What Do We Believe about Teacher Learning and How Can We

Everyone seems to have strong convictions about teacher education--about what teachers need to learn, about how they can be helped to learn those things, about the factors that affect professional growth and the improvement of teaching and learning. There is widespread consensus about some claims, but significant dissent about others. Reasonable as they may seem, do we really know these things? In many cases, the evidence on which particular claims rely is inadequate. The claims may be true. But they may also require qualification. Some are probably dead wrong. Some compete with others, equally popular. In this session, we will consider a set of claims about teacher learning and what it would take to deploy them as resources for developing a stronger knowledge base about professional education for teaching. This paper is not intended as a review of the literature, and is also not meant to suggest that we know nothing about teacher learning. Instead, it is meant to provoke a collective discussion of how inquiry and practice in teacher education might support its development and improvement. (Author) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AN