LEARNING COMMUNITIES IN TEACHER EDUCATION: EXPLORING INTERSECTIONS OF REAL, VIRTUAL AND “BEST PRACTICES” IN FIELD EXPERIENCE SUPERVISION

In the field experience component of teacher education programs, the student teacher (intern) often becomes disconnected from the university as she/he embarks on the 'practical' learning in the school classroom, while the faculty advisor (university supervisor) can feel like an outsider and token aspect of the intern's professional development in their process of becoming a teacher. Thus, working as part of the triad of intern (student teacher), cooperating (mentor) teacher, and university faculty advisor (supervisor) during these field experiences can be a challenge for all involved. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of a research project that creates a multi-dimensional model for the internship (field) experience that seeks to strengthen theory-practice transitions in secondary mathematics teacher education and to integrate more reflexive, critical approaches to learning to teach, and teaching to learn, mathematics.

In the research project being discussed in this presentation, the faculty advisor (also the researcher) created a digitally-enhanced internship experience for secondary mathematics teacher education, featuring a teacher-intern-faculty advisor (TIFA) learning community. The internship model includes the integration of a co-mentorship learning community model, an enhanced lesson study approach to professional development, and a digital ‘e-advisor’ component to intern supervision, including the use of multiple technologies such as desktop video conferencing, video flip-cameras, and online collaboration and discussion forums. Over a four month period (the internship semester), this learning community consisted of three (3) TIFA triads (intern, cooperating teacher, and faculty advisor) who engaged in several face-to-face professional development sessions, web-based conferences sessions, and collaborative video analysis of teaching episodes using an integrated noticing framework. At each of the real and/or virtual professional development sessions, data were gathered through video, focus group discussions and individual interviews. The research goal was to understand more about 'best practices' (i.e. meaningful and sustainable practices based in blended learning environments) for teacher education field experiences and becoming a mathematics teacher. The research data was analyzed through the lens of Bourdieu's social field theory with a goal of understanding the network of relations and discursive practices in schools and in teacher education programs.

Analysis of data from this study indicates that participants in the TIFA learning community embraced the changes to the traditional internship model because of the benefits they experienced firsthand. The benefits of this TIFA community were noticed on a variety of levels. For example, there were noticeable influences on interns’ desires and abilities to be self-reflective on their process of becoming a teacher, and they articulated the many benefits of having “more eyes on you” through the enhanced digital community approach. Similarly, cooperating teachers expressed how the learning community had a major impact on them, not only in their roles as cooperating teachers (for becoming teachers) but in being reflective classroom mathematics teachers.