This clever volume offers a collection of essays about how to improve teacher education. Each of the authors write about the findings of the Choosing to Teach longitudinal study, which involved thirty randomly chosen teachers, ten each from three non-traditional teacher-prep programs: the Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP) at the University of Chicago, the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) at the University of Notre Dame, and the (Jewish) Day School Leadership through Teaching (DeLeT) program at Brandeis University. Following enrollees from the time they entered their respective programs through four years in the classroom, it focuses on how teacher prep programs tailored to participants’ backgrounds and aspirations can improve classroom practices and keep teachers in the classroom longer. For example, teaching in an inner-city Catholic school has a different set of challenges than teaching at an affluent suburban school, and a given teacher’s interests and effectiveness will differ in each.
With this in mind, all three programs provide immersive and contextualized learning opportunities through what the authors call “nested contexts of teaching.” Training looks beyond the classroom to provide a more comprehensive view of the role future teachers will play. ACE, for example, focuses not just on the classroom, but on the larger school, its community, and the Catholic Church. This multi-layered approach ostensibly provides teachers with tools unique to their local environments. That, in turn, “increased their sense of agency as teachers and reinforced the rightness of their career choice.” By the end of their first year of teaching, twenty-two of the thirty participants (nine from UTEP, nine from DeLeT, and four from ACE) reported that they intended to teach for five or more years, despite unsupportive school conditions in some cases.
Too many preparation programs follow a one-size-fits-all model. Inspiring Teaching offers an alternative paradigm—teacher education that prepares educators to serve particular groups of students or specific kinds of schools. Without them, “we risk losing the gifts of bright, socially committed teachers from teaching in areas of great need or from teaching completely.”
SOURCE: Inspiring Teaching: Preparing Teachers to Succeed in Mission-Driven Schools, ed. Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Eran Tamir, and Karen Hammerness (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2014).