Supporting the Teaching Cycle |
Research & Development |
The Teacher Development Studio is designed to support the teaching cycle.
The complexities of learning to be a teacher are grossly underestimated. Many institutions of higher education and alternative certification programs have treated teacher preparation as a revenue generator, quickly passing students through the program and into settings with children in classrooms without fully acknowledging the sophisticated set of dispositions and behaviors that need to be mastered before taking responsibility for children’s cognitive, affective, and social development. The Simmons School of Education and Human Development is creating a Teacher Development Studio to support teacher preparation that is different from typical teacher preparation programs.
In typical teacher preparation programs, prospective teachers take a series of courses that focus on child development, educational psychology, content areas courses, and instructional methods courses that use case examples to help illustrate how the courses are relevant to the classroom. Once students reach a certain threshold in their coursework, they begin practicum experiences in classrooms with students taking increased amounts of instructional responsibility culminating in a student teaching or internship experience. Key to understanding the weakness of this approach is recognizing that there are few opportunities to practice teaching behaviors prior to entering the high-stakes classroom environment.
In typical teacher preparation programs, prospective teachers take a series of courses that focus on child development, educational psychology, content areas courses, and instructional methods courses that use case examples to help illustrate how the courses are relevant to the classroom. Once students reach a certain threshold in their coursework, they begin practicum experiences in classrooms with students taking increased amounts of instructional responsibility culminating in a student teaching or internship experience. Key to understanding the weakness of this approach is recognizing that there are few opportunities to practice teaching behaviors prior to entering the high-stakes classroom environment.
The Teacher Development Studio provides distinct spaces for each behavior to be practiced in environments specifically designed to support pre-service and in-service teachers as they work to improve their practice. These three environments make up the Teacher Development Studio and will be prominently located on the first floor of Harold Clark Simmons Hall. Once pre-service teachers have had sufficient practice with teacher behaviors in these low-risk environments with significant support from Simmons faculty members, they will be placed in practicum and student teacher settings but always with the opportunity to return to the Studio for additional support. Additionally, we envision licensed teachers, both Simmons alumni and other colleagues, using the Studio to continue to build their practice mastery as they develop in their profession.