Student Teachers at Work Shifting the Orientation of Planning for Teacher Activities to Planning for Student Learning

This paper focuses on how one Student Teacher (ST) shifted his planning from teacher activities to student learning during a semester-long student-teaching practicum course in social studies. The study of this shift provides a glimpse of the enormity of the ST’s task and the ways in which he responds to the complexity of the work. Data include: lesson plans, providing a written record of activities, and classroom discourse. Analyses of the data rendered three areas relevant to the shift, including: 1) evidence of initiation-response-evaluation [IRE] script as a default script before the shift, 2) evidence of a shift to planning for student learning, and 3) evidence of movement away from the IRE to increasingly open-ended questioning. Preliminary evidence indicates increments that appear inconsequential taken individually, combine to present a picture of an incipient, developmental shift by the ST from planning for teacher activities to planning for student learning.