10: Shifting Roles, Shifting Perspectives: Experiencing and Investigating Pedagogy in Teacher Education

There is strong consensus that teacher educators should model the types of student-centered instructional practices that they want teachers to enact in their own classrooms (e.g., Ball & Cohen, 1999; Smith, 2001; Wilson & Ball, 1996). The Professional Teaching Standards (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 1991) state that modeling pedagogy can help teachers “develop ideas about what it means to teach mathematics, beliefs about successful and unsuccessful classroom practices, and strategies and techniques for teaching particular topics” (p. 127). Yet it is not always clear what, if anything, teachers appropriate from their exposure to this modeling and how these experiences might impact teachers’ classroom practice. Teachers might simply mimic the pedagogical moves that a teacher educator modeled without considering the rationale or the conditions for use. Often times, surface-level appropriations lead to poor results, and teachers abandon student-centered teaching for a more familiar didactic approach (e.g., Grant, Hiebert, & Wearne, 1998). So, how can teacher educators help teachers appropriate models of effective pedagogy in ways that are useful in their own classroom? In this chapter I describe one attempt to aid teachers in appropriating models of effective pedagogy by engaging them in a teacher education experience, then stepping back to examine and analyze the pedagogy of the teacher educator.