Developing Teacher Diversity in Early Childhood and Elementary Education by Stephen T. Schroth & Jason A. Helfer

Author:Stephen T. Schroth & Jason A. Helfer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Each of these helps prepare teacher candidates for future positions in the classroom. Content knowledge is necessary for teacher candidates to provide the children with whom they work the knowledge , understandings, and skills related to the disciplines upon which they touch on a daily basis. The pedagogical knowledge allows teacher candidates to take the content knowledge and make it developmentally appropriate and accessible to young children. Finally, hands-on experiences permit teacher candidates to work directly with children, learning both whether or not they like working with people of this age group, and practicing ways of making content accessible to them, managing the flow of the classroom, and working to make the planning, delivery, and assessment of instruction automatic. The REACH program fully used these time-proven preparation components, adding to them the factors discussed in the next chapter.

The best teachers realize that their job is never done, and that their responsibilities temporarily end only with the conclusion of a given class or school year. To help build this sense of responsibility, vocation, professionalism, and calling in teacher candidates, programs that prepare new practitioners must work to enhance their opportunities to work with the best mentors in a variety of settings. Some candidates will inevitably need more exposure to good teaching and more experience at engaging in certain tasks than will others. This reality must be accepted and even embraced by the faculty of teacher education programs. Repurposing fieldwork and practicum experiences so that they are designed to instill certain knowledge , understandings, and skills in teacher candidates rather than viewing them as sentences that must be served in PreK–12 classrooms will better serve interns and greatly improve these experiences for pre-service teachers. While the minimum number of hours demanded by state departments of education and other credentialing agencies must of course be met, this way of looking at fieldwork and practicum experiences also means that for certain candidates, fewer hours could be logged at specific settings, so long as they demonstrate the knowledge , understandings, and skills desired as outcomes from that placement.

A variety of sources exist that can be used to provide the foundation for the assessment system that will assess candidates’ skills and needs at various points throughout the program. The InTASC Standards, for example, provide a framework for what teacher candidates must know, understand, and be able to do in the classroom.5 These standards determine benchmarks for what teacher candidates must know about learners and learning, content knowledge, instructional practice, and professional responsibility. If teacher education programs develop an assessment instrument that measures how well teacher candidates are doing at these in the middle and end of each term, faculty can use the data this generates to devise experiences, scaffolds , and supports , to assist with the development of areas of need. A candidate, for example, with excellent content knowledge but a shaky grip on instructional practice would benefit from additional opportunities to plan and deliver instruction, but would be ill-served by additional coursework focusing on content.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.