Fw: Transforming Teacher Education, Notes from the Field

["Monty Neill" <monty@fairtest.org>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Carol Foresta 
To: ndsg 
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 6:39 PM
Subject: [ndsgroup] Transforming Teacher Education, Notes from the Field


Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Get this book hot off the press! 

Transforming Teacher Education, Notes from the Field (Harvard
Education Press, 2007) by David Carroll, Helen Featherstone, Joseph
Featherstone, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and Dirck Roosevelt tells the
story of how a small group of colleagues at Michigan State University,
locally known as "Team One," enacted an ambitious and visionary version
of teacher education on a large scale in a big, bureaucratic state
university over the span of more than a decade. It will be of special
interest to readers concerned with the key ideas and central problems
as well as the nuts and bolts of field-based teacher education. It will
particularly interest readers who dare to hope that US teacher
education can be intellectual, creative, and vitally passionate. This
is a rare account by insiders and practitioners of the art of doing
teacher education in a coherent and programmatic way. The book adds a
significant chapter at the university level to the history of
"democratic" and "progressive" education--the long historic push to 
educate all students well, and to include everybody's children in
quality schooling. Team One, was a successful, if limited, effort to
move education closer to the goals of social justice and a more equal
society.

This is a quietly dramatic account of an effort to create and sustain
decent settings for teaching and learning to teach-- as well as
particular structures and practices that support this work. One
constant theme is the link between the social and the intellectual: 
the creation and sustaining of the respectful human relationships out
of which all deep learning grows. Another theme is the assumption of
capacity: that all students can learn, and that most teachers can
develop into competent teacher educators. A third theme threaded
throughout is the creation of an institutional culture based on
continuous common learning and the sharing of authority, knowledge, and
expertise. 

Stories of successful practice are often told about individual
classrooms and schools, but rarely about teacher education. Even when
teacher education is the subject, the case is apt to be a small
program, in an elite setting, not a program graduating very large
numbers of students. This account if freighted with important lessons
for the whole field of teacher education. Both schools and universities
can profit from understanding better how a group of colleagues found
ways to create a culture of collaboration, inquiry, and
experimentation. And of course it is a story that speaks to one of
the nation's deepest unmet needs: how to educate large numbers of
competent, caring teachers well prepared to work in public school
classrooms enrolling everybody's children.

The book is a collective narrative told in many voices and from many
perspectives. 
Its various chapters range from institutional history to analytic
essays on the curriculum and pedagogy in particular courses, from
interviews with core faculty to samples of student work, from accounts
of collaborating teacher development to investigations of the program's
culture and supporting structures. The chapters draw on rich archival
material including student papers, teacher educator journals,
instructor plans and class notes, program memos, handbooks and other
official documents.

Transforming Teacher Education: Notes from the Field offers images of
the possible; up close description and analysis of the true complexity
of teacher education; explorations of tensions and dilemmas; and
detailed accounts of teacher educators and classroom teachers learning
together over time. Team One at Michigan State was doing what many
public schools have been trying to do in recent decades: taking the
tiny seeds of creative institution building and teaching craft more
commonly found in small or private settings, and helping them sprout
and grow in institutions of mass public education. In the end, this is
not only a book about teacher education; it is also about what Abraham
Lincoln might have meant when he spoke of the "unfinished work" of
democracy.

__________________________________________________________
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