September 2001 — Features
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Technology in Secondary Teacher Education
In its initial stages, faculty members recognized a need for substantive change in the program. We acknowledged that serious deficiencies currently existed and, most importantly, that we were not adequately preparing our secondary candidates to meet the needs of diverse student populations that included differences across gender, ethnicity, culture, language, mentally/physically challenging conditions, sexual orientation and varying achievement levels. Further-more, we recognized a growing need for our students to become more skilled in the effective and ethical use of technology in classroom instruction.
It was at this time that the faculty realized that if we were to move beyond just tinkering with our existing program to radical redesign, we needed to have total control over the students' schedule for the professional pedagogical semester, and that this semester should come immediately before student teaching. This meant that students must have completed their content major/minor coursework, all liberal studies requirements and the educational foundation's prerequisites prior to their I-STEP semester. This decision truly freed the faculty from thinking about the program in traditional ways.
Framing the Curriculum
Even then, however, our first thought was that we could probably address some of the curriculum gaps we were seeing by simply re-conceptualizing curriculum within existing courses or re-allocating hours to a new course that more specifically addressed diversity, technology and context issues. But the critical question that kept emerging was this: What do we want our graduates to know, be able to do and be like when they leave our program? By framing our discussions around the issue of student outcomes, it became clear that before we decided on the form of the program, we must first decide what would drive the design. Thus, we began an extensive investigation into what the faculty believed, and what the literature indicated comprised the characteristics of effective teachers and student teachers.
We examined existing teacher preparation standards (e.g., the National Certification Association for Teacher Education's Knowledge Base Standards and the Council of Chief State School Officers' Standards for Licensing Beginning Teachers) as springboards for identifying the knowledge, skills and dispositions we wanted our candidates to have in order to meet the needs of the classrooms of tomorrow.
Once these were identified, we set out to determine the form of instruction that would best accomplish these objectives. It was here that we completely rejected the view of our program as a series of isolated courses taken in sequence. Instead, we began to imagine the program as student experiences that would lead to an integrated understanding of learning theory, curriculum, instructional methods, assessment/evaluation and the contexts in which all of these come together.
Through this focus on learning experiences, the program was reconceived as an integrated 13-hour block of professional study to be team-taught by faculty members from the secondary education area. The 30-student cohort meets three days a week on campus. Once a week they meet at one of two school sites (a high school and a middle school), rotating to the other school for half of the semester. At least one faculty member is also present at the school sites to coordinate activities and debrief with students at the end of each day's experiences.
