CP 91-2 Making conversations about teaching and learning in an introductory teacher education course.
Abstract
In their long apprenticeship of observation as students, preservice teachers have acquired both a mass of information about schoolteaching and a subjective warrant to teach. In my introductory teacher education course, the students' experiences appear as conceptions of school lessons which complicate their learning and my teaching. In the attempt to cope with the situation, I have assigned students to write "conversations" about school lessons shown on videotape. In those conversations, the students cultivate several distinct voices: themselves as inexperienced teachers, as experienced students, and as each of several authors of their reading. The writing assignments both organize and reveal interaction between students' prior conceptions of teaching, the videotaped teaching that they analyze, and the arguments they encounter in their reading. In several ways that I will describe, the conversational procedure helps me to cope with the students' subjective warrant to teach.