases and promote both reflection on and inquiry into the students' teaching with the goal of creating strong connections between theory and the practice of students learning to teach in the English education program. Using a web-based interface, cases could be posted and include lesson plans, notes, spaces for chat and dialogue journals, and links to supplemental texts on theory and practice associated with particular cases. Organized chronologically by student teacher, or grouped based on targeted management and subject matter issues addressed in the teaching lab, such a database could be utilized as a primary text of the 401/402 methods course. Students could reflect on and analyze their own teaching and also work with other students to explore problems of teaching across multiple cases and contexts through their laboratory work, thereby deepening their understanding of the essential pedagogical challenges they are likely to face later on in their work as teachers. The types of tasks students engage in during the 401/402 sequence are foundational and can be built upon as priorities for professional development during the internship year.
We envision the process and use of technology as follows. As a first step in the fall semester, students would utilize time in an English teaching laboratory taken in conjunction with 401 to adapt model lessons in the teaching of writing and language use (the content emphasis in TE 401) which focus on the use of priority pedagogical processes (e.g. explanation, discussion, group work) and implement them. Over time, students would learn to design and construct lessons on their own and to take advantage of existing lessons that would be useful to their classroom work. Each student performance would be recorded to digital video and catalogued on a course website. Using their own lessons, students would next create case studies of their own work by focusing on a perceived problem in their own teaching. Earlier incarnations of this format utilized at the University of Pittsburgh have yielded positive results (Koziol et al., 1999; Minnick, 2000). These cases would be linked to the corresponding videos already posted on the website.

In the second step of this recurring process, students would post their notes and journal reflections surrounding the lesson they taught in the lab to the website. The result of collecting these artifacts would be a site for exploration and inquiry into the students' processes of learning as they practice constructing and executing lessons for the first time.

In the third step of this process, students would next use the battery of artifacts emerging from their lab work to lead discussions in the seminar portion of the 401 course. Students would use the questions they developed at the conclusion of their own case studies to pursue relevant issues connecting their lab work to the main course seminar and to their field work. These presentations would serve multiple purposes. Students would gain valuable experience and guided practice in leading discussions about teaching. Further, students would be given the practice necessary in shaping habits for independent as well as collaborative reflection and inquiry as they developed a vocabulary and a stance that supported such habits. Finally, students would also be in a position to form valuable insights into and understandings of the ways in which theory informs practice in teaching, and vice versa.

In the spring semester of TE 402, students would repeat these three steps to develop cases from the lessons they implement in the context of their field placements. Once again, lessons would emphasize the use of explanation, discussion and group work, on this time in the context of the teaching of literature, which is the content focus of TE 402.

Over the course of both semesters, students could develop teaching portfolios wherein each student would use video streamed performances of his/her own teaching to develop a series of cases across a semester or year and use that portfolio as a site of reflection and an assessment of growth, learning, and transfer of skill in the teaching of English. Ideally, the case work and collaboration undertaken in the 401/402 sequence would facilitate a stance of reflection and inquiry. Further, such work would support the transfer of theory and pedagogy to future practice during the internship year and into their teaching careers that is highly valued within the MSU program for teacher education.