When How We Teach is What We Teach: Teacher Educators as Instructional Models for Novice Teachers

Authors

• William Waychunas, Bradley UniversityFollow

ORCID

0000-0002-8928-8527

Abstract

Teacher education programs have struggled to overcome the apprenticeship of observation, or the tendency for preservice teachers (PSTs) to replicate the traditional or problematic forms of teaching from their K–12 experience. However, the field tends to assume that PSTs draw only on instructional models from K–12, overlooking higher-education instructors such as professors, other faculty, and teacher educators as sources of pedagogical inspiration and guidance. This study uses data from a longitudinal investigation tracing the development of nine secondary social studies teachers to focus on how the modeling and demonstration of practice within coursework by teacher educators shaped PSTs’ understanding, impressions, and future use of program-endorsed methods. Findings suggest that modeling and demonstrations of practices by teacher educators, both explicit and implicit, have the potential to expose PSTs to unfamiliar methods, often legitimizing practices and convincing them of the value of more rigorous approaches. In many cases, convincingly modeled methods by course instructors even upended PSTs’ initial skepticism about specific practices and led to their use in early-career teaching. The inverse was also true: Methods that were modeled ineffectively or received poorly discouraged PSTs from adopting such approaches in their teaching. Findings also suggest that teacher educators can facilitate the noticing and understanding of practices by calling attention to components of modeled methods before, during, and after modeled lessons. Implications for extending conceptions of the apprenticeship of observation into teacher education coursework, as well as the practical challenges, opportunities, and obligations of teacher educator modeling, are also discussed.