Research Genres in Teacher Education

Almost since its inception, teacher education has suffered from doubts about its value to teachers. Outside observers have asked, usually skeptically, whether teacher education makes a difference, and teacher educators themselves have wondered what they have been able to accomplish and how they could accomplish more. Presumably, research could help both teacher educators and teacher education policymakers to understand better whether and how teacher education makes a difference. But the question has been difficult to answer because the enterprise itself is extremely complex. It is a huge enterprise, producing 100,000 new teachers each year; it occurs in a wide variety of institutions of higher education; and it occurs in other kinds of institutions as well. Even within higher education, there are people enrolled in teacher education who won't become teachers and people not enrolled who will become teachers. Finally, the boundaries between teacher education and not-teacher-education aren't clear. Some of us count experiences in schools as part of teacher education; some count courses in the liberal arts as teacher education; and some count only those courses that occur within education departments as teacher education. Not only is the enterprise itself difficult to get a handle on, but the outcomes of teacher education are similarly diffuse. As a field, we suffer from enduring disagreements about what counts as a valid outcome and about how to measure those outcomes that do count. Some people want evidence of teacher thinking, others of teacher skills. Some think you assess thinking through paper-and pencil tests, others that you need to see it in the context of practice. And so forth. The complexity and size of the enterprise, coupled with the ambiguities about what counts as an outcome, make it difficult for researchers to pose manageable research questions and to design studies that can improve our understanding of teacher education and what it does. In order to make their task more manageable, researchers limit their attention to problems that they can easily define. Here are three examples of how researchers delimit their scope of inquiry. 1. Many researchers concentrate on the student teaching component of teacher education The student teaching component is a more definable and therefore manageable piece of the teacher education puzzle. It occurs in a definable time slot, in a definable place, and is relatively separate from the rest of teacher education. The typical research design for studies of student teaching is a …