Teacher Educators are Teachers First by Practicing what they Teach.

This is the first of several posts that will be published here about the art of teacher education.  There is a rich body of research on teacher education, and I will make use of recent work that shows that teacher education is a vibrant and energetic field that is being led by a new cadre of educators who are willing to get out there and do it.

Mike Dias, Charles Eich and Lauri Brantley-Dias are three members of this new cadre of teacher educators that will form the basis for this story and that is: Teacher Educators are teachers first: They practice what they preach.

For more than 30 years I practiced science teacher education, which meant that not only did I teach courses at the university, and I also taught science in K-12 schools, first as a science teacher in Lexington and Weston, Massachusetts, and then with being a professor at Georgia State University.  But there was also something that I found even more powerful, and that was the collaboration I had with practicing teachers and administrators.  As a teacher educator, I felt it was crucial that I worked in parallel with teachers in the metro-Atlanta area, and if possible to teach science education courses collaboratively with a practicing teachers.  Our doctoral program in science education attracted many local science teachers, and as graduate students, they worked as graduate teaching assistants in many of our courses.

Three of the graduate students, who would later go on and complete doctoral programs in education were Mike, Charles and Lauri. Michael and Charles were former students in our graduate science education program, Charles earning his master’s degree, and Michael his Ph.D.; Charles did his Ph.D at Auburn after completing his work at GSU.  Laurie did her doctoral studies instructional technology at GSU,  and was a member of the GSU faculty for several years.  She and Mike (her husband) have professorships at Kennesaw State University (GA), and Mike is a professor of science education at Auburn University.

 Practicing What We Preach

Mike, Charles and Laurie teamed up to organize a unique project in teacher education in which they asked more than a dozen fellow science teacher educators around the country to “practice what they preach.”  On a warm summer Atlanta evening, the three of them discussed Charles’ upcoming sabbatical leave after attending an Atlanta Braves game.  Charles had made arrangements to spend his sabbatical leave teaching eighth grade science in Auburn, Alabama, and at this informal gathering that night, that he work with Charles decided to study together his experience of going back into the classroom as a science teacher.  Working together, they “studied” Charles experience using quantitative and qualitative information.  Laurie played the role of the outsider prospective to bring further meaning and co-construction of ideas that emerged with Charles’ and Mike’s research.  Together they published papers about their work as teacher educators practicing what they preach.

Science Teacher Educators as K-12 Teachers

Then, Lauri suggested that the idea should be turned into a book.  Through the Association for Science Teacher Education, they put out a call for papers from fellow science teacher educators who would write chapters in a book describing their experiences practicing what they preach.  For more than two years they worked together with other teacher educators and produced a book that generated 16 unique accounts of science teaching at various grade levels, K – 12.  The book they published is entitled Science Teacher Educators as K-12 Teachers: Practicing What We Teach (2014).

I reviewed the book and found it to be a very important and astonishing autobiographical collection of papers written by our colleagues who in these pages took the risk of not only going back into the classroom to teach science, and to be transparent about their experiences by sharing their success, as well as the conflicts that they met with on their journey. (Disclaimer: I was the author of the last chapter of the book, which was the closing article).

There is richness in these reports, as well as creativity, and above all else, there is courage as shown by these teacher educators’ willingness to leave the safety of university life and immerse themselves in the world of K-12 classrooms.  Many of the authors took this step to find out how it feels to be back in a school in today’s classroom, and how this experience might affect their work as teacher educators.  Trying out inquiry-based reform, and constructivist approaches was also a central goal of most of the authors.  They also hoped that thoughtful reflection of their experience through the writing and critique of their chapters in this book would give the sureness and self-confidence to change their views and impact their university colleagues and their students.

The authors of these chapters described their experience through a process of collaboration and/or self-reflection.  Their immersion into the real lives of students and teachers showed the complexity of teaching, and in some cases, the difficulty in being successful in the classroom.  These were experienced teacher educators with strong backgrounds in science and pedagogy, yet they experienced a variety of problems.

In the posts to follow on the work of these teacher educators who choose to practice what they preach will lead us into the art of teacher education.  Teacher education, like medical education, requires people who have strong content backgrounds, and (in my view) they also need a stronger understanding of how to communicate with students, and how to choose the pedagogies that will help students understand, comprehend, and fall in love with the subjects that they teach.

This is no easy matter.  I look forward to telling you more about these teacher educators, and how their work can help us understand the nature of teacher education, and to provide research that outshines any of the critics of teacher education that seem to dominate the dialogue.