Building TSE (limits risk taking --> less trial, error & reflection)
Constructing their professional teacher identity effectively (Perform to please)
4. Factors that appeared to increase the potential for attrition included: workload, negative feedback, hostility towards ESL teachers in the teaching community. 5. Resilience appears to be built through: Peer support, connection to students, acts of defiance, efficacy and identity building experiences when teaching outside of the teacher education program.
Discussion
1. Addressing the process of evaluation and feedback in the field The current structure of evaluation is well suited for its function as ‘gate-keeper’: ensuring that the teacher candidates it graduates have achieved specific standards for competence. Where it falls short is in helping its teacher candidates to develop the teaching competence it requires of them. If we want to create conditions for future teachers to readily accept the valuable feedback that their teacher mentors offer them in the field, then we must first uncouple the feedback process from the evaluative one. This could be done in several ways including using a ‘portfolio’ approach of teaching competence, where future teachers gather evidence of their growth, skills and reflective practice rather than relying on periodic observation, for example. Having future teachers identify their own areas of strengths and actively seeking out feedback from the university supervisor and cooperating teacher through self-directed goal setting, would also work to counteract the asymmetry that undermines acceptance of feedback. Finally, teacher mentors who work with future language teachers in the field must also be provided with opportunities to develop their mentorship skills especially with regard to how to give constructive, goal-oriented feedback (Wiggins,2012)
2. Addressing the Practicum Experience If teacher education programs truly want to do their part to address the problems of attrition, then they need look no further than the wealth of research already available to them through work like Darling-Hammond’s (2012) and others which advocates first addressing the practicum experience itself. Teacher education programs that truly help future teachers develop excellence (and, one can strongly suspect, strong efficacy and strong professional identity development) do a number of things including: 1. Seek out and help develop settings for the practicum that include high-quality teaching for diverse students. 2. Select cooperating teacher mentors who have deep expertise and willingness to share it with a colleague 3. Place novices with their own program graduates to enhance the coherence of the learning experience (Darling-Hammond, 2012).
3. Providing More Opportunities for Scaffolded Practice of Teaching Skills Restructuring teacher education programs’ approach to the practicum is a rich place to begin to address future attrition in the field. It is also, perhaps, a long-term goal for development. In the short term, teacher education programs can begin to address the divide between theory and practice by building on what they are already doing well: providing more opportunities to model and practice teaching skills. As previous research has already established, future teachers draw on their own experiences as students when enacting teaching in their classrooms (e.g., Lortie, 1975). One crucial way to deprogram future teachers away from the ‘lecture-style’ teaching they are used to towards using more effective teaching strategies is to ensure university instructors practice what they teach. That is, in the university classroom, teacher educators should design classes that move away from lectures towards learning structures that we would like to see them use in the classroom. These structures and the teaching skills that accompany them should be explicitly modelled.
4.Leveraging Peer Support and Encouraging Development of Professional Communities The final recommendation for teacher education programs based on findings from this study, is to further leverage the support that peers provide each other. The study revealed how future teachers naturally turned to their peers for feedback and consultation on teaching assignments, for emotional support in processing stressful experiences, in problem-solving and testing out teacher values and in co-constructing future, imagined experiences of efficacy.
Teacher education programs can and should build on these initiatives. They can do this in a number of ways including routinely placing PSTs in “tandem” placements – especially during early practicum experiences so that PSTs’ teaching is naturally scaffolded by the support of a peer while co-teaching. Later field placements could also leverage peer support networks by placing PSTs in ‘cohorts’ with the same schools. That is, while teaching ‘solo’ to a class, PSTs would still be able to call on the support of peers from the program before and after school, and during breaks. By sending future teachers to a school together, language teacher education programs in particular, would provide a (peer) community that is especially important for teachers whose linguistic identity and perceived lack of proficiency places them at risk for rejection from their school community (e.g., PSTs from anglophone universities, allophone PSTs). Providing these PSTs with a built-in support network of peers during the practicum, could potentially counteract the negative effect that barriers to integrating into a school community have on their developing professional identity.
If teacher education programs created more spaces in their university courses for peer consultation, problem solving and group reflection on best practices, then future language teachers could build on their natural impulse to turn to peers for support. Teacher education programs could then equip future language teachers with the skills – and impulse - to build effective professional learning networks that will support them once they have begun teaching and are vulnerable to attrition.