L&C seminar: Is innovation in teacher education possible, and can self-study help?

Tom Russell, Queen's University, Canada
In this seminar I would like to develop several ideas about pre-service teacher education that I wish I had understood much earlier in my career as a teacher educator. Lortie’s notion of the apprenticeship of observation has been with us for decades, yet its implications for how we teach new teachers seem to have been overlooked. Many years of schooling have made future teachers quite familiar with how most teachers begin their classes. I contend that the earliest classes we teach are unique and important opportunities for making unexpected moves that signal how learning to teach is different from learning a subject. Studying our own teaching of our earliest classes is a unique way to open students’ eyes to the influence of how we teach on how people learn.

As background, I invite you to explore a website that I constructed in 2009 to draw together ideas that I find important for the development and improvement of teacher education programs. Do keep in mind that I work in a context that may be different to yours: In Ontario, a pre-service program is an 8-month experience that requires an undergraduate degree as a prerequisite.