Reading, writing, rereading, rewriting: A framework for teacher education

This study argues for a framework for teacher education in which the work of the school and the university classroom is inextricably entwined, both for preservice teachers and for teacher educators. Key to this proposition is a phenomenological approach to constructing knowledge centered on the practices of observation and description. At the center of the current national conversation about the need to attract and retain able teachers in every classroom are key questions about the nature and purpose of teacher education. Cochran-Smith & Fries (2005) trace an evolution in the kinds of questions that have grounded research on teacher education. Beginning in the 1950’s, researchers focused on teacher education as a training problem, intent on discovering effective methods of preparation that could be easily replicated. By the 1980’s, researchers began to consider teacher education as a learning problem, bringing to the forefront questions about the currency teachers bring with them to the classroom, both knowledge and skills as well as attitudes and beliefs. In the current era, focus has again shifted, this time to a consideration of teacher education as a policy problem, raising questions about cost-effectiveness and scope of impact. Each of these questions has profoundly shaped the nature of teacher education. Reading and rereading, writing and rewriting are generative forms for learning for and from teaching. This paradigm of revision is well suited to the conditional and evolving nature of knowledge in classrooms. It is also a framework that makes room for a new breed of teacher educator, boundary spanners who are able to teach from their teaching. This paradigm contrasts considerably with a prevailing model of teacher education, bemoaned by Cochran-Smith & Lytle (2009) as “training and retraining,” in which knowledge transmittal by outside experts becomes recursive throughout the teaching lifespan. Through reading and rereading, writing and rewriting, it is knowledge construction that is recursive