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Situated Choices of Teacher Candidates:Roles and Relationships with Students

Kelly Grindstaff, Gail Richmond, Charles W. AndersonMichigan State University

Presented as part of the paper set:

A Study of Science Teacher Preparation: Year 3

at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching,

Dallas, April 4-7, 2005

This work was supported in part by grants from the Knowles foundation and the United States Department PT3 Program (Grant Number P342A00193, Yong Zhao, Principal Investigator). The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the supporting agencies.

Situated Choices of Teacher Candidates: Roles and Relationships with Students

IntroductionA constant theme in education literature in the U.S. is the persistence of traditional teaching and

the failure of substantial reform. In science education literature, studies aimed at understanding how to pre- and in-service teachers do and do not develop reform-based practices – teaching for understanding – have largely focused on content knowledge of teachers. There has been a focus on how thinking about science content frames pedagogy, or on pedagogical content knowledge (see Barnett, J. & Hodson, D., 2001; Loughran,J., Mulhall, P. & Berry, A., 2004; Van Driel, J.H., De Jong, O., & Verloop, N., 2002; Zeidler, D., 2002) There has been less attention paid to how science teachers develop their practices in response to their views of students – what they need to know about them, how to learn this, how and what students should learn, and why – and the relationships they try to form with students. This paper focuses on a sub-group of our teacher candidates, and examines their views of students, the relationships they envision and attempt to enact with students, and the resulting roles they see themselves and their students playing for successful classroom practice. The analysis to be presented here on candidates’ relationships with, understanding and

assessing of their students attempts to highlight this one aspect of their practice, while recognizing the interconnected nature of all elements of a teaching practice. Our vision of this problem of practice – understanding and assessing students - revolves around our vision of a successful science teacher as one who understands and responds to their students’ thinking. Successful teachers seek to understand how their students make sense of the topics in the science curriculum. Socio-cultural research on how culture, gender, and language affect students’ ways of understanding science documents the many ways in which students differ from one another—and from the expectations of school science—in their ways of talking, reading, and writing and in their approaches to describing and explaining the world around them (see Anderson, Holland & Palincsar, 1997; Gee, 1996; Heath, 1983; Moje, Collazo, Carrillo and Marx, 2001; and Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, Rosebery & Hudicourt-Barnes, 2001). So science teachers who aspire to help all their students achieve scientific understanding need to be aware of the diverse experiences and resources that their students bring to school with them and learn how to take advantage of those experiences and resources, finding what Warren, et al. (2001) describe as “generative continuities” between the scientific knowledge and practices that they are teaching and the students’ approaches to making sense of the world around them.

Thus, we seek to gain insight into how our teacher candidates sought to find out about their students’ thinking, and how this affected their teaching practice and learning. Classroom assessment plays a central role in providing information about student understanding which helps teachers to adapt their plans to their students’ needs, and thus improve their own instruction. The relationship that teachers attempt to and do build with students, and roles for the teacher and the student that make up that relationship, are integral components of that instruction, which has ramifications for students’ and teachers’ learning. We focus, then, on the following research questions: • What roles did teacher candidates desire and enact with respect to the student-teacher relationship, for the purposes of understanding and assessing students? Why? What expectations, obligations, and needs did they see these roles fulfilling in their

contexts? And did those contexts enable and constrain such roles? How did the roles they enacted and sought for themselves and their students affect their

practice and their learning?

Grindstaff, K., Richmond, G. and Anderson, C.W.


Theoretical FrameworkOur attempts to describe and interpret teacher candidates’ patterns of practice are

complex, particularly since we see teachers’ practices based largely on what van Driel, Beijaard, and Verloop (2001) describe as practical knowledge, which tends to be action-oriented, person- and context-bound, tacit, integrated, and based on beliefs. Likewise Clandinin (1985) describes knowledge in personal practical knowledge of teachers as “that body of convictions, conscious or unconscious, which have arisen from experience, intimate, social and traditional, and which are expressed in a person’s actions” (p. 361). Thus, we analyze our candidates’ patterns of practice, and the product of situated decisions – choices for their teaching actions embedded in the contexts of their past experiences and beliefs, and in response to the expectations of the salient communities during their intern year: their mentor and other science teachers; their students and the culture of (their) school, and our teacher education program, as we advocate reform science teaching. This paper highlights three of the candidates’ choices about a particular dimension of their practice – understanding and assessing students – while navigating their protean identities in these different communities which preserves feelings of efficacy.

Thus we are interested in the situated decisions about what roles they sought for themselves and their students resulting in particular student-teacher relationships to facilitate their understanding of students’ thinking and assessment of students’ learning. The student-teacher relationship is built on what we might think of as an implicit model of the roles for both the teacher and the student. Biddle (1979) conceives of a role as characteristic behaviors in context. That is, a context affects expectations that influence behaviors. We are concerned, then, with what expectations, and associated needs and obligations, our candidates saw their role fulfilling

Similarly, one’s role in a particular community is akin to one’s identity in that community. We pay particular attention to what Sfard and Prusak (2005) call designated identity, or the stories we tell ourselves about our future selves, since we are interested in how our candidates chose their designated identities, and associated roles and relationships with students, and their strategies for developing the knowledge and skills they need to arrive at those designated identities – or their learning to become the teachers they espouse.

The roles that candidates espoused and enacted as part of their identity are revealed in the student teacher relationships they attempt to build in trying to motivate or engage their students, help them with difficulties or meet individual needs, and assessment of their students’ learning. All of these behaviors are affected by the expectations of the communities they must navigate in their intern year, and their identities in these communities, both affecting what they can expect to succeed in, feel efficacious doing, and what they want to and do learn. We feel if we can better understand these situated decisions we can build a program that can better respond to our students and enable them to make choices that we believe are more beneficial for student learning and well-being, toward reform science teaching. Data Sources and Analysis

In general, we illustrate each candidate’s pattern of practice with examples from a teaching cycle (planning, teaching, assessment, and reflection) for a single lesson. We use data from other sources to show how the candidates’ actions during the focus teaching cycle exemplified more general patterns in their practice. Our teacher candidates revealed how they thought about student and teacher roles and how they tried to understand their students in the kinds of activities they wanted and did engage their students. This data came from a variety of sources. For example, their lesson plans were statements of their intentions, as were their written



reflections or their interviews after classes were over, as when they said that they were surprised or disappointed by events in the classroom, or when they reported that the class went as they had expected. Video tapes of their lessons provided evidence to some degree of the roles they actually encouraged and the relationships they formed with students.

Our candidates’ decisions about what kind of help to seek and accept—which communities were most salient, which new practices they would try to learn—played a powerful role in shaping their learning trajectories. Our data provide us with some information about these decisions, since we asked the candidates about the sources of ideas that they used in their teaching, the people whose advice they valued the most, and the practices that they gave highest priority to in their learning. Much of our analysis focused on assignments the teacher candidates completed as part of their coursework and interviews we conducted with them. Specifically, we looked at the following: • Teaching Investigations

All candidates chose a classroom problem to investigate regarding their teaching. They collected data about some classroom practice they were concerned about and were to use that data to help them solve problems and revise their theories of teaching, and their practice. Many of these dealt with practices such as engendering student cooperation which spoke directly to our research questions.

• Unit Plans and Reports including case studies of focus students and student assessmentsAll candidates wrote reports on their planning, teaching, and assessment. These reports included goals for student learning, teaching activities, assessment of student learning, and their reflections on what they would do differently the next time they taught the lesson.

• Interview ResponsesIn conjunction with each lesson observation and taping was an interview about that lesson and about their teaching in general, such as their goals for student learning and assessment of students. In addition, in the spring semester Kelly Grindstaff interviewed each candidate regarding their priorities in teaching.

• Interview responses of Mentor Teachers and Field InstructorsWith the exception of Lynn’s mentor (who did not respond to our request), Kelly Grindstaff interviewed the mentors and field instructors about the intern’s priorities and practices over time and as compared with their own. We hoped that this etic perspective would enrich our understanding of both the intern’s practice with regard to understanding and assessing students, and types of support (and constraints) the mentor or field instructor provided or tried to provide.

• Video tapes of two lessons One member of the research team (Kelly Grindstaff) videotaped and observed each candidate teaching one lesson in the fall and one lesson in the spring. We do not make assumptions about overall practice from these brief snapshots here, but these do help inform our overall picture of each candidate’s practice.

• Miscellaneous Materials Other written materials revealed thinking about students, which included philosophy statements, resumes, and journals written for field instructors The assignment templates and the interview protocols are accessible through our project website: http://SciRes.educ.msu.edu/TEScience/Index.htm.

Data analysis began with identifying relevant data in the data sources listed above. We looked to these data sources to provide insight into the candidates’ models of what roles teachers


http://SciRes.educ.msu.edu/TEScience/Index.htm


and students should play and how those roles showed their concerns, strategies and practices for diagnosing student interest and reasoning and using this information to motivate, teach and assess their students. Once we had selected the relevant data, our analyses focused on creating coherent accounts that were consistent with all of the available data for each candidate. These accounts are organized to elucidate the roles – or behaviors in context affected by the expectations, and associated needs and obligations – that these candidates saw themselves fulfilling within their different communities of practice: with their mentors and students at school, and with us and their peers at the university. We hypothesize about how their espoused roles are affected by their designated identity and what this and their enactment of their roles mean for their learning how to teach. We organize these stories, then, around the situated decisions these candidates made in in response to the expectations of these different communities in their hopes and enactment of relationships with students, and the differing emphases on the functions (such as motivation, meeting individual needs and useful assessment) of those relationships. ParticipantsNine teacher candidates participated in our study over both years. We selected three to focus on with regards to these research questions. All were biology majors teaching at least one class of biology, as we wanted to be able to compare candidates who were all teaching within their major subject area. We chose candidates with biology majors because biology classes tend to have the widest variety of students since high school students less interested in sciences more often choose to take biology over chemistry or physics. In addition, we wanted some variety of teaching context, and these three candidates ranged from a predominantly middle-income urban setting to a very affluent suburban setting. There was also a great variety of mentors, from very hands-off to very supportive, as well as a diversity of candidates’ priorities and challenges. The cases of each candidate follows. Cases of the CandidatesAngie Harris

Angie had a biology major and chemistry minor. Her mentor, field instructor and course instructors all described her as having strong content knowledge. She had a quiet soft-spoken manner and indicated both a genuine intellectual interest in how her students made sense of science and a belief that all students can learn. She wanted to engender the same curiosity about biology that she had in all her students – the curiosity to make sense of the content. In her teaching philosophy statement, for example, she writes about posing questions and investigations and the vision that “a science classroom can emulate these scientific learning communities … encouraging curiosity…” Her intern year was spent at the same suburban high school where she had been placed as a senior the year before, teaching biology. Her mentor was very committed to her learning, was very supportive and also demanding. Both saw their match-up as a good one. Angie: Responding to the expectations in the classroom – mentor and students1

We believe Angie was attempting to emulate scientific communities in her classroom, and she was well aware that to do this was no easy task. In order to help her pursue this goal, and improve her teaching of all students, she spoke and wrote often of the integral role of understanding how students were making sense of the content. This was central to her practice. 1 We have more direct information about expectations from mentors from interviews and only indirect information about expectations of students since we did not interview this group. Here we rely on videotapes of classroom interaction, which can only capture so much, as well as how the interns and mentor spoke of students. Thus, given the limited information about students, we report these together under the common context of the classroom, while recognizing that the expectations of mentors and students are not the same.



Her role as the teacher was primarily to understand how students thought in order to inform her instruction and assessment. Her mentor commented about this aspect of her practice.

M: She would read what a student wrote on a test and say, “what do you think this means? Where do you think they are coming from?” She would want to figure out how to give the student feedback who usually misinterpreted the question, to help them feel encouraged to re-do it and then learn. (interview with mentor, spring semester, 2003)What stood out most for us with regards to Angie’s practice was her intellectual pleasure

in figuring out how students are thinking about the content. In her journal in the spring semester (2003), Angie wrote that she “enjoy[ed] assessing student thinking” and “dislik[ed] evaluating or grading student work. In relaying her difficulties, she wrote that she struggled with writing assessment questions that allowed her to “really understand what the students are thinking.” We find the word “enjoy” particularly telling for it captured our own sense of what was, in her mind, pleasurable in and foundational for her practice – understanding how her students understood the content. The sometimes mundane procedure of grading was a chores of teaching that she didn’t care for. Her role was to understand the students thinking to assist her teaching.

Helping all her students make sense of the content was a driving force in Angie’s teaching. This concern for all her students that was clear to her mentor. Angie’s tried to develop personal relationships with students, especially those who were struggling, in order to encourage them to take advantage of the clear feedback, and guidance toward meeting objectives she provided. She wrote in her unit plan and report in the fall semester (2002) that “a teacher needs to develop a personal relationship with students who are struggling before the student will really feel comfortable approaching the teacher” and that “they need the teacher to reach out to them” and then once “the student feels as though the teacher really cares, then the student will want to put in the extra work to complete and make up work.” The role of the teacher, then, is demonstrating care and providing clear feedback and guidance (which can only be done if the teacher understands how the student is thinking about the content). The role of the student is to take advantage of that feedback and guidance and capitalize on the opportunity and belief in them that the teacher presents.

Angie worked very hard and was very committed to understanding how her students learned in order to help them learn and succeed in school. This impressed her mentor greatly.

M: She believes that every student can learn and that is what I liked about her the most. And that is why I took her on as an intern. She really believed that if she could just come up with a match to how the student learned that she could help them, if they were 50% willing to work with her. She proved that to be true. … So she didn’t give up on anybody….She only had 2 students get E’s out of about … 120 students. (interview with mentor, spring semester, 2003)Angie had high standards for herself and her students – both needed to be committed to

learning, though the onus was on the teacher to create opportunities. Integral to providing opportunities to learn, was her use of assessment as a teaching tool as well as assessment of learning. Angie had to adopt the mastery learning approach her mentor used, but she did so happily. In her classroom, students were given repeated opportunities to complete work and rewrite tests until they earned at least a B grade. Thus, students earned either an A, a B or an I (incomplete) on all work. In addition, a “T analysis” was used which is described as “where the students have an opportunity after every quiz to write down their corrected response and then explain what confused them in the first place” (interview with mentor, spring semester, 2003). Angie’s field instructor elaborated, “on one side they would have what they did wrong – how they answered that question improperly – and then on the other side of the T they would do



research and find out the correct answer. It was such a learning tool. (interview with field instructor, spring semester, 2003)

Angie liked this system of assessment. It resonated with her concern that students really understand the content and that they have opportunities to gain that understanding and to demonstrate it. In addition, in her interview in the spring semester (2003) she noted that “it reduced anxiety” since students knew that they could “keep doing it over and over until they really understand the content.” She did not want a poor grade on a test to reflect anxiety rather than a lack of understanding. She saw this method of assessing students as meeting their expectations of fairness

Angie did report, however, that she struggled with motivating the few students who did perform poorly to come in for extra help or make up work (journal, spring semester, 2003). Motivation of students is a concern of every intern, and typically a concern that grows when a candidate is involved in their field placement, in this case their internship. Early in her internship, Angie wrote about the importance of student responsibility, task authenticity and low stakes for engagement and learning (Unit 2, fall semester, 2002). At the top of her list of priorities for teaching, according to the her journal the following semester (spring 2003), was engaging students to participate by planning lessons with more student talk and more active student interaction with the content. In her priorities interview at the end of the school year, Angie said that it was more important for her at that time than when she started the program, that students see how relevant science is to their everyday lives.

These examples illustrate, not surprisingly, that throughout her internship Angie increasingly connected her intellectual goals for students with figuring out how to really engage them in the content. According to her mentor, Angie understood “that if the student is not motivated to learn, no matter what she does, it is futile” (Mentor interview, Spring 2003). This increased importance of motivating students with active engagement in relevant authentic content, is a response primarily to the expectations of students, in trying to meet their needs of finding classes useful and interesting, and also fun.

Whereas Angie felt that she struggled with motivation, she did not particularly struggle with cooperation of students or control in the classroom. Whereas observed lessons were not the epitome of student engagement, and her field instructor was concerned that Angie lost sight of what the whole class was doing when she helped a small group of individual students, in observed lessons students cooperated and did not appear to remain off-task for long. What Angie was concerned with was fostering an environment which would lend itself to intrinsic motivation, rather than being motivated by grades – where the students were enjoying what they doing because it captured their “natural curiosity” by being challenging, authentic, interesting, and allowing students a measure of choice and control. She felt that she had a good model in her mentor to work towards that goal (interviews with Angie, fall semester, 2002 & spring semester 2003).

Thus, Angie’s enjoyment of figuring how students made sense of the content was fostered by the expectations and support of her mentor. Her commitment to all students and her belief in demonstrating her genuine concern for them as a basis for a relationship was also supported by her mentor, and we surmise by the students themselves, given the rapport with them that she demonstrated in our observations. In response to the tenor of the class, as well as her mentor’s guidance, Angie became more concerned with tapping into the curiosities of students. Students, presumably, expected, or at least wanted, her to make class fun and interesting and to be reasonable and fair in her expectations of them. In this largely middle class, suburban school, students in her classroom seemed to expect to work and cooperate in return.



Angie: Responding to the expectations of the teacher education programAs mentioned, Angie saw the teacher’s role as understanding how her students thought

and, in a sense, bending over backward to provide students with opportunities to learn, where those opportunities aimed to foster their interest and curiosity. However, during an internship, an intern is both a teacher and a student. Angie saw her role as an intern (and as a teacher) as learning how to better her practice. Student assessments were vehicles to assess her own teaching as much as (and connected to) what her students understood. In her Unit 2 Plan and Report, in the spring semester (2003) she assessed what she learned about her own teaching from studying her students’ responses to an open-book quiz on homeostasis in which she felt they were “a little unclear about the words that describe the processes.” In her reflection she “realized that there really weren’t enough coaching activities that would help the students gain experiences using these exact words.” She noted that the next time she taught this she would “require students to use the words in each aspect of the learning cycle.” We surmise that Angie’s emphasis on understanding the big ideas and not memorizing (e.g. open book quiz), caused her to de-emphasize the vocabulary.

In her journal that same semester, she wrote that she “enjoy[ed] figuring out what went wrong through the unit and how to re-teach concepts.” It is clear that one of the central practices we expect of her in our program – to reflect on and learn from her experiences is something she enjoyed doing. What she wanted out of her internship was largely in line with what we expected of her. Despite much attention on understanding how students think, Angie did not feel particularly accomplished at it, especially early on. “I’m not very good at assessing their [students’] understanding. No, I am not good at that at all” (interview with Angie, fall semester, 2002). She felt that she had a long way to go – and we believe this was a positive sign that she considered understanding student thinking as not only important, but difficult – that she will continue to feel like she can learn from others and get better at this. From her assignments, we believe Angie was very reflective and will continue to question her practice. When she described what she was working on to improve her practice, she joked about all the structured reflection in the program, but she appeared to learn a lot from it: “Oh, reflecting, reflecting, reflecting (laughs) ... writing papers, re-writing stuff for class, talking to [my mentor]” (interview with Angie, spring semester, 2003)

Angie saw her own role as a student in similar ways to her role as a teacher – to constantly inquire to better her understanding (of students, for a teacher, and of how to teach, for a student of teaching). Like her dislike for grading, she disliked what she saw as trivial aspects of the program such as due dates, learning how to upload assignments on the website, and creating a website (interview with Angie, spring semester, 2003).

Overall, we believe Angie saw the expectations of the classroom, especially from her mentor, and from the program as largely aligned. Other than the fact that her mentor felt that MSU did not emphasize engagement or motivation of students enough – a view that Angie agreed with – she did not complain about competing expectations nor signified sacrificing one role for another. However, she did express in her interview in the spring semester (2003) that, at times, she had to sacrifice the quality of her teaching and her learning from it, in the face of a volume of responsibilities and the hectic schedule of the intern year. Angie: Summary

Angie’s conception of her role marked by her curiosity – of biology and how her students thought about it, and of how to teach better. Her field instructor spoke about her enthusiasm for her content and for her students’ learning: “She had passion for the content and really did intimately care about whether students were learning this content, whether they were understanding” (interview with field instructor, spring semester, 2003). Angie demonstrated this



passion and caring repeatedly, of which her interest in making sense of student reasoning played a key role. She desired to understand her students and get to know them in the service of engaging them in the content to engender their understanding. The role of assessments for her was always to give her information about how students were making sense of the content, giving her feedback for her practice, as well as providing her students with assessments of their own learning and grades. Angie successfully utilized her students and the thinking they revealed, her mentor, and the program as resources for her learning.

Lynn AsterLynn had a biology major and a mathematics minor. She had returned to school to

pursue a teaching degree after four years working as a technician in a cytogenetics lab. She was confident about her content knowledge and was very enthusiastic about her subject matter and about teaching. For her internship she taught a lower-track biology class in a large urban school. Her mentor was not a good match for her, was not very involved in her learning to teach, and thus was not really a resource for her. However, Lynn did seek out others at the school, and she felt very connected to the MSU teacher education program and the people in it, from whom she sought support. Lynn was in many ways similar to Angie. She had a real passion for biology and she definitely aligned herself with reform-minded practices. She also cared very genuinely about her students and their learning. The focus of Lynn’s philosophy, as indicated by her philosophy statement, is one of attention to the whole student and her relationship with them. She highlighted encouraging “a positive sense of self,” a “lifelong love of learning,” “valuing and nurturing students’ backgrounds and interests” and “forming fair and respectful relationships.” Like Angie she believes that “every child can learn” and adds “is entitled to a high quality education” and “challenging curriculum.” She indicates here her understanding that not all students have access to the same resources nor are they treated the same. Lynn had a more vivacious personality than Angie and this served her well in her very different context, with a hands-off mentor and greater motivation challenges in a different classroom culture. Lynn: Responding to the expectations in the classroom –students and mentor

Lynn focused on her role of engendering cooperation and engagement – getting students interested in the content – in the service of student understanding of the content and their success in school. Like most interns, she was concerned and struggled somewhat with student cooperation and motivation. However, unlike Angie, Lynn’s struggle to engage her students took center stage and framed how she thought about teaching. Lynn’s answer to this central concern was a variety of strategies stemming from her beliefs about students and the resources she had to draw on. In her initial teaching investigation as Lynn was just taking over her mentor’s class, she chose to work on figuring out how to keep students on task. In her concluding comments of this investigation she wrote:

I am going to continue to demand a great deal from these students, and I’m going to tell them I expect a lot, because they are smart and they are all capable. I’m going to continue to really hold them to the rules so they know that my actions stand behind my words. I think these actions will help me establish myself as the clear leader in the classroom and I hope that my comments about their responses help them to see that I do care about them as individuals. (teaching investigation, fall semester, 2002) Lynn appeared to plan her approach to engage her students on developing relationships

with them that resulted from her demonstrated care for them, her belief in their abilities (and thus high expectations) and clear communication about expectations and rules. Lynn discovered through the course of the school year that these were valuable strategies, but that this was no easy accomplishment. She echoes these approaches in her interviews and points to rationales



for them. For example, she surmises that students don’t believe in their own abilities, that they have not been told enough by others, “I know you can do this” (interview with Lynn, fall semester, 2002) nor held to high expectations.

Her efforts to capture their attention and interest were often met with only marginal success. Her assessment in an interview in spring semester (2003) that about one quarter of her students were into science was corroborated by classroom observations. It was a struggle for her to keep students on task, due both to her own difficulties in designing appropriate activities and in confronting particular students’ stances toward school. For example, in the classroom observation of the spring semester, the lesson admittedly did not go very well as her students got caught up in the complicated directions of her “bead bug” activity, and the learning she hoped for did not take place. This was not the first time her students had become confused and caught up in the procedures, as she had written in her very first unit plan and report that her goal was to have no activities confuse students. It seems that her desire to have engaging activities might have meant that she did not always think through the details of how those activities would work in the classroom.

Lynn did recognize, however, that she was, at least with certain students, fighting the culture of the classroom and she grappled with how to change that culture. In a subsequent teaching investigation (in unit 2 plan and report, spring semester, 2003), she again investigated student cooperation, and, since she values group work, how to make that group work more effective for students’ learning. She noted one student who was frequently uncooperative and hypothesized his reasons for his behavior as a response to the classroom culture: “perhaps he is trying to make his intelligence more palatable to his peers by mixing it with disruptive behavior” (teaching investigation in unit 2 plan and report, spring semester, 2003). She suggested that being smart or being cooperative might run counter to the culture of peer groups in her classroom.

To address her continuing cooperation difficulties, Lynn decided to try three strategies with this unit. First, she focused on the content relating to her students’ lives in doing a cancer case study. She began the unit with students brainstorming everything they knew about cancer, contributing any personal stories they had, and recording questions they would like to investigate in the unit. She appeared to have learned from reflecting on her previous unit: “I also learned what a good idea it is starting big units with conversations and incorporating student ideas and activities.” (Unit 1 plan and report, spring semester, 2003). Second, she used her authority to change where students sat. Finally, she conferenced with her most difficult students in an effort to build better relationships with them and understand where they were coming from. And according to her conclusions, in which she focused on the students she held conferences with, her relationship-building effort paid off the most and resulted in significantly different student behavior.

In addition to drawing on students’ experiences and interests as much as possible, working on building relationships with students – through more communication and a demonstration of caring – and maintaining high expectations for student learning, Lynn’s answer to the variable, often lacking, motivation in her students was to continue to be enthusiastic about the content. Early on in her internship, she learned that her efforts to make things exciting didn’t always work as planned. “Wowing the students with my plasma membrane models (floating corks, colored alcohol, oil, etc) was harder than I expected” (Journal entry Oct. 11, 2002). Despite this, she maintained a commitment to enthusiasm. More importantly, even though she had struggled all year with really engaging her students, she maintained that their learning was greatly her responsibility. In her final interview she said,

L: If you are enthusiastic.…. We’ve all walked into a class and thought I cannot stand



this teacher, but they were just so darn nice and so positive and just kept going every day that you ended up looking forward to that class and learning so much. So it [motivation] helps. (laughs) But I don’t have to throw up my hands and say, well they don’t like science, there is nothing I can do, they are bound to fail. That is crap. … Sometimes I flirt with “I’m just going to be a bad guy today” …but I want to be, like I am dying to be, that teacher that is so positive and so excited about science that you don’t need to scream at your students, you don’t need to whatever, they are just going to naturally hop on that train. But I’m finding that just wanting to be that teacher doesn’t get me there. (interview with Lynn, spring semester, 2003)

As she indicated in this last sentence, Lynn was very open about the fact that she had a long way to go. She was concerned with engrossing her students in engaging, generative and active tasks from which to learn, and she was under no illusions that this would be easy. In a sense the students did not play the role that they were supposed to in her mind. She was enthusiastic, tried to incorporate their interests, tried to get to know them, tried to provide them with challenging, pertinent and interesting content – fulfilling her obligations, as laid out in her philosophy statement, and still her success was spotty and inconsistent.

Not only the culture of the classroom and the expectations of the students presented a challenge to Lynn, but the expectations of her mentor and others in the school did not match up with her own goals. The strategies she focused on which have been recounted here such as having high expectations, attempting to draw on student interest/lives, and building relationships with them, are laudable. However, what is most noteworthy is not the strategies themselves but her insistence on trying to figure out how best to meet the needs of her students in the face of others telling her she had done enough, or the best that can be done given the situation, as is demonstrated by these comments:

L: [My field instructor] will say “you are doing a great job, Lynn.” And [my mentor] will say this is the best you can expect out of these kids, but I feel like there is more. There is another way. You don’t have to shout. There is another way to do it. You don’t have to be their best friend. But there is a way to do it. Right now I’m thinking my best possibility – and I am open to suggestions (laughs) – is forming good personal relationships with them. (interview with Lynn, fall semester, 2002) Unlike Angie, Lynn’s mentor did not help her very much to think about how to assist her

students who were having trouble. He gave her freedom to do what she wanted but little or no guidance. As a result, the most influential people on her practice were her instructors at MSU, all of whom she speaks very highly. She also sought out advice from another teacher in her building, mostly around getting teaching activities. This more distant support was helpful for Lynn, but not the same as a consistent mentor. Yet, due to all her, often solo, efforts Lynn did seem to develop positive relationships with her students. Still, it was not enough to engender consistent performance to their potential in her eyes. She was devastated when the mid-term exam average was 55% (Journal entry, Jan. 16, 2003).

Given this continual struggle, Lynn was understandably concerned about grading in ways that accurately assessed but did not topple fragile success and effort. Her variety and weighting in grading work reflected an effort to balance demonstration of understanding and effort with room to make mistakes. Learning was the most important thing and this required that students put in effort and not give up. Lynn strove to find the balance between rigorous, telling assessments and the reward of effort. Most notably, she seemed to put herself in the students’ shoes when she talked about grading, saying she could understand why they don’t care about exams (Journal entry, Oct. 11, 2002) and that she didn’t want them to suffer for not doing well on a test, considering they come to class, do their homework and are thoughtful in class (interview with Lynn, spring semester, 2003).



Lynn felt confident in getting a fairly accurate picture of how students were thinking about the content and using that to inform her instruction, as she reported in her Unit 1 Plan & Report from the fall semester, 2002: “I learned how to really analyze student work and student responses about where they are and what support they still need.” She reiterated her comfort with this but her need to better understand her students in “learning to read them better in what they need to blow off steam or really work hard. … So analyzing student responses and understanding, I feel pretty well prepared, but just my understanding of a 14 or 15 year old – I’m sure could use [improvement]” (interview with Lynn, spring semester 2003). Part of her role as the teacher, then, is to grade fairly and integral to that is being empathetic and understanding students – how and when to push them and for what to hold them accountable, to engender the cooperation and motivation needed for their learning and success in school. Lynn: Responding to expectations of the teacher education program

Lynn’s lack of support from her mentor, and her strong affiliation with the philosophy of the teacher preparation program, pointed her to her instructors for support – both intellectual and emotional. She was far less concerned with their evaluation of her than their ability to help her, being candid about her failures and her struggles. Those struggles lead her to question not only, what was expected of her by the program: how her students understood big ideas and to how to engage them in those ideas; but in the face of very inconsistent success in that regard, what was really important for them to understand. What did her students really need to know and why? She raised this question during interviews in both semesters.

L I’m not upset if not every subject is hit 100%. Because what is the difference if you breezed over it in a week, and forgot it, or just spent two weeks on something you thought was really cool. Who’s better off? Either you forgot it or you didn’t get it in the first place. (interview with Lynn, fall semester, 2002) L: And I really thought, like after today, I don’t even know if it is that important. It is not. Like it is something cool. It’s true. It’s amazing. It’s the reason for sexual reproduction. But it might take me three weeks of killing these kids and them killing me. They’ll behave like they did today and I’ll continue to beat my head against the wall, and it is not really that important. It is. I mean it is meiosis. But for a 10 th grader, it is cool if they can just say, it is just a special cell division that happens in the reproductive organs. (interview with Lynn, spring semester, 2003)The response of her students and her commitment to their learning, caused Lynn to

wrestle with what scientific literacy is – what it means to educate a scientifically literate person and prepare students for further study in biology. What she was working to reconcile, we believe, was her real belief that her students were capable, with their less than stellar effort and success. How could she help them to understand what was important and perform to their potential? This was her job and she did her best to draw from her studies at MSU and her reflective stance, to help her learn from her students.

So it is a challenge – is this authentic or is it not? Is this a cooperative group or are they all just copying one from the other? … I think about it all the time. I don’t know how literate I am at saying “oh this is Lisa Delpit. And this is whoever.” But I try to think of the styles and the environment that I try to use. I think all the time about my TE 250 [the required social foundations course]. What cultural capital do they have? …. I don’t agree that you can only learn through your student teaching. To me that is crap. I have learned so much at school [MSU]. (interview with Lynn, fall semester, 2002) Whereas Angie’s experience was one of aligned expectations, Lynn clung to the

expectations of the teacher education program as aligned with her own to find ways to rise to the challenge of meeting and countering the expectations of her classroom and school.



Lynn: SummaryLynn brought a real desire to be an inspiring teacher – to ignite in her students her

passion for biology. Her role as a teacher was focused on connecting her instruction to her students, thus necessitating doing her best to understand them, and what would get them interested in the lesson. She was concerned with student engagement in the material in order that they succeed in school, understand the content and appreciate its value in their lives. With those around her telling her that she needed to “show them who’s boss” and otherwise employ teaching strategies that she didn’t believe in, Lynn struggled to figure out how to teach valuable content well, for deep understanding, in a climate that neither expected nor completely supported it. Lynn’s vision of building relationships with and understanding her students and their thinking about science was similar to Angie’s. However, with less support from her mentor, and often a greater challenge with regards to engaging her students – Lynn focused more on understanding how to engage her students and less on how they were reasoning about the content.

Kathy MillerKathy had a biology major and chemistry minor. Her internship was with two mentors,

one in biology and the other in chemistry, giving Kathy two sets of expectations as well as subjects to navigate. She was placed in a very affluent suburban district in her home town. Since she was hoping to get a job in this district, she was very conscious of her performance at the school and how others perceived her capabilities. Kathy cared about her students and their learning, just like Angie and Lynn. However, her orientation toward understanding students and her context differed in subtle yet significant ways. Kathy’s relationship building differed from both Lynn and Angie, in that she focused on gaining students’ respect as opposed to trying to understand how they made sense of the content or why they acted in ways that they did. She also expressed the greatest feelings of constraint and that she could not always teach and assess students in ways that she wanted. Kathy: Responding to expectations of the classroom – mentor and students

Given her context, at very affluent school with much parent support and pressure, and where much is expected of students, by parents, teachers, and themselves, Kathy was understandably very concerned with assessing and grading her students fairly. She recognized the anxiety that many of her students had around their grades and she did not want to add to that anxiety. Her strategies around assessment reflected this concern as well as the constraints she felt being in her mentors’ classrooms and reconciling their assessment approaches with her own. Kathy had a very strong desire to please her mentors and perform well in their eyes. Yet this did not result in her practice looking exactly like theirs. In fact, there were many elements of their practice which she did not agree with. She was more concerned with being fair to her students and engendering their interest, than she perceived her mentors to be.

In her journal (Nov. 23, 2002) she wrote about how she had been put in a difficult position, having to justify a practice she did agree with – pop quizzes – so as not to “undermine” her mentor who had given the pop quizzes. Kathy expressed her disagreement with pop quizzes:

I just think, especially at [this school], students are so stressed about points and grades already that pop quizzes increase their anxiety and don’t really accomplish much positively. I much prefer having them take a quiz like that as a self-test not for points, or aloud as a class to see where they are at and what to work on. But since it’s not my classroom, for this time I had to go with what my mentor believed was best. (Journal entry, Nov. 23, 2002)



Kathy was very concerned about respect – both earning it from her students and giving it to them. She manifested her respect for them primarily by being explicit about her expectations and thus fair in her grading. In her first interview she said,

I try to be real clear with them on what my criteria are…I tell them exactly what I am going to expect [on an assessment]. …So when I grade it, I am grading it on what I told them. …If you respect them, they will respect you. …I tell them what I expect; that is what I grade them on; that is what I evaluate them on. They know what is coming from me. …It is important to me that my students respect me. … I would like them to like my style of teaching and think that it is organized enough that they can follow it. … I need them to respect me. (interview with Kathy, fall semester, 2002) Thus, Kathy saw herself fulfilling primary obligation to students in grading them fairly –

grading them on what they expect. When she talked about revising her lessons and assignments based on student responses, it was often around learning to be more explicit with the questions to get at the information she expected. Her curiosity about how students think seemed to manifest itself more through class conversation than formal assessment. “I like talking to them. I like hearing what they are thinking. I like hearing their ideas and their questions” (interview with Kathy, fall semester, 2002). It appeared to us that this type of conversation was more in the service of developing a rapport with her students than in any systematic inquiry into their sense-making.

We believe that Kathy was not pushed very much by her mentor with regards to thinking about assessments as formative - as learning tools for her students or her own practice, but rather as summative – where the assessment strives to accurately represent what the student understands. Kathy’s mentor said things like “science is basically memorization. …If it is an open-ended question then you would want to know how they got there, but most often it is pretty cut and dry” and “Probably the hardest part of assessment is to get it all done” (interview with mentor, spring semester, 2003). It is not surprising, then, that Kathy’s main concern around improving her practice in terms of assessment was organizational: “Absent kids are a big issue for me. Big. How do I catch them up? … I need some sort of system for organizing that” (interview with Kathy, fall semester, 2002).

This is not to say, however, that Kathy did not try to get at their sense-making at all, just that it was not her highest priority. She worked hard to write assessments and her biology mentor teacher was impressed with them, particularly mentioning application-type questions. She also noted that Kathy was “very efficient at correcting the tests and getting them back, and they [the students] really appreciate that” (interview with mentor, spring semester, 2003), further illustrating how Kathy sought to meet her obligations to students and earn their respect. Kathy had little problem (though she did not always agree) meeting the expectations of her mentor. Nor did she have much difficulty (though it was a lot of work) in meeting the expectations of her students. For Kathy, she was playing her role, doing what was expected, meeting all her obligations and fulfilling the needs of her students – since she saw these largely as grading fairly and providing a worthwhile and pleasant (i.e. content has relevance; students have choice; and she is friendly) classroom experience. In the lessons that were observed, one in chemistry and the other in biology, Kathy showed she had a good rapport with her students, Kathy’s instructions were clear and her students got to do activities that they seemed to enjoy, at least more than sitting in their desks. Kathy was undoubtedly a very successful intern, but she was also not impelled to question or learn from her practice in the ways that Angie and Lynn were.

Unlike Lynn, Kathy’s students were largely successful. However, Kathy did discuss one student in particular who was not. The student was portrayed, not as a bad kid, but as apathetic



and forgetful. Kathy’s assistance revolved around helping the student get work done or completing tasks that translated into grades. Kathy genuinely cared about helping all her students succeed, but at least in this case, that did not involve trying to figure out how they understood the content, which was paramount for Angie. Neither did Kathy ever mention wrestling with why the student did not hand things in, which was the focus of much of Lynn’s consternation. Kathy never disclosed asking the student if they were confused, or if it was difficult, or if they couldn’t concentrate. For Kathy, some kids “just don’t do the work” and she described her assistance, which involved much time and commitment on her part, as trying to help that student “understand the connection between you have to do the work, then you also have to bring it and turn it in, and then your grades will be better” (interview with Kathy, spring semester, 2003).

When Kathy did delve into students’ understanding, as she was asked to do in her unit plans and reports, if it was in chemistry, she would typically write about helping students who had not mastered procedures which were necessary to get the right answers and complete work. In her unit 1 plan and report she notes, “she obviously does not understand how to cancel out the charges, which is the most important part of formula writing.” Kathy also writes how she will have to touch base with this student and take the initiative to approach her since she does not ask for help even when she needs it. Again, Kathy was very willing to help students, and she was concerned about all of the students in her classes learning. It is pertinent to us, however, that Kathy does not write about helping this student understand the connection between canceling charges or writing formulas and what the molecules and their electrons are doing during chemical bonding, for example. This is likely a reflection of how she sees chemistry, her minor, as “a lot of problems” (interview, fall semester, 2002). But even in biology where she felt much more knowledgeable, assisting students who were having difficulties still seemed to be more focused around completing work and being able to get the right answers than understanding students’ reasoning in order to engage them in the big ideas. Her main concerns for improving her teaching were around managing student work and grades.

However, like Angie and Lynn, and all interns, Kathy cared about engaging her students, and she too employed similar strategies such as connecting the content to students’ lives, and supplying real-world examples. Even though Kathy’s students were generally very cooperative, as both she and her mentor noted in interviews, she did not see that as license to abandon concern with making her lessons interesting for them. In her second unit plan in her first semester, Kathy pointed to the importance of engaging students in “real-life situations,” which are relevant to their lives. In her final interview, she talked about an experiment with plant growth that the students got to design and how they “they wanted to see how it was doing” because they had gotten to ask the question and design the investigation of it.

Yet in stark contrast to Lynn in particular, Kathy had very little challenge with keeping students on task, cooperating and participating. Kathy did have some students, however, especially in her chemistry class, who were not particularly motivated. In one teaching investigation she rearranged the seating arrangement in efforts to increase positive influences, decrease negative influences, and increase surveillance of three disengaged male students. This approach was only moderately successful, and clearly does not address other reasons for student disengagement. Whereas Kathy considered some similar strategies to Lynn, such as being consistent with consequences, she did not seem to question why students were acting in the ways that they were, and there was no mention in this investigation of building relationships with them to find out.

However, Kathy did write about one of the students that “I will continue to correct his disruptive behavior during class and I may also talk to him individually soon.” We surmise that



she did eventually do that since during a subsequent interview she said she was “trying to establish a relationship with him and letting him make his little jokes where it is appropriate” (interview with Kathy, fall semester, 2002). This may very well have been upon the advice of her field instructor who wrote, “She might also benefit from developing her relationships with the ChemCom students” (Field Instructor report, Nov. 2002). So it appears that Kathy’s first strategy around engaging her more difficult students was to enforce rules and the second, perhaps upon some prodding, was to get to know them.

We believe that this reflects a certain distance that Kathy saw as important to earning respect – the appropriate limits of student-teacher relationship. This is not to say that Kathy was not friendly with her students, because she was. But it seems to us that Kathy’s approach toward motivation and engagement revolved more around “monitoring” and friendly surveillance rather than questioning, as indicated in her second unit plan and report in the fall semester (2002). This appears to be a reasonable tactic since few of her students pushed her to think about what she was teaching them, why, or how she could do it better, by understanding how they thought or where they were coming from. In addition there is no indication that Kathy was pushed by her mentor to think in these ways. As a result, as Kathy suggested in her final interview, she didn’t feel that she needed to learn more about how these particular students thought or why they responded in certain ways, since “hanging out in the school for the whole year tells you most of it.”Responses to the expectations of the teacher education program

Kathy, in contrast to Angie and Lynn, seemed to see her experience in the program more as a rite of passage or a means to an end than a learning experience. She focused on her evaluation – acting in ways that others wanted her to, to get a good grade, and to get a job. Her role as a student in the teacher education program is akin to the role she sees her own students enacting – getting their work done, and earning their grades. As such, she appeared to value learning more for how it affected her current performance rather than how it might enrich her practice in the future. Despite her statement: “let’s get as much out of this [year] as I can, while I have people who know the curriculum” (interview, fall semester, 2002), she does not appear to let herself do that, if she perceives that it will compromise the evaluation of her performance.

For example, she did not want to let her mentor know when she wasn’t familiar with an upcoming topic in the curriculum to seek her advice on how best to approach it. Instead she would say “um hm, uh ha, of yeah, sure, definitely” And “go home [and read] and be like “oh…[now I know what they were talking about]” (interview with Kathy, spring semester, 2003). Later in the same interview she spoke of “pleasing everybody because you need a job.” Kathy’s emphasis on performance paid off in the sense that her mentor did think highly of her. Her mentor mentioned Kathy’s maturity several times and she said “You can just see that she is so ready to move into the teaching field as an accomplished, practiced teacher” (interview with mentor, spring semester, 2003)

It is interesting to note that Kathy’s mentor also talked about evaluation as a constraint. We don’t know if Kathy’s mentor brings this up because Kathy is concerned about it, or if Kathy is concerned about it because her mentor’s approach to her evaluation. It may be a little of both. We think Kathy would agree with her mentor when she said “whether or not she agrees with me, I am still her mentor teacher, and she still has to constantly be concerned with my final evaluation of her.” Her mentor was well aware of Kathy’s concern with how others perceived her:

M: She was very concerned with making a good impression with the science department, which is not an easy group to move into, and with the secretarial staff. ….She is a people person and she knows that sometimes you just have to



bite your lip. You have to work with these people day in and day out, and sometimes you do things to keep the peace. And she was very very good at that, in many many respects and a lot of different ways. (interview with Kathy’s mentor, spring semester, 2003)

Kathy: SummaryKathy’s main priority was assessing students fairly. Her explicitness of what to expect

on assessments and her concern for making the content interesting and relevant, fulfilled her obligations to her students and thus earned the respect of her students Though not absent from her practice, a primary concern did not appear to be understanding how students made sense of the content, which was paramount for Angie. Additionally, Kathy did not face many of the challenges that Lynn encountered with regards to motivating her students, and so she did not appear to think hard about why students acted or responded in ways that they did. Given the students’ attention to grades, and thus Kathy’s assessment that she was meeting their needs with her agenda, it is not surprising that Kathy’s priorities revolved around being transparent and fair with regards to assessment.

DiscussionAll these interns were interested in leaning how to teach well, a part of which was to

endeavor to understand students in particular ways, to form relationships with them and to meet their students needs and fulfill their obligations to them. Yet their visions of what that looked like and entailed, the resources they had to draw on, and the expectations to which they had to respond, differed.

Angie, with an intellectual curiosity for student reasoning, made that central to her role as a teacher and central then, to how she sought to understand students and central to her meeting their individual needs and fulfilling her obligation to support their understanding of the content. She was supported in this by the expectations and assistance of both her mentor and the teacher education program. Thus, fulfilling the expectations of her students, her mentor and the teacher education program occurred with little feelings of compromise or conflict,

Lynn, focused her learning on how to engage her students, as this was her greatest challenge. She had a much harder time than Angie encouraging her students to play the role she envisioned. She felt that despite her efforts that she had not fulfilled all of her obligations to her students, not had they fulfilled their obligations to her. This led her to question the content and what students needed to know, in addition to why students responded in the ways that they did. She identified strongly with our teacher education program’s expectations and this was enhanced by the non-relationship with her mentor, despite the fact that the classroom culture often pulled in another direction

Kathy’s focus was one of earning respect. A central role in gaining that respect revolved around grading students on clear and explicit criteria, what Doyle (1983) calls “the performance for grades exchange.” Kathy earned that respect, through fulfilling her obligations to her students, the most important of which was grading them fairly. She appeared to focus more on performance than learning. She did not indicate a real questioning of her practice. She wanted her performance to earn the respect of her students and especially her mentor, since she greatly desired a job in the small district where she had her field placement. In this way, her role as an intern is akin to her role as a student – to fulfil her obligations, get her work and be rewarded appropriately. Kathy found it more advantageous and likely easier to meet the expectations of her mentor and her students rather than the teacher preparation program. We do not mean to suggest that these expectations are in conflict, but Kathy’s mentor did sometimes send messages



that conflicted with the program, so Kathy had good reason to maintain her skepticism of the program’s practicality.Implications for Teacher Education

Considering arguments like Cohen’s (1988) that traditional ways of teaching are easier for both teachers and students, how do we encourage our candidates to build hybrid practices (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) that aim for reform science teaching? How do we encourage them to delve deeply into questions of how students understand and why they respond in ways that they do, when this is a harder role to enact and thus harder to feel efficacious and be successful doing? This study suggests that we need to pay more attention to the contexts of interns in our attempts to develop expectations that are currently attainable by the candidates and contribute to their sense of self-efficacy, rather than denying it, while at the same time helping them build hybrid practices moving toward reform science. This will not be an easy task. Many studies suggest that the practical experience of the field placement is more highly valued by teacher candidates than their university coursework (see Featherstone, Munby & Russell, 1997; Feiman-Nemser, 1983; Lortie, 1975; Tabachnik, Popkewitz, & Zeichner, 1979-1980). In addition, Wideen, Mayer-Smith and Moon (1998), in their review of research on learning to teach, found that many teacher education programs have little effect upon the firmly held beliefs of beginning teachers. In light of this, we need to concentrate on connecting our interns’ concerns of motivation and student success with strategies for understanding students on all levels.

Such pedagogy in teacher education will require that we better manage the tension, and look for and utilize complements between the roles of teacher education as advocacy for change and reform in schools, and preparing students for success in current school contexts. We have to help our candidates form hybrid practices, which eases their learning to respond productively to the expectations of the university and reform-minded practices as well as those of their school contexts. In a sense this means encouraging a designated identity developed out of stories which include success in meeting expectations of the school and a focus on building reform-minded practice by including particular questioning of one’s practice. We need to better help our interns explore how their students think and make sense in science, to use assessments to do this, to draw on the resources their students bring, and to use all of this in the questioning and improvement of their practice.

Wideen et al (1998) suggest that more successful teacher education programs need to focus on what teacher candidates know and believe, and engage interns in articulating and confronting those beliefs as a part of reflective practice or action research. We feel that while we have certainly provided opportunities for our teacher candidates to reflect on their practice and examine it, we can get better at focusing on what they already believe. In essence this will be work to better match our implicit and explicit curriculum. We need to show our teacher candidates that we question our own beliefs, and that we need to learn about them and their contexts, form relationships with them, draw on what they know and what their needs are, since this is what we want them to do with their own students. If we can structure opportunities to better understand their situated choices, we can better structure opportunities for them to get better at understanding their own students, and make choices that we believe have the potential to positively affect student learning.



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