Rehearsing Teaching Professionally (ReTPro)

Project summary

ReTPro`s overall ambition is to establish a practice-based supportive framework for teacher education (TE) in which pre-service teachers (PSTs) are provided opportunities to develop diversity-sensitive didactics (DSD) as part of their professional teaching repertoires. This approach implies a systematic redefinition and restructuring of TE to implement ReTPro as an explorative analytic space, and rehearsal as a tool for learning teaching and for TE research. In light of the current changes to TE in Norway, building on the insights from a pilot and wrestling to understand how best to bridge the gap between theory and practice, ReTPro will develop a conceptual space between practicum schools and teacher education at campus. We envision that ReTPro becomes a space where PSTs alternate between enacting and investigating their own and others’ teaching, all of which is supported and reflected on by teacher educators, school mentor teachers and peers. While there is a general international consensus that democratic citizenship as a status and as a mode of behaviour is desirable and should be fostered as an integral component, the concept itself remains a complex and often elusive one. To meet this didactic challenge, we will elaborate on DSD as a strategy for exploring and developing democratic citizenship because DSD is based on students’ personal and cultural strengths, cognitive capacity and previous experiences and makes school learning relevant for them by drawing on their cultural knowledge, life experiences, frames of reference and languages. Our vision is aligned with Biesta’s claim that teaching is also about giving students orientations to the world, qualification in terms of deep learning, socialisation in terms of becoming part of tradition and subjectification, in terms of autonomy and judgement. ReTPro therefore aims to develop PSTs’ diversity-sensititive teaching repertoires of purposeful actions where skills, qualities and dispositions are embodied.

Method

ReTPro chooses to follow a strand of research that views practising teaching as the central element of learning to teach (e.g., Grossman et al., 2009; McDonald et al., 2013; Klette & Hammerness, 2016). This shift towards the practice of teaching and learning to teach is more than just an increase in the time spent in practicum to bridge the gap. It is a statement about action and reflection that is defined by 1) close and detailed attention to teaching, 2) the development of vocabulary to reflect on and in teaching and 3) the creation of materials and methods that characterise that work (Ball & Cohen, 1999). To meet the objectives, ReTPro is mainly placed within an educational design research (EDR) framework as described by McKenney and Reeves (2014).

Under EDR’s focus on finding solutions to complex educational problems, ReTPro will work systematically and simultaneously towards the dual research goals. This means that ReTPro will adopt a systematic analysis, design and evaluation of the implementation of ReTPro with the twin aims of generating research-based solutions and advancing our knowledge about the characteristics of the intervention and process of designing and developing it. The EDR design of the study will be supported by the use of established qualitative methodologies, such as participatory action research (PAR) (Chevalier & Buckles, 2019), self-study research (Brandenburg & McDonough, 2019) and quantitative-based surveys. In the proposed ReTPro project, a synthesis of these methodologies will be adapted and specifically designed to innovate, develop, analyse and modify professional practices while acknowledging critical as well as creative approaches to curriculum planning, design and redesign. Driven by the desire to rethink, support and reform our TE in ways that would better prepare PSTs for a diversity-sensitive, interactive, explorative and dialogic way of teaching—as well as to study these processes within this context—the research design will meet and answer the range of our objectives. This includes an understanding and evaluation of the ReTPro processes and what can be learned about collaborative working to build connections across the gap of theory and practice, campus and practicum. Our EDR methodology will allow us to monitor and explore participants’ experiences of ReTPro as it emerges and evaluate the process over time. This will be undertaken by help from interviews, observation and analysis of the collaborative work taking place. The empirical element of the project will highlight what lessons can be learned, if any, about the value of ReTPro for the improvement of TE, as well as what rehearsing and building professional teaching repertoires means to the participants (process and evaluation outcomes). 

Reflective rehearsals approximate the work of teaching (Grossman et al., 2009; Lampert et al., 2013) by providing a space for PSTs to open up their teacher thinking and decisions to one another and to their teacher educators or MTs.  ReTPro will build and expand on the previous pilot study and develop ReTPro as a conceptual space between practicum schools and the campus. This will be a space where PSTs have the opportunity to move back and forth between enacting and investigating their own and others’ teaching, all of which is supported and reflected on by teacher educators, school MTs and peers.