Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning: Understanding e-Portfolios in Teacher Education [1st ed.] 9783319019543, 9783319019550

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Katrina Liu

Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning Understanding ePortfolios in Teacher Education

Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning

Katrina Liu

Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning Understanding ePortfolios in Teacher Education

Katrina Liu Department of Teaching and Learning University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, NV, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-01954-3    ISBN 978-3-319-01955-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01955-0 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to: Ada Liu Miller Kai Liu Miller

Foreword

One of the characteristics of teacher education around the world has been the continual emergence of slogans that gain popularity within the teacher education community and then receive funding from governments and philanthropists. These slogans begin with specific meanings that are attached to them by their initial advocates, and then over time, they begin to broaden and blur until the meaning becomes unclear and almost everything comes reside under these umbrella terms. Partnerships, teacher education for social justice, and evidence-based teacher education are a few of these slogans. Reflection has been one of the most popular slogans in teacher education internationally during the last fifty years. It has come to the point now, where it is almost impossible to know what someone means by the term in a teacher education context until it is examined more deeply. Often though, there is no “more deeply,” no clear articulation of what exactly is meant by reflection. Reflection has been often used as a label to give the illusion that a program is being innovative and that important changes have been made when in fact they have not (Zeichner & Liston, 2014). The terms reflective teaching and reflective teachers have been used in the teacher education community in the USA since John Dewey (1933) introduced it in his classic book “How We Think.” Over the years , many teacher educators have claimed that their programs have emphasized the preparation of teachers who are reflective or critically reflective in ways that have suggested a more professional and agentive view of teachers than the view of teachers as civil servants who passively carry out the dictates of their administrators. However, much research has shown that the term reflective teaching has been used in teacher education to describe both professional and technical conceptions of teachers, and that when used by itself without sufficient elaboration, the term reflective teaching does not provide any greater understanding of teachers’ motives and practices than the term teacher (e.g., Zeichner & Liu, 2010). This book focuses on critical reflection for transformative learning, and unlike much of the literature which has promoted a vague and superficial conception of reflection, it presents a very clear and specific framework for conceptualizing critical teacher reflection that pays attention to both the substance and quality of vii

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teachers’ reflections. This book also provides unusual clarity and specificity about the concept of transformative learning that is the goal of critical reflection in the teacher education program examined in this book. The transformative learning that is sought in the teacher education program studied is aimed at preparing teachers who teach in culturally responsive ways. Importantly, Dr. Liu situates her analysis of the struggles and successes of four prospective teachers in this program to become reflective teachers within the multiple layers of context in which their teacher learning was embedded. The learning of the four teacher education students studied in this book was impacted by a variety of factors inside and outside the program. This book focuses on the role of electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) that were required in the program on their learning. Dr. Liu’s analysis of the learning of the four prospective teachers captures both the successes and struggles of their learning and to what extent their learning was translated into their teaching practices while they were in the program. Her analysis also links their learning to the characteristics of the specific teacher education program in which they were enrolled such as when she discusses the tensions between assessment and teacher learning that were experienced by the prospective teachers when preparing and presenting their ePortfolios to their teacher educators. Finally, after presenting and discussing both her conceptual framing of critical reflection and transformative learning and presenting and contextualizing her study of the four prospective teachers’ learning, Dr. Liu offers a vision for the future where more teachers are prepared to teach in programs that focus on critical reflection for transformative learning. She summarizes the lessons that she learned from the study that is presented in this book and offers advice to other teacher educators about how they might adapt what was learned here to other program contexts. This is a refreshingly hopeful book that does not gloss over the complexity of the task and manages to provide hope and guidance for the future. Seattle, WA July 2020

Ken Zeichner

References Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. Chicago, IL: Regnery. Zeichner, K. & Liston, D. (2014). Reflective teaching: An introduction. (2nd edition) New York: Routledge. Zeichner, K. & Liu, K. (2010). An analysis of reflection as a goal for teacher education. In N. Lyons (Ed). Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry. (pp. 67-84). New York: Springer.

Acknowledgments

As Henry Giroux urged us, teachers should portray themselves as transformative intellectuals who combine scholarly reflection and practice to educate students to be responsible citizens. Growing up in a small village in South Central China with my parents working on rice paddies for a living, I didn’t know I would become a teacher and I especially didn’t know I would one day become a teacher educator. This was not a journey that I could have even imagined as that little girl who always wandered around the little roads between the patches of green coming out of the small, kidney-­ bean-­shaped rice paddies on spring days were it not for so many people who encouraged and inspired me to become a transformative intellectual. I am especially grateful for my middle school head teacher Guo Qinghe Laoshi who guided me to take up of the charge to be his aide and my high school head teacher Li Wuoxiang Laoshi who instilled in me the enthusiasm of teaching. More importantly, you both provided me with tremendous inspiration, care, and trust that paved the path for me to become a teacher. My choice to become a teacher educator was accidental. As a former English teacher, I only planned to pursue my doctorate in English as a Second Language or Linguistics when I was in my master’s program at Beijing Normal University, but Dr. Ken Zeichner made a lifelong impact on me. When he delivered a lecture at Beijing Normal University, I happened to be in the lecture where I first heard about teacher education and how teacher educators can have powerful impact on teachers by preparing them to be reflective intellectuals rather than knowledge recipients. After the lecture, Ken encouraged me to apply to the Curriculum and Instruction doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where later I started my path to be a teacher educator under Ken’s supervision, a path that I will never regret. Part of the research in this book comes from the dissertation project I completed for my doctoral study in that program. Throughout my study and the writing of this book, I owed tremendous amount of thanks to so many people. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to my advisor and mentor, Professor Ken Zeichner. From the initial stages of my research to completion of this book, Ken has continued to give me scholarly advice, critique, and emotional support. Your broad knowledge in the field of education, your deep understanding of the complexity of classrooms and ix

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communities, your respect for teachers, and your endless enthusiasm and tireless effort in advocating for the importance of public education as an endeavor for a more just and equitable society motivated me to carry out this project and will continue to enlighten my future career. I owed heartfelt thanks to the members of my dissertation committee who have all assisted my work  and have continued to support and inspire me: Professors Gloria Ladson-Billings, Michael Thomas, Richard Halverson, and Maggie Hawkins. I cannot thank more for all the professors in the School of Education who gave me great amount of support, among them Professors  Michael Apple,  Bernadette Baker,  Catherine Compton-Lilly, Carl Grant,  Diana  Hess, Nancy Kendall, Tom Popkewitz, Gary Price, Paula Wolfe and the list can go on and on. I would also like to thank Marilyn Fearn, Diane Falkner, and Joyce Zander in the Office of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction for all the support they provided. I cannot begin to thank enough my four major participants, the university-based teacher educators, and the cooperating teachers who participated in my research. Though I will not name you explicitly because I have promised you anonymity, I wish to thank you, Ella, Karla, Doug, and Judy, for sharing with me your ePortfolio reflection and opening your classrooms to me, showing the trust to share your joys and concerns throughout the course of this study. I would also like to thank my teacher education students at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I have gained much knowledge in supporting prospective teachers’ critical reflection through working with you in methods courses and classroom observations. I must offer my warmest thanks to Arnetha Ball, for your tireless mentoring, encouragement, care, and friendship. I greatly appreciate the joyful and educational moments when we co-taught teacher education courses, co-presented our work at conferences, and co-authored several research papers. You not only modeled for me how to become a transformative and generative intellectual but also a human being with a beautiful mind. My sincere appreciation also goes to Curt Bonk and Xun Ge for your guidance and encouragement since I was a doctoral student. I would be remiss not to shout out to my many colleagues and friends at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The list is long and I would like to single out among them, Chia-Liang Dai, Robin Fox, Howard Gordon, Iesha Jackson, Katy Hayning, Margarita Huerta, Edric Johnson, Beth King, Emily Lin, Jane McCarthy, Sharolyn Pollard-Durodola, PG Schrader, Jeff Shih, Annie Stinson, Xue Xing, John  Zbikowski,  and Shaoan Zhang. I am appreciative of the leadership of my current College of Education Deans, Kim Metcalf, Danica Hayes, and Gwen Marchand for your support. I also want to thank Denise Davila, Sharon  Tettegah, and Jian Wang for your endless encouragement and intellectual inspiration. My sincere appreciation is extended to Melissa James, Editor, at Springer, for your enthusiastic support and patience throughout this project. Thank you, Hemalatha Velarasu, Pearly Percy, and the entire production team at Springer, for your fine guidance during the production process. The theoretical framework of

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critical reflection for transformative learning guided my analysis in this book and my own teaching practice as a teacher educator was published in the Journal of Educational Review. I would like to extend my heartfelt appreciation to Dr. Gary Thomas, then editor of the journal, for your constructive feedback and insightful suggestions to strengthen this piece. I am who I am today because of my first teacher—my late mother Lei Laying. You instilled in me the courage and strengths to set up goals and pursue them with zeal. I will never forget what you constantly told me: Go ahead and you can make changes. You are a role model for my whole life: persevering, hardworking, and a loving heart, qualities necessary to make transformation happen. I owe millions of thanks to my father Liu Bingjun, my brother Liu Wei, and my sister-in-law Zhou Shiwei for your unconditional love and support. My grateful thanks go to my family in the United States: thank you very much, Louise O’Donnell, Richard U. Miller, and Elizabeth Miller for your love, patience, and support. To my wonderful husband, Richard Miller, thank you for your intellectual and emotional support over the long process of making this book a reality. You acted as a listener, critical friend, and editor for my work. This book is a special treat to celebrate our 7th wedding anniversary. Last but not least, I would like to dedicate the book to our children, Ada and Kai, who, as all other children in the world, deserve an equitable and just education.

Contents

1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.2 Reflection and Critical Reflection����������������������������������������������������    4 1.3 Social Context in Teacher Education������������������������������������������������    7 1.4 ePortfolios and Prospective Teacher Reflection��������������������������������    9 1.5 About the Research ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   11 1.6 About this Book��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   14 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   16 2 Who Celebrates Kwanzaa? The Struggle for Critical Reflection and Transformative Learning����������������������������������������������   21 2.1 Tales of Success: Avoiding Critical Reflection with Positive Description of Technical Procedures������������������������������������������������   22 2.2 Absence of Evidence, Not Evidence of Absence������������������������������   26 2.3 Critical Reflections Struggle to Emerge�������������������������������������������   29 Languages Spoken at Home are Comforts��������������������������������������    29 The Principle of Equity Is What I Strive to Achieve In and Out of My Classroom����������������������������������������������������������������������������    32 2.4 Performative but Not Transformative ����������������������������������������������   36 Even Johnny, Who Should Not be Included, Worked Well!�����������    36 I Think That’s Her Culture��������������������������������������������������������������    37 2.5 Problematizing the Performance������������������������������������������������������   39 2.6 Epilogue: Fading Memories��������������������������������������������������������������   42 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   43 3 Looking Back on What Was Good and What Was Bad: Prospective Teachers’ Understanding of Critical Reflection ��������������   45 3.1 Looking Back on What Was Good and What Was Bad��������������������   46 3.2 Reflection as an “Assignment Term”������������������������������������������������   48 3.3 Where You Go from Here ����������������������������������������������������������������   48 3.4 Epilogue: The Goal of Preparing Reflective Teachers����������������������   51 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   53 xiii

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Contents

4 It’s Me Doing Work for Someone Else: Prospective Teachers’ Attitudes Toward the ePortfolio Reflection Requirements������������������   55 4.1 The Place of the ePortfolio in the Teacher Education Program��������   56 4.2 We Get Mixed Views������������������������������������������������������������������������   58 4.3 It’s a Good Form of Accountability��������������������������������������������������   60 4.4 Epilogue: I Actually Benefit From It������������������������������������������������   61 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   64 5 I Want to be Seen as the Best I Can: How the Teacher Education Program Conditions Prospective Teachers’ Reflection Strategies������   67 5.1 Cherry-Picking����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   68 5.2 I Know Who My Audience Is ����������������������������������������������������������   69 5.3 I Want to be seen as the Best I Can for My Job��������������������������������   71 5.4 I Present It in the Way to Meet Expectations of the Teacher������������   72 5.5 Disjuncture Between Performance and Program Expectations��������   74 5.6 Epilogue: The Performance of Reflection����������������������������������������   75 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 6 Awesome, Awesome: Missed Opportunities for Transformative Learning����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   79 6.1 Awesome, Awesome, You Guys Did a Great Job������������������������������   80 6.2 I Don’t Really Have Anything for You to Focus on: Influences by Cooperating Teachers ������������������������������������������������   83 6.3 I Think We Are Just Similar: Forming Conformity to Defend the “Outsider”����������������������������������������������������������������������   85 6.4 Teacher Educators Push for Transformative Learning����������������������   88 Transformative Learning Outside of the ePortfolio������������������������    88 Critical Reflection Through Reading and Discussion��������������������    91 6.5 Epilogue: Program Fragmentation and Lack of Support for Teacher Educators ����������������������������������������������������������������������   92 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 7 Supporting Prospective Teachers’ Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning������������������������������������������������������������������������   97 7.1 The Five Factors Affecting Prospective Teachers’ Reflection and Teaching��������������������������������������������������������������������   98 7.2 A Data-Driven Approach to Teacher Education ������������������������������  101 Build Consistency Within the Teacher Education Programs����������   101 Facilitate Critical Reflection among Prospective Teachers ������������   103 Ongoing Data-Based ePortfolio Design and Modification ������������   108 Creative Activities and Assignments����������������������������������������������   110 7.3 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  115 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  116

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8 Coding and Analyzing Narratives to Foster Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning������������������������������������������������  119 8.1 Narrative Analysis in Teacher Education������������������������������������������  119 8.2 Thematic Coding: A Priori and Grounded Theory Approaches ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  120 A Priori Coding ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   122 Open Coding ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   123 8.3 Transformative Protocols Through Data Triangulation��������������������  125 8.4 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  127 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  128 9 Toward a Transformative Teacher Education Community������������������  129 9.1 A Framework for a Transformative Teacher Education Community ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  130 9.2 A Potential to Achieve����������������������������������������������������������������������  132 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  134 Appendix: Multiple Sources of Data��������������������������������������������������������������  137 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  141

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1  Introduction As important is it is to teach facts and learning tools to students, it is equally important to help encourage and support their growth as individuals. I hope to teach for social reform in this world; there are many disparities too entrenched in our society that need to be changed. Developing strong positive individuals that will stand up for what is right and wrong in this world and then have the capability to enact change where they see fit is the ideal outcome of the social reconstruction movement. Too many children are turned off by the education process and schooling in general, my goal is to provide them with a positive academic experience where they can be exposed to the joy of learning and growing in a nurturing environment. This in and of itself should help inspire youth to pursue further positive scholastic experiences and lead them to create a brighter future for us all. (Doug, Educational Philosophy).1

This is an excerpt from Doug’s educational philosophy, “To a Brighter Future,” part of his ePortfolio reflection. Doug was a prospective teacher in the elementary teacher education program at Midwest University. Like his peers in the program, and many other prospective teachers across the country, Doug was expected to demonstrate commitment throughout his  five-semester teacher education  program to teach all children, especially those from nondominant and marginalized communities. This expectation is based on the demographic imperative (Banks, 1993, p. 24), the fact that the student body in U.S. public schools has become increasingly more diverse over time. As of 2014–2015, White students are now a minority in number in K–12 public schools, with students of color comprising the majority (Institute of Education Sciences, 2016, Table 7, p. 48). Meantime, the number of students who are English language learners (ELLs) or speakers of nonstandard variants of English

1  As with the names of all participants in this book, Doug is a pseudonym adopted to protect the identity of the participant and preserve the confidentiality of the information they provided.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. Liu, Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01955-0_1

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is significant and growing (9.6%, or about five million nationwide in 2016 (NCES, 2016), as is the number of students living in poverty. Many scholars have argued that student diversity can be funds of knowledge for academic success (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992; Rios-Aguilar, 2010; Rios-Aguilar & Kiyama, 2012) and that the voices of people of color can fuel counternarratives to benefit every group of students and teachers in the classroom (Cammarota, 2014; Ladson-­ Billings & Tate, 1995; Miller, Liu, & Ball, 2020; Milner, 2008; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Unfortunately, the reality has been far less positive, with long-standing, inequities for marginalized students in terms of low achievement and graduation rates (Ford & Moore, 2013; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Milner, 2012a), high suspension and expulsion rates (Carter, Skiba, Arredondo, & Pollock, 2017; Skiba et  al., 2011; Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002), limited access to highly qualified teachers (Zeichner, 2014), and overrepresentation in the school-to-prison pipeline (Skiba, Arredondo, & Williams, 2014; Wilson, 2014). In this context, many teacher education programs have committed to prepare future teachers able to conduct high-quality, culturally responsive instruction that serves all students, especially those in the neediest schools. For example, to be admitted to Doug’s program at Midwest University, students had to declare a commitment to multicultural education and reflective practice in their admission materials. Once in the program, there were many opportunities to study multicultural education and culturally responsive teaching and to put those ideas into practice through field experiences. In keeping with the teacher education programs as a whole, the elementary education program focused on reflective teaching, emphasizing the ability to foster learning among all students from different groups as well as a commitment to teaching for social justice and equity. The following overview from an introduction to the program lays out the expectations of prospective teachers. Teacher education students learn to recognize how their own background and experience shape their thinking and actions, to reflect on their practices, and to develop and adapt practices that serve the needs of their students. Through their preparation, students gain awareness of how schools reflect both the strengths and inequities of our increasingly multicultural society and become more committed to advancing social justice and equity through their classroom practice and community interactions.

The ePortfolio system was developed by the teacher education program to support preparing reflective practitioners prior to the appearance of edTPA; as such, submission of an ePortfolio is one of the requirements for prospective teachers’ graduation. The major purpose of the ePortfolio, according to the designers such as John (a senior professor in the teacher education program) and Allen (the ePortfolio project director), was to support prospective teacher learning through critical reflection. The following is an example of ePortfolio reflection from Ella, Doug’s peer in the elementary teacher education program. I had each shape name translated into the languages of the students that are in my classroom. Each shape was in English, Spanish, Khmer (Cambodian), Arabic and Albanian. The students’ eyes lit up when they heard my voice coming out of the computer and I watched their faces as each language was spoken. I could tell that they felt a genuine connection in

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the classroom. The ability to affirm these students’ identities was so fulfilling. One of my Spanish speaking students said to me, “My mom and dad speak this at home!” Another student, realized that his father had done the translation for me in Khmer and he said, “That’s my Dad!!” (Ella Third Semester Reflection)

As teacher educators, how do we interpret Ella’s reflection and decide whether or not the reflection is critical? Zeichner and Wray (2001) contend that most prospective teachers (and teachers) who have constructed a teaching portfolio claim that the portfolios have caused them to reflect more about their teaching than they would have otherwise. Nevertheless, teacher educators and researchers need to conduct closer study of the nature and quality of these reflections, because “if the reflection stimulated by teaching portfolios does not help challenge student teacher perspectives that help maintain the gap between the poor and others in U. S. schooling, then its value is problematic” (p. 619). At the same time, as Brookfield (1995) argues, “reflection in and of itself is not enough; it must be linked to how the world can be changed” (p. 217). One of the duties of teacher educators, then, is providing prospective teachers with a way to go from reflection to change—helping them develop what Mezirow (1990) calls a “praxis” for transformative learning (p. 354). Therefore, teacher educators should ask deeper questions, such as how does Ella’s reflection affect her learning to teach? What transformative actions, if any, resulted from her reflection? Although many teacher educators believe that ePortfolio reflection can enhance learning, are prospective teachers on the same page? I first met Ella at the end of her third semester in the teacher education program. When asked about her opinion of the ePortfolio reflection requirement and why she reflected the way she did, Ella gave me a long response: I think we get very mixed views on the ePortfolio. Because I understand the people who work for it and support it in the school of education. They see a different thing from we see as students. They see it as a reflective tool. And it is something we all kind of struggle with it, because as we heard many times, principals look at it, they use it for hiring and see what is in your ePortfolio, but then we hear from former students and we hear even from principals, that [they] don’t really use the ePortfolio. So I feel like we are kind of given two different stories on the portfolio…. It’s really like who the audience is…. [The ePortfolio is] a professional piece that’s going to be shown to professional people who kind of hold your career in their hands, and so sometimes I wonder are we really putting who we are down in that ePortfolio because I want to be looked as the best I can for my job, rather than nitty– gritty, what’s really shaping me. (Ella Interview #1)

Ella’s response shows that many factors impacted her understanding of the ePortfolio reflection requirement and her selection of what went into her ePortfolio. Researchers have long demonstrated the effect of the sociocultural context on prospective teacher learning (Grossman, Smgorinsky, & Valencia, 1999; Zeichner, 2006; Zeichner & Conklin, 2008). As such, the nature and quality of prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflection should not be treated as a simple and unchanging phenomenon, resulting from just their own thinking or beliefs, but as the result of a constellation of internal and external factors, including their educational and life experiences, the curriculum, culture, and policy of their teacher education programs

4

1 Introduction

and field placement schools, and the interactions of these different factors. With these thoughts in mind, I have written this book to delve deeper into the following questions: • What do prospective teachers reflect on and to what extent is their reflection critical? • To what extent does their reflection transform their teaching practice? • How does the teacher education program foster or inhibit their critical reflection and transformative learning? • How can teacher educators support prospective teachers’ critical reflection for transformative learning? In the rest of this chapter, I will lay out the theoretical foundations of critical reflection, the sociocultural context of prospective teacher learning, and ePortfolio reflection research in teacher education. I continue with a brief description of the research itself and conclude with a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.

1.2  Reflection and Critical Reflection The primary title of this book, Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning, refers to the core theoretical model I have used for both research on teacher education and for my own teacher education pedagogy. I have been working with this framework for more than 10 years now, and although my conception and implementation of it have evolved over the decade, it remains focused on the intersection of self and society, contemplation, and action. I fully expect to continue to use the framework and to continue developing it as I learn more and experience more in research and teaching. Because of the importance of this theoretical framework, both to the understanding, I have developed of prospective teacher learning, and to the pedagogy, I have developed to stimulate prospective teacher reflection and action in the classroom, I will briefly explain the roots of critical reflection for transformative learning in education research and practice, paying particular attention to those historical strands that have been formative for the model. It will come as no surprise that John Dewey first proposed the idea that good teachers are reflective. In his influential book How We Think (Dewey, 1933), Dewey suggests that good teachers engage in “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and further conclusions to which it leads” (p. 188). This kind of thought is reflective, meaning it is more directed than simply accepting a belief with little attempt to examine the evidence for it. What is surprising is that the idea was not seriously taken up and moved into teacher education until Donald Schön’s Reflective Practitioner (Schon, 1983), a full 50 years after Dewey. In the nearly four decades now since Donald Schon’s work was first published, teacher education programs around the world have recognized reflection as a vital skill for teachers, and taken on the goal of developing reflective teachers (Handal & Lauvas, 1987; Hatton &

1.2  Reflection and Critical Reflection

5

Smith, 1995; Valli, 1992; Zeichner, 1996; Zeichner & Liston, 1996). This movement in teacher education took strength in no small part from the desire to prepare teachers able to adapt their teaching to particular students in particular social, cultural, and political contexts (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Hammerness, Darling-­ Hammond, & Bransford, 2005; Zeichner, 2006), especially students who are culturally, ethnically, and racially different from the majority of the society and the majority of the teacher corps (Au, 2009; Ball & Ladson-Billings, 2020; Ball & Tyson, 2011; Cochran-Smith, 2011, 2020; Ladson-Billings, 2001, 2009; Ladson-­ Billings & Tate, 1995; Sleeter, 2001; Valenzuela, 2017; Zeichner, 2020). Within this reflective teaching movement, the specific term “critical reflection” has gradually taken precedence (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Mezirow, 1990, 2000; Smyth, 1989; van Manen, 1977). However, there are multiple definitions of critical reflection (notably Cherubini, 2009a, 2009b; Dinkelman, 1999, 2000; Howard, 2003; van Manen, 1977) which, while certainly related in their linkage to social science critical theory (notably Habermas), contain enough variation to confuse teacher educators and teacher education students. For example, Howard (2003) offers a framework of culturally relevant pedagogy as an ingredient of critical reflection without articulating a formal definition, while Dinkelman (1999) draws from the work of van Manen (1977) and Liston and Zeichner’s (1991) social reconstructionist perspective, to define critical reflection as: deliberation about wider social, historical, political, and cultural contexts of education, and deliberation about relationships between educational practice and the construction of a more equitable, justice, and democratic society” (p. 332).

Note that, in keeping with social science critical theory, this conception of critical reflection emphasizes the social, political, cultural, and demonstrates an interest in social justice both within education and in larger society. However, these critical concerns are presented as the content for reflection, but neither the reasoning for their selection nor the potential to move beyond thinking is addressed. Zeichner and Liston argue (Zeichner & Liston, 1996) that not all thinking about teaching can be considered as “reflective,” saying that “if a teacher never questions the goals and the values that guide his or her work, the context in which he or she teaches, or never examines his or her assumptions, then this individual is not engaged in reflective teaching” (p. 1). The next step, then is for teacher educators to guide prospective teachers in taking action upon the analysis of their assumptions. If we grant the importance of reflective teaching and agree with Zeichner and Liston that this reflection must question the goals and values guiding teaching, then we must go beyond the notion of reflective teaching in general and consider how to foster critical reflection among prospective teachers. This requirement, in turn, means that we need to understand how prospective teachers learn to reflect, and to what extent that reflection is critical, and not just “thinking about teaching.” For example, the research on reflective teaching reviewed by Zeichner as early as 1992 shows that there is quite a bit of study on preparing reflective teachers. However, his review also shows that most of that research focuses on prospective teachers’ perceptions and self-reported results, with few taking a closer look at their reflections

6

1 Introduction

in terms of process or its critical nature. In order to be sure, we are preparing prospective teachers to be reflective practitioners, we need to understand how they learn reflection, and to what extent they learn to be critical. I will take this critique one step further before turning to the social context of teacher education. In addition to preparing prospective teachers to reflect critically, we need to prepare them to make use of that reflection in their classrooms, schools, and communities. In other words, it is not enough to identify distorted assumptions or educational equities: the point is to do something about them. To address this need, my framework employs the concept of transformative learning, “the process of making a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of an experience, which guides subsequent understanding, appreciation, and action” (Mezirow, 1990, p. 1, emphasis mine). Mezirow insists that the end result of reflection should be action that transforms the teacher and the learner, and in so doing, transforms the institution. Therefore, the ultimate goal of critical reflection for transformative learning in teacher education is to prepare teachers who can recognize and understand socially, culturally, and politically grounded injustice in education and then take actions to change it. With this goal in mind, I developed the following definition: Critical reflection is a process of constantly analyzing, questioning, and critiquing established assumptions of oneself, schools, and the society about teaching and learning, and the social and political implications of schooling, and implementing changes to previous actions that have been supported by those established assumptions for the purpose of supporting student learning and a better schooling and more just[ice] society for all children. (Liu, 2015, pp. 10–11)

This definition highlights the three core aspects of critical reflection for transformative learning: the process (analyzing, questioning, critiquing, and implementing changes), the content (assumptions relevant to both classroom teaching and the larger society), and the goal (educational equity for a more just society). I use this framework to guide both the research presented in this book and my pedagogy for teacher education, and which I will elucidate in the succeeding chapters of this book. Here I will briefly outline the way in which I put this framework in terms of stages in a hermeneutic that teacher educators can use both to inculcate habits of reflection in prospective teachers and quickly gauge where they are in learning to reflect (Liu & Ball, 2019; see Fig. 1.1). In this framework, I use a modified version of critical reflection proposed and elaborated by Brookfield (1987, 1988, 1995) to explain how teachers learn to reflect on problems in teaching, learning, and schooling. His original model included four aspects that he sometimes described as “components” and at other times “stages” to reflect the fact that they do depend upon each other and may be learned sequentially, but do not have to occur as fixed, discrete. In this book, I use the word “stage” to reinforce the necessity of scaffolding prospective teacher learning. Because I also incorporate Mezirow’s transformative learning into my framework, I have added two more stages (or components) in which the teacher acts upon their reflection and then reflects upon the results of those actions. Table 1.1 summarizes the six stages of critical reflection for transformative learning.

7

1.3  Social Context in Teacher Education

Assumption Analysis Reflection on the effect of reflectionbased Actions

Contextual Awareness

Reflectionbased Actions

Imaginative Speculation

Reflective Skepticism

Fig. 1.1  The hermeneutic cycle of critical reflection for transformative learning

It is important to reiterate that these stages of critical reflection for transformative learning, although performed by expert reflective teachers in any sequence (or, in fact, several stages simultaneously), prospective teachers need to learn them deliberately and with proper scaffolding. This scaffolding must be done within the social context of teach education, including the ways in which the field experience socializes prospective teachers into the local details of teaching and schooling. Therefore, I briefly discuss the social context of teacher education before laying out the structure of this book.

1.3  Social Context in Teacher Education Ken Zeichner once suggested to me in a personal conversation that “you need to look at the portfolio in the way it is existing in the program that exists in the department and within the institution and state policy context; you can’t understand any part of the teacher education program without situating it ecologically.” The social

8

1 Introduction

Table 1.1  Stages of critical reflection for transformative learning (modified from Brookfield, 1987; Liu, 2015) Stages 1. Assumption analysis

Explanation Teachers identify the assumptions about schooling and the society that underlie the ideas, beliefs, values, and actions that they and others take for granted, and then compare those assumptions against their lived experience and that of their students. 2. Contextual Teachers recognize that their assumptions are created in a specific social, awareness historical, political, and cultural context, so what they regard as appropriate ways of organizing schooling and society are not context free. 3. Imaginative Teachers explore alternative ways to current ways of thinking and living in speculation order to provide an opportunity to challenge prevailing ways of knowing and imagine more rational or just alternatives. 4. Reflective Teachers develop a critical cast of mind to doubt the claims made for the skepticism universal validity or truth of an idea, practice, or institution. They call into question the belief that simply because some idea or social structure has existed unchanged for a period of time that it must be right and the best possible arrangement. 5. Reflection-based Teachers take actions to change or improve their teaching, or schooling in actions general, on the basis of their reflection. They do this with an awareness of the context and a generalized skepticism toward universalist solutions 6. Reflection on the Teachers analyze the effect of the reflection-based actions on student effect of reflection-­ learning, upon which to make further decisions for future teaching. This may trigger another cycle of critical reflection. based actions

context of prospective teachers’ teaching and learning to which I pay close attention has six dimensions: 1 . the state licensure requirements or external teacher education standards 2. goals and structure of the elementary teacher education program 3. the different reflection requirements for prospective teachers in different courses 4. the goals and design of the ePortfolio 5. the role of prospective teachers as teachers and 6. the effect of cooperating teachers and school policies on prospective teachers’ concepts and practices

The state standards, in tandem with the structure and goals of the elementary teacher education program, influence the program’s admission process, curriculum, instruction, and evaluation of prospective teachers. Each semesters’ requirements for prospective teachers to learn and reflect vary from course to course and from teacher educator to teacher educator, leading to different approaches to ePortfolio reflection assignments. The technical affordances of the tools prospective teachers use to construct their reflections, and the staff support (some professional, some peer) on campus combine to set limits on what can be accomplished in the system. The prospective teachers’ prior education experiences and their social–cultural backgrounds—what Lortie (1975) famously described as their “apprenticeship of observation”—obviously condition their values and beliefs about teaching, learning, students, and schooling, and shape their writing about their teaching practice. Finally, the cooperating teachers, especially those who work intensively with the

1.4  ePortfolios and Prospective Teacher Reflection

9

prospective teachers during the student teaching semester, have a strong impact on the teaching and thinking of prospective teachers in part because of the amount of time they spend together but also because of their nearly unchallenged authority as experts in the classroom. Their understanding of critical reflection and their notions of good teaching, as well as their interpretation of school policies and curricula, has a direct influence on the prospective teachers. In the past decades, significant research on teacher education from a sociocultural standpoint has focused on the importance of building learning communities for teacher learning and professional development (e.g., Barab, McKinster, & Scheckler, 2006; Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; Little, 2002; Liu, 2012; Liu, Miller, & Jahng, 2016; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001), and on socialization, the impact of social context on preservice teacher learning (Bausell & Glazier, 2018; Grossman et al., 1999; Köybasi & Ugurlu, 2019; Tan, 2015; Zeichner & Conklin, 2008; Zeichner & Gore, 1990). As Grossman et al. (1999) comment, “prospective teachers often find themselves tugged in different directions, with university faculty, supervisors, mentor teachers, and school systems encouraging different approaches to teaching” (p.  5). Thus, to understand their thinking, teacher educators must understand the social context in which teaching and reflection are situated and interpret the context of teaching and reflection within the social and cultural structures of the present society. However, there has been a lack of community building in the practice of preparing reflective teachers in teacher education programs. Much of the work on reflective teaching maintains a focus on facilitating reflection by individual teachers who are to think by themselves about their work. There is still very little emphasis on reflection as a social practice that takes place within communities of teachers who support and sustain each other’s growth (Zeichner & Liu, 2010). Similarly, research on prospective teacher reflections and ePortfolios tends to neglect the social and cultural context that may exert an influence on prospective teachers’ reflections or the impact of the ePortfolio environment itself on what prospective teachers decide to upload as reflection artifacts. Prospective teachers’ reflections, constituting a part of their learning process, should not be regarded as the simple result of decisions made by prospective teachers themselves.

1.4  ePortfolios and Prospective Teacher Reflection In recent years, the portfolios have come into wide use in the United States with the introduction of performance-based assessment into most state requirements for teacher education programs, although states still require basic skill and content knowledge exams. Portfolios are able to demonstrate, in a more holistic and continuous way, the complex skills that prospective teachers must develop in order to become full-time teachers. One approach to portfolio assessment is the use of the electronic portfolio or ePortfolio. Although there is a general understanding of what

10

1 Introduction

an ePortfolio is and what it is able to do, there is no consensus within the teacher education field about its definitions, purposes, and platforms. Since the early 1990s, ePortfolios have emerged as a tool for “encouraging deeper learning through the use of multimedia artifacts as richer forms of literacy to express understanding” (Lambert, DePaepe, Lambert, & Anderson, 2007, p.  76) that “can provide a dynamic, living space where ongoing professional statements and reflections are accessible to a full professional learning community” (Samaras & Fox, 2012, p. 20). Despite the apparently limitless potential of ePortfolios to support teacher learning, the reality in the field is less exciting. Although there is a body of literature on the ePortfolio reporting that they enhance prospective teachers’ reflections (Borko, Michalec, Timmons, & Siddle, 1997; Davies & Willis, 2001; Lyons, 1998; Milman, 2005; Slepcevic-Zach & Stock, 2018), research documenting in-depth studies of the content and quality of the reflections is sparse, and efforts to triangulate prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflections with classroom observations practically nonexistent. Moreover, the tendency for teacher education programs to maintain an assessment purpose to ePortfolios has proven rather problematic. As Ross (2014) observes, the understanding that their ePortfolios will be assessed makes prospective teachers “extremely audience-aware” (p.  219), which can encourage prospective teachers to avoid serious reflection (Wilson, Wright, & Stallworth, 2003) and a tendency toward repeating the preset standards (Delandshere & Arens, 2003). Instead, they attempt to ensure high assessment through rhetorical strategies such as sunshining (reporting only positive information and avoiding self-­ criticism) and would-spiking (proclaiming what the prospective teacher would do differently in the future, without conceding any problems in the present), which forestall criticism by evaluators (Thomas & Liu, 2012). This is not to say that the promise of the ePortfolio is unachievable. For example, Oner and Adadan (2011) designed ePortfolio reflections so that prospective teachers were able to access each other’s portfolios and share feedback on the artifacts they posted, which allowed them to reflect on their teaching practice from multiple perspectives. Elsewhere (Liu, 2017) I found that with elucidation of the multiple voices and texts from prospective teachers’ field experience, the ePortfolio can create a dialogic space for prospective teachers, cooperating teachers, and supervisors during field experiences, enabling teacher educators to stimulate deep reflection and springboard transformative learning. However, I also found that absent systematic observation and careful follow-up, the potential to move from multiple voices to real transformative learning is limited. As Dewey (1933) advocated almost a century ago, the habit of critical inquiry needs to be cultivated; both studies highlight that in order to help prospective teachers engage in meaningful reflection, teacher educators have to provide carefully designed tasks and an easily accessed platform in the ePortfolio that can function as a medium to support multiple voices and perspectives. In short, ePortfolios provide great promise for encouraging serious reflection by prospective teachers and therefore also show potential for enabling transformative learning. However, research suggests that potential has been limited by a wide range of factors, not least of which is an incomplete understanding of how prospective

1.5  About the Research

11

teachers learn to reflect, how deep that reflection is, and whether or not there are transformative results of that reflection in their teaching and learning. I therefore developed and conducted research with the aim of finding some answers for these questions and developing ways to better teach both critical reflection and transformative learning.

1.5  About the Research The study from which I drew this book was situated in the undergraduate elementary education program of a large university in the Midwestern United States— “Midwest University.” The city (and therefore the school district in which my participants were placed) is a city of over 250,000 people, making it an “urban emergent district,” one located in a city with fewer than one million residents (Milner, 2012b). Milner points out that, although schools in urban emergent districts are located in smaller cities, they still mirror the diversity of student demographics found in larger, “urban intensive” districts. In this case, students of color comprise 53% of the total student population in the district. However, the teacher corps, as is typical in the United States, is overwhelmingly White. Midwest University’s elementary teacher education program was founded in 1951 with the vision of preparing quality teachers, rather than on producing a large number of teachers, even though there was a shortage in the state at the time. This vision, valuing democracy and education, the school and community, and the child and their development, was deeply influenced by educators such as John Dewey and Ralph Tyler. Over a half century, the program adopted the structure of five semesters beginning with students admitted as juniors, resulting in an undergraduate degree with certification that typically took 5 (and in some cases more) years to complete. The five semesters included four practicum semesters with specific focus each semester from community and early childhood, to literacy, math and arts, and social studies, science, physical education, and music, culminating into the final semester of student teaching. To be admitted to the program, candidates were expected to declare their dedication to multicultural and interpersonal competence in working with diverse races, cultures, language backgrounds, family forms, sexual orientations, economic, gender, and ability groups, and also to develop reflective competence. After entering one of the two cohorts in the elementary education program (early childhood through middle childhood and middle childhood through early adolescence), students spent four semesters in practicum and one semester student teaching. In addition to 40 credits in liberal studies that prospective teachers could complete before or after being admitted to the teacher education program, there were 57–60 credits of professional education including methods courses and field placement seminars and 27 credits in other requirements such as courses on human development, educational psychology, and foundations of the profession.

12

1 Introduction

One of the goals of all the teacher education programs at Midwest University was to prepare reflective educators. The website for the program defined being reflective as: Educators must be prepared to search for the meanings and consequences of their own knowledge and beliefs, of their teaching, of schooling; they must be prepared to use the resulting understanding to choose among professional alternatives, continually re-­ examining professional goals and professional actions.

Aligning itself with the goal of the teacher education program as a whole, the elementary education program highlighted reflective teaching, emphasizing the ability to foster learning of all students from different identity groups as well as the commitment to teaching for social justice and equity. When the study was conducted, the teacher education program at Midwest University had used two models for organizing and placing prospective teachers in practicum and student teaching schools, the Professional Development School (PDS) model, and the non-PDS model since the late 1990s. One major purpose of the PDS program was to prepare teachers who can be successful in culturally diverse urban schools. After prospective teachers were selected for the PDS program, those who sought elementary certification were placed in two of four elementary partner schools, and those who were in the secondary certification program were placed in one partner high school and one middle school. The elementary teacher education students completed all of their practicum teaching and student teaching experiences in one of the two pairs of elementary and middle Professional Development schools. One of the unique features of the PDS partnership was the presence of an on-site university supervisor in each PDS who supervised the prospective teachers from practicum II through the student teaching semester. Faculty and staff in the teacher education program developed the ePortfolio project to support preparing reflective practitioners; as such, submission of an ePortfolio was one of the requirements for prospective teachers’ graduation.2 Each elementary prospective teacher’s ePortfolio was structured for them into five areas: autobiography, educational philosophy, teaching and learning, teaching for diversity, and the standards. Starting from the first semester of the five-semester professional program, prospective teachers were expected to upload designated work for each semester, such as an educational philosophy statement from their introductory education course, lesson plans, and reflections on the lessons they taught, goals for their practicum teaching, and several reflections on that experience. At the end of their (final) student teaching semester, prospective teachers provided “artifacts” to show that they met all 15 university teacher education standards, such as teaching videos, classroom photos and materials, and further reflections.

2  At the time I began my research, Midwest University did not participate in edTPA. However, not long after I completed my data collection, the state Department of Public Instruction mandated a gradual switch to use edTPA assessment of the ePortfolio as one of the elements leading to licensure. Chapter 7 provides a brief discussion of the implication of edTPA for the use of ePortfolio for student learning.

1.5  About the Research

13

This book is based on qualitative research involving the collecting and analysis of prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflections in three semesters (third and fourth practicum semesters and the final student teaching semester) triangulated with my observations in field placement classrooms and interviews in two semesters (fourth practicum semester and final student teaching semester). Primary participants included four prospective teachers in the elementary teacher education program: Ella, Doug, Judy, and Karla. Ella grew up in a small town in the state where Midwest University is located. With both parents being education professionals, Ella inherited from them a strong passion for teaching. Ella’s educational philosophy centered around relationships of trust and respect with students and parents. Therefore, one important element of Ella’s educational philosophy was the three-way communication between the parents and the community, the child, and the teacher. In terms of teacher behaviors and attitudes, Ella believed that, in order to become effective, a teacher must reflect on their teaching at multiples stages of the process. The skill of reflection was, in her opinion, one of the most important ones that a teacher could possess because it takes courage to look at oneself and admit that something went wrong or was not good for the students. Doug, one of a handful of prospective teachers of color in his cohort, also stated in his educational philosophy that his teaching was strongly embedded in social reconstructionism. As an African American male, he felt that his previous school experiences were not always pleasant or helpful because he went through occasions of unjust and wrong judgment of him, such as accusations of plagiarism and cheating, which gave him a passion to work with minority students to help bring change to their lives. Therefore, his goal in teaching was to build a positive environment to nurture students’ learning, especially for those who were not given enough attention or support. He strongly articulated the idea of teaching for social change: “I hope to teach for social reform in this world; there are many disparities too entrenched in our society that needs to be changed” (Doug Reflection). Doug requested to be assigned to diverse classrooms during his practicum and student teaching semesters. Judy grew up in the north part of the state where Midwest University is located. Both of her parents were educators as well. Writing in her educational philosophy, Judy stated that growing up with “white privilege” she had a pretty easy upbringing: always having a roof over her head and enough money for trips and never having to worry about food. During her freshman year, she took a trip to New Orleans, which she stated gave her a glimpse of social injustice and discrimination against the poor. She indicated that she wanted to work with a diverse population and teach in a culturally relevant manner so children could learn about and respect differences. She believed in education and the power it has to influence and change lives. Judy was the only participant in this study who was in the Professional Development School Program. Karla grew up attending a private school in which she felt the teacher/parent/ student relationship was very strong. Due to this experience, Karla wanted to form relationships with both her students and their parents before she expected to be able to teach them valuable academic knowledge. She intended to pass on the skills of social interaction in order to achieve a more progressive society of critical thinkers

14

1 Introduction

and communicators. Karla stated in her educational philosophy that her beliefs were rooted in social reconstructionism. She explained that on the one hand, the teacher must relate to her students on a social level as an equal, with age and wisdom as her only strengths over them. On the other hand, the teacher must stress that her style and knowledge surpass her students because of academic experience and training (and not because of simple social superiority). I selected these four participants for several compelling reasons. First, Ella, Judy, and Karla were all White, female prospective teachers, native to the state in which they planned to teach, and thus representative of the graduates of many teacher education programs in the United States (US Department of Education, 2016). Second, Doug represented a rare case of prospective teachers of color, which research links to the low representation of African American teachers in K–12 schools and an even lower representation in teacher education research (Milner, 2012a). In addition to the four primary participants, I interviewed teacher educators involved in the four participants’ education, including five teacher education faculty members, four methods course instructors in the third and fourth semesters, six supervisors in the third through fifth semesters, and six cooperating teachers in the fourth and fifth semesters (see Table 1.2). For details regarding data sources and data analysis, please see Chap. 8 and the Appendix.

1.6  About this Book This book has two goals. One is to delve into the answers to the questions that motivated my research in prospective teachers and their struggles to learn to become transformative practitioners. The other is to draw upon my experiences, and those of my research participants, to provide some guidance for teacher educators who wish to develop the capacity for critical reflection among their own prospective teachers, and to enable that reflection to lead to transformation of teaching, schooling, and communities. As such, I have structured the book into nine chapters, each of which can be read separately but which, taken together, provide both an analysis of prospective teacher reflection and suggestions for its improvement. Table 1.2  Research participants Name/position Methods instructor

Supervisor Cooperating Teacher

Social studies PE Music 4th semester 5th semester 4th semester 5th semester

Ella Cathy Lizz Paul Beth Jane Kate

Karla Laura Pam Roy Juan N/A Katy

Judy Cathy Lizz

Doug Cathy Lizz

Maggie Maggie Sue Sue

Paul Beth Anne Tom

1.6  About this Book

15

After this brief introduction, Chap. 2, “Who Celebrates Kwanzaa?” employs key stories of the four primary participants to lay out the efforts they made to engage in reflective practice. Triangulating their written reflections with classroom observations and interviews reveals different actions when it comes to transformation of their teaching and their students’ learning. The focus of the stories is the struggle for inclusive education in the context of cultural, linguistic, and racial diversity in the K–12 student body that is not reflected in the teacher corps. Chapter 3, “We Look Back on What Is Good and What Is Bad,” turns to the institutional experiences prospective teachers have with reflection and the conceptions of reflection they develop as a result of those experiences. Those conceptions lean strongly toward what Zeichner and Liston (1996) call “generic reflection,” and typically narrate a simple vision of teaching that avoids details and criticism in favor of self-praise. Chapter 4, “It’s Me Doing Work for Someone Else,” steps back from the field classroom and looks at how prospective teachers think about reflection and the teacher education program’s demand that they become reflective practitioners. As the chapter title suggests, much of the attitude prospective teachers have toward the ePortfolio reflection—and toward reflection assignments in general—is shaped by the fact that they are required tasks within a general regime of assessment. This reality has serious implications for the use of ePortfolios and reflection assignments as learning tools within teacher education programs. Chapter 5, “I Want to be Seen as the Best as I Can,” considers prospective teachers’ acts of reflection on their classroom teaching as a performance for an audience. Again considering the overarching regime of assessment within which prospective teachers report their success in meeting the state and university standards. Here, their desire to be seen as always already professional, high-quality teachers override any impulse to critically analyze their assumptions and teaching practices, and thus undermines transformative learning that might have occurred. Chapter 6, “Awesome, Awesome,” turns to the relationship prospective teachers develop with the cooperating teachers and university-based supervisors—the supervision triad of teacher education. This relationship is found at the intersection of assessment and affirmation—the sense that the supervisor is assessing both prospective and cooperating teachers, and the general culture of affirmation that has become inescapable in U.S. education. As a result, the potential for collaborative reflection regarding the puzzles and concerns naturally arising in prospective teachers’ field experiences goes unfulfilled and opportunities for critical reflection are missed. Chapters 2 through 6 provide the bulk of the prospective teachers’ stories and my analysis of their stories from the lens of critical reflection for transformative learning. The next two chapters are more forward-looking and intended to help other teacher educators work with the implications of the previous chapters to improve teacher education in general. Chapter 7 revisits the theoretical framework for critical reflection for transformative learning, then turns to a data-driven approach to implementing that framework in teacher education. Although this chapter assumes a teacher education program structured like the one studied for this book, the sug-

16

1 Introduction

gestions and recommendations are applicable to other sorts of programs. Chapter 8 then briefly explains how to use the procedures of narrative coding to tailor the suggestions in Chap. 7 to the teacher education program and, most importantly, to the pool of prospective teachers in a given program, conforming to the idea that teacher educators should do as they demand of prospective teachers and begin where their students are. The final chapter, “Toward a Transformative Teacher Education Community,” proposes more radical changes to teacher education in the United States. Rather than thinking of the findings and suggestions of the previous chapters as palliatives for a system that must be preserved, Chap. 9 argues for a new generation of teacher education programs that centers on critical reflection for transformative learning in a holistic context of prospective teachers, university-based teacher educators, school-based cooperating teachers, and the parents and community members the schools serve. This approach builds upon previous models, including community-­ based teacher education (Murrell, 2001; Zygmunt & Clark, 2016) and teacher prep 3.0 (Kretchmar & Zeichner, 2016; Zeichner, 2016), which hold great promise not only to encourage the production of high-quality teachers, but to enable them, with their colleagues and community partners, to move our schools closer to paying off the education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006) and providing equitable education for all.

References Au, W. (2009). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. New York: Routledge. Ball, A. F., & Ladson-Billings, G. (2020). Educating teachers for the 21st century: Culture, reflection, and learning. In N. S. Nasir, C. D. Lee, R. Pea, & M. M. Royston (Eds.), Handbook of cultural foundations of learning (pp. 387–403). New York, NY: Routledge. Ball, A.  F., & Tyson, C. (Eds.). (2011). Studying diversity in teacher education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Banks, J. A. (1993). Multicultural education: Development, dimensions, and challenges. The Phi Delta Kappan, 75(1), 22–28. Barab, S. A., McKinster, J. G., & Scheckler, R. (2006). Designing system dualities: Characterizing an online professional development community. In S. A. Barab, R. Kling, & J. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Bausell, S.  B., & Glazier, J.  A. (2018). New teacher socialization and the testing apparatus. Harvard Educational Review, 88(3), 308–333. Borko, H., Michalec, P., Timmons, M., & Siddle, J. (1997). Student teaching portfolios: A tool for promoting reflective practice. Journal of Teacher Education, 48(5), 345–357. Brookfield, S. D. (1987). Developing critical thinkers: Challenging adults to explore alternative ways of thinking and acting. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Brookfield, S. D. (1988). Organizing concepts and practices in adult education in the United States. In S. D. Brookfield (Ed.), Training educators of adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Cammarota, J. (2014). Challenging colorblindness in Arizona: Latina/o students’ counternarratives of race and racism. Multicultural Perspectives, 16(2), 79–85.

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Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). Race still matters: Critical race theory in education. In M. W. Apple, A.  Au, & L.  A. Gandin (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of critical education (pp. 110–122). New York: Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68. Ladson-Billings, G. J. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–12. Lambert, C., DePaepe, J., Lambert, L., & Anderson, D. (2007). E-portfolios in action. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 43(2), 76–81. Little, J. W. (2002). Locating learning in teachers’ communities of practice: Opening up problems of analysis in records of everyday work. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 917–946. Liu, K. (2012). A design framework for online teacher professional development communities. Asia Pacific Education Review, 13(4), 710–711. Liu, K. (2015). Critical reflection as a framework for transformative learning in teacher education. Educational Review, 67(2), 135–157. Liu, K. (2017). Creating a dialogic space for prospective teacher critical reflection and transformative learning. Reflective Practice, 18(6), 805–820. Liu, K., Miller, R., & Jahng, K. E. (2016). Participatory media for teacher professional development: Toward a self-sustainable and democratic community of practice. Educational Review, 68(4), 420–443. Liu, K., & Ball, A. (2019). Critical reflection and generativity: Toward a framework of transformative teacher education for diverse learners. Review of Research in Education, 43(1), 68–105. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X18822806 Liston, D., & Zeichner, K. (1991). Teacher education and the social conditions of schooling. New York, NY: Routledge. Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyons, N. (1998). Reflection in teaching: Can it be developmental? A portfolio perspective. Teacher Education Quarterly, 25, 115–127. McLaughlin, W. W., & Talbert, J. (2001). Professional communities and the work of high school teaching. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mezirow, J. (Ed.). (1990). Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A guide to transformative and emancipatory learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Miller, R., Liu, K., & Ball, A. (2020). Critical counter-narrative as transformative methodology for educational equity. Review of Research in Education, 44(1), 269–300. Milman, N.  B. (2005). Web-based digital teaching portfolios: Fostering reflection and technology competence in preservice teacher education students. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 13(3), 373–396. Milner, H. R. (2008). Disrupting deficit notions of difference: Counter-narratives of teachers and community in urban education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(6), 1573–1598. Milner, H. R. (2012a). Beyond a test score: Explaining opportunity gaps in educational practice. Journal of Black Studies, 43(6), 693–718. Milner, H. R. (2012b). But what is urban education? Urban Education, 47(3), 556–561. https://doi. org/10.1177/0042085912447516. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & González, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Murrell, P. (2001). The community teacher: A new framework for effective urban teaching. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. NCES. (2016). The condition of education: Pre-primary, elementary, and secondary education: English Language Learners in public schools. Retrieved May 9, 2020, from https://nces. ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgf.asp#info.

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Zeichner, K., & Conklin, H. (2008). Teacher education programs as sites for teacher preparation. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, D. J. McIntyre & Association of Teacher Educators (eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education: Enduring questions in changing contexts (3rd ed., pp.  269–289). New  York: Routledge; co-published by the Association of Teacher Educators. Zeichner, K., & Gore, J. (1990). Teacher socialization. In W.  R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 329–348). New York: Macmillan. Zeichner, K., & Liston, D. (1996). Reflective teaching: An introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Zeichner, K., & Liu, K. (2010). A critical analysis of reflection as the goal of teacher education. In N. Lyons (Ed.), Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry (pp. 67–84). New York, NY: Springer. Zeichner, K., & Wray, S. (2001). The teaching portfolio in US teacher education programs: What we know and what we need to know. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17(5), 613–621. Zeichner, K.  M. (1996). Teachers as reflective practitioners and the democratization of school reform. In K. Zeichner, S. Melnick, & M. L. Gomez (Eds.), Currents of reform in preservice teacher education (pp. 199–214). New York: Teachers College. Zygmunt, E., & Clark, P. (2016). Transforming teacher education for social justice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Zeichner, K. (2016) Advancing Social Justice and Democracy in Teacher Education: Teacher Preparation 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 52(4),150–155. 

Chapter 2

Who Celebrates Kwanzaa? The Struggle for Critical Reflection and Transformative Learning Judy is holding the summary chart she made for her equity unit on celebrations of light, finishing the last lesson of the unit surrounded by a group of kindergarteners sitting on the ground. She starts to go through the categories in the chart one by one: “Who celebrates Kwanzaa?” Students are very active and hands go up everywhere. One student gets the opportunity to respond: “African Americans.” “What are the tools they use in the celebration?” Judy asks. Rebecca, the only African-American girl in the classroom, answers: “Mats and cups!” The question and answer process based on the chart continues with other celebrations such as Hanukkah, Chinese Winter Solstice, and Christmas. (Judy Observation #3)

This last unit of Judy’s student teaching semester happened to occur in the season when the majority of students and families in the class celebrate American holidays. Judy wrote in her ePortfolio reflection that she wanted her students to have “an opportunity to learn about lesser known celebrations” (Judy Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection). With this rationale, she invited different community members to introduce to the students the celebrations based on their own cultures. By the end of this unit, Judy reflected that students learned the principles of different light celebrations, and most important of all, they learned from the cultures of different people and how to apply those principles to their own lives. Teaching and reflecting as Judy did is not uncommon among prospective teachers who show some ability to analyze and critique their teaching in the micro classroom context, at least in their written reflections. More impressively, some of them are able to articulate certain social, cultural, and political aspects of teaching, such as race, culture, and identity, in their written reflections as well as in conversations with their mentor teachers and university supervisors. However, taking a closer look at their reflections and, especially, their teaching practices in the classroom, reveals gaps between what prospective teachers are vocal about in their written reflections and what they actually do in their teaching. It also demonstrates a disjuncture between how they carefully design, prepare, and teach lessons versus how they respond when unexpected situations arise in the classroom. These discrepancies indicate that prospective teachers’ reflections and teaching to some extent are performative—that is, they are designed and implemented to fit the social discourse and assessment requirements of their teacher education program. However, this carefully prepared performance can falter when the unexpected occurs in the classroom, and when that happens, prospective teachers tend to fall back on their old paradigms, relying on attitudes formed through epistemic, sociocultural,and psychic distortions of knowledge  (Mezirow, 1990). Responding to the unexpected © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. Liu, Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01955-0_2

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disruption of prepared performance in this way does not lead to transformative learning for either prospective teachers or their charges, but may easily reinscribe larger social inequities into the micro classroom environment. As the stories in the following sections reveal, understanding the complexity of reflection, its connection to the situated social context, and its effect (or lack thereof) in the classroom is key to breaking the patterns of performance and disruption that prevent transformation and reinforce the pervasive social and political distortions linking race, culture, identity, and behavior. As any teacher is acutely aware, students are not uniform in the way they approach assignments or in the efforts they make to fulfill the assignments. Reflective writing in a digital environment is no different. The four cases discussed in this book form a spectrum of the performance of reflection ranging from avoidance of critical reflection with positive description of the technical aspect of teaching at one end, no serious effort to capture teaching practices that are grounded on critical reflection at the other end, and some prospective teachers falling somewhere in the middle, showing emergent signs of critical reflection with limited transformation. I will begin by describing Karla and Doug at the two ends of the spectrum, and then consider Ella and Judy in whom we can see emergent efforts at critical reflection. Similarly, there is a spectrum of prospective teachers’ action in the classroom ranging from little observable effort to transform teaching and learning to significant efforts at such transformation. In this chapter, I will examine both critical reflection in the ePortfolio space and transformative action in the classroom space.

2.1  T  ales of Success: Avoiding Critical Reflection with Positive Description of Technical Procedures Karla is conducting a writing workshop lesson for fifth graders during her student teaching semester. Students sit in groups of four or five; sitting at one table at the far-right side of the classroom are two African-American students and three Hispanic students. All the other students seem to be white. Karla starts writing on the whiteboard the word “blue” and telling her own real story of having a pen explode in her bag. With the beginning sentence written down, Karla says “I’m done.” The students look confused. Karla follows with a question: “If you were the teacher, what could you ask me to expand the story?” Many students raise their hands and Karla pauses once in a while to ask their input, the students responding with questions such as “What does it look like? What does it smell like?” and “What is your reaction?” From the students’ input, it is clear that they have learned how to use the “six-traits strategy” to prompt their writing. Many students are called on to help Karla to write her story; although the five students of color sitting at the table on the far-­ right raise their hands multiple times, Karla only calls one of the children (an African American boy) once. (Karla Observation #4)

During the post-teaching conference between Karla, the university supervisor, and the mentor teacher, the supervisor raised a question about including all student voices: “I think … you need to pay attention to the whole class … and make sure that all the voices are not silenced. There are more hands up than you called.” Karla

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did not respond to the supervisor’s question—her mentor teacher immediately responded for her, saying: For half an hour … for this class, the shorter the better. They are struggling with focus. They were excited. They were engaged. She’s really running most of the day when I’m gone. I don’t see any areas that I’m concerned. They do really enjoy you. Her organizations are great. I don’t really have anything for you to focus on. Really make it your own week. Try it and have fun. (Karla's Fifth Semester Mentor Teacher, Post-Teaching Conference)

The supervisor moved on with topics such as the standards, how to assess students’ writing, and Karla’s confidence in teaching, and did not return to the issue of including the voices of the students of color. Karla’s written ePortfolio reflection described this lesson with a positive spin, particularly about how she included students’ voices, without mentioning her supervisor’s concern of some students being silenced. Also, Karla did not bring up questions regarding the seating arrangement of the table of students of color or her interaction with them. I taught a writing lesson in which students took on the role of a teacher, and I took the role of a student. I wrote one sentence on the white board and told them, “I’m done.” … In the words of Lucy Calkins, I respond to my students by saying, “When you think you’re done, you’ve only just begun.” I therefore urged my students to help me continue writing my story. To do this, students raised their hands to ask me questions that would prod my writing. I wrote each of their questions in another color on the white board, and went on to answer them…. As part of my education philosophy encourages, I want all students to have a voice in the classroom. The students had the opportunity to speak about writing. (Karla Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

Karla's reflection continued to explain that, in order to obtain her students’ input, she asked her students to complete an exit slip in which they wrote down the things they liked about the class as well as the ones they did not like. These student reflection cards show not only that I am a reflective practitioner to improve my teaching, but also to improve my student learning. The benefit to the students comes directly from my passion and interest in their learning and understanding as an adult and the facilitator of knowledge and discussion within the classroom. I understand that each choice I make in the classroom can and will somehow affect my students, and that I need to make responsible decisions with the students’ best interests in mind. (Karla Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

Once more, Karla described the technical procedure of implementing an exit slip without further analysis of her teaching. What did the students like? What did they dislike? Based on her students’ input from the exit slips, what changes did she plan or implement in her later teaching? We don’t know, as she gave no detail beyond her simple assertion that she followed an exit slip procedure and it worked. When I observed this lesson and the post-teaching conference, I thought back to another observation I conducted during Karla’s fourth-semester social studies and science practicum. In that placement, a fourth-and-fifth grade classroom, Karla engaged in a very similar practice of excluding students of color in her teaching. During that observation, Karla was teaching a social studies lesson. She first read a story in front of the class and then asked the students to present their projects in the front. There was an African American student sitting alone far away from the rest of

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the class and two other African American girls sitting together at a table. Karla did not call on any of these three students to answer questions nor did she interact with them when she walked around the classroom. During the post-teaching conference, Karla’s supervisor brought up a few questions. Supervisor: Why does this guy sit alone here? Karla: I don’t know. He doesn’t have behavioral problems. He might like sitting alone. Supervisor: I always had kids to have a special day, like their birthday or something. They can put their desk anywhere in the room they want to for that day. Karla: Actually it’s funny because he’s been…. This has been at least 2 weeks. Supervisor: I think you should ask why that kid is sitting alone? Karla: Because he also participates too. I don’t know if you noticed, he definitely…. So it’s not he’s forgotten at the back. Supervisor: I was just curious. Karla: I don’t know, to be honest.

During this conversation, it is obvious that although Karla noticed that the student had been sitting alone away from the other students for at least 2 weeks, she did not see it as a problem or she chose not to find out the reasons behind it. She also tried to defend the situation by stating that the student was “participating,” “not forgotten at the back,” and suggesting that “he might like sitting alone.” The supervisor dropped the issue and continued with an observation about the two African American girls who sat together: Supervisor: The African American girls didn’t often read along, but the white kids did. I don’t know if this is just a random thing that happen today, or…. Like when you discussed, the two African American girls were left behind. Like in a push–pull sheet [a classroom assignment], they were just doing their own thing. This could just be a random thing, but if it’s not, what does that say? Because I draw a picture kind of like the four white kids sit together and the two African American girls were just kind of playing at the corner. What were your thoughts about that? Karla: Well, actually, the thing is…. Okay, one of them is…. She came in last week, on Monday, and she is kind of a bad influence on the other girls. The bigger one is new, and the smaller one, like is the top reader in the class, top student, like I mean really. Supervisor: Why don’t you sit down with her? If you noticed that this new girl is bringing the girl down, have a talk with the girl, the sooner the better. Karla: [My mentor teacher] mentioned that too…. She’s not a bad girl. She’s just way more social, she is first grader [in terms of her education level, not in terms of her age], so she’s, but she’s definitely brining the other girls to the misbehavior level that they haven’t been before. Supervisor: If I were the teacher, I would nip it in the bud. Talk to them individually, I think at first, and maybe have a group discussion, like, this is our class dynamics, and blah blah blah. Be aware of that because it was blatant.

In this conversation, the supervisor tried to prompt Karla to reflect on why the two African American girls were not participating in the class. Instead of reflecting on her teaching, especially on how her teaching might have some impact on their disengagement, Karla announced that the new student was a bad influence on the other girl. Karla did not explicitly link this statement to her lesson, but the implication is there: The African American girls, especially the new one, are responsible for the situation. This blame-shifting (Thomas & Liu, 2012) toward the new student was

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supported by “evidence” such as being social and low academic performance, which fit with long-standing socially distorted assumptions about African American students (Delpit, 2012; Howard, 2010; Irvine, 1990; Milner, Cunningham, Delale O’Connor, & Kestenberg, 2019). The supervisor took the bait, accepting Karla’s deficit view about the new student without prompting her to critically analyze her assumptions about the students; instead, he suggested Karla talk with the students individually and as a group, as a disciplinary solution. This entire conversation is missing from Karla’s fourth semester written reflection. Her ePortfolio reflection that semester was positive descriptions of what happened in the classroom, especially what went well, devoid of any critical analysis of her assumptions about teaching and learning, especially related to those students who were specifically discussed during post-teaching conferences. As a consequence, there was no sign in her ePortfolio reflection that she searched for alternative solutions to better include and support those students. For example, Karla posted a video clip on her ePortfolio of her teaching about water vapor. Based on her description, however, all we know is that it looks like the class went well and all the students understood the concept of water evaporation. I used a real-life activity that I came up with on the spur of the moment to describe water vapor to students. Instead of describing that water droplets are always in the air, but only appear as liquid droplets when they’re cold, I told all of the students to breathe out, suck in air, and taste to see if they could feel the water in the air. At first, they said they could taste water, but further into our discussion, we came to the agreement and understanding that they did not taste the air, and no liquid droplets because the air wasn’t cold enough to form water droplets, or condensation. (Karla Fourth Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

Teacher educators are very familiar with this type of “generic reflection” (Zeichner & Liston, 1996), technical descriptions of teaching with a positive sunshine (Thomas & Liu, 2012). Karla seldom talked about things that did not go well in her class, let alone issues brought up during post-teaching conferences which, according to Dewey (1933) should have been “puzzles” to trigger critical reflection. Moreover, Karla’s “reflection” lacks narration of the lives and experiences in her teaching (Clandinin & Huber, 2002). There are no details, no faces, no names, no student voices, little evidence to support her contention that the students understood the lessons. In summary, Karla’s ePortfolio reflection did not demonstrate any attempts to analyze her prior assumptions about teaching and learning, to search for alternative solutions, or to implement any changes in her teaching based on her reflection. Instead, her reflection demonstrated a rather linear thinking process: she planned a lesson, she implemented it in her teaching, and it went well. According to Laura, one of the teacher educators in the program that Karla belonged to, reflection should not be linear but “a recursive process in which teachers have the opportunity to look carefully at their own work and to improve upon it” (Laura Interview). Apparently, Karla did not internalize this hermeneutic approach to reflection and limited herself to tales of success in her written reflection. Figure 2.1 demonstrates Karla’s linear process in her reflection.

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I designed this lesson.

I implemented this lesson.

It went well.

Fig. 2.1  Karla’s linear reflective process

2.2  Absence of Evidence, Not Evidence of Absence In Doug’s fourth-grade classroom, more than 25% of the students are African-Americans with some Hispanic students. For this math lesson, Doug has invited a friend of his, another African American male who graduated from college majoring in history and African American studies, as an aide to help in the classroom. During the independent practice time, his friend walks around to help the students, especially some of the African American boys, commenting from time to time, “Yes, you can do it!” or “Great, you got it!” Doug also walks around to check his students’ progress, providing assistance when needed. (Doug Observation #3)

I began Chap. 1 with an extensive quote from Doug’s educational philosophy, in which he wrote that, as an African American, his goal in teaching was to build a positive environment to nurture students’ learning, especially for those who were not given enough attention or support. He strongly articulated the idea of teaching for social change and he sharply critiqued existing injustice in education: “I hope to teach for social reform in this world; there are many disparities too entrenched in our society that need to be changed” (Doug Educational Philosophy). Doug requested to be placed in diverse classrooms during his practicum and student teaching semesters. For example, in the fourth semester, Doug was placed in a secondand third-grade combined classroom with a high poverty and high mobility rate among the students: According to the mentor teacher, 60% of the students who started that year left by the end of the year. His mentor teacher commented, So he had a certain amount of confidence already established given that he is very close to student teaching. He has a charisma about him being male and being African American. Students just grab onto it, particularly boys, and many of the boys in this class have absentee fathers, and so having a male figure, an authority figure was really a plus. And of course, he was a good role model for young African American boys. (Interview, Doug’s Fourth Semester Mentor Teacher)

During one of the observations of Doug teaching, a sign language interpreter was sitting beside a student who was deaf. His mentor teacher praised Doug’s ability to teach in such a challenging environment: The student population on this team is very diverse. One kid is deaf and has a sign language interpreter. You have to learn to teach within the limitations of having someone signing for you because you cannot wander around the class, and lecture at the same the time. You need to stay with the interpreter, so there’s a whole skill and learning how to do that. We have very high rate of poverty, high rate of minority students. This is also a special education cluster classroom, so we have students in the whole rate of special education needs also. And he did very, very well in that. (Interview, Doug’s Fourth Semester Mentor Teacher)

2.2  Absence of Evidence, Not Evidence of Absence

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In the fifth semester, Doug requested placement in a diverse classroom again. He developed a bond with the African American students in the school, as his mentor teacher commented: “Every African American student in this building knows him. I definitely see they are attracted to him, following him around where he is around all the time, but also he pays extra attention to them” (Interview, Doug’s Fifth Semester Mentor Teacher). Doug’s mentor teacher brought it up that Doug also reflected with him on a daily basis about social–political aspects of teaching and how to support specific students who needed his support: [His conversation with me] is usually about specific students, and how to get the specific students, to get them on track socially, and I think that’s a real strength—that’s been one of the things I’ve enjoyed and that it has been about the kids…. It’s about some societal issues, too, creep in there as well, and then to some degree also talking about specific skills, like how to kind of scaffold so the students can get to a specific spot. (Interview, Doug’s Fifth Semester Mentor Teacher)

In addition to highlighting Doug’s strengths in building positive relationships with diverse learners and providing specific support for them, both the fourth- and fifth-­ semester mentors brought up his challenges in content knowledge and getting things prepared. For example, Doug’s fifth-semester mentor commented, “Once again, he needs to find that balance, because you do have to have the lessons and the content and everything else and that coherent plan going forward.” However, similar to Karla’s reflection, most of Doug’s written reflections were technical descriptions of the micro classroom teaching without analyzing his assumptions about teaching and student learning. Although Doug’s educational philosophy expressed his belief in helping marginalized students and bringing about changes to their lives, seldom did he talk about the specific characteristics and needs of his students in his ePortfolio reflection, especially those of the students of color in his class. He never mentioned how he brought his teaching philosophy into his teaching through role modeling, building positive relationships with the students, and tapping into the funds of knowledge from his African American community, all of which were visible in his teaching and articulated by both him and his mentor teachers  during interviews. For example, when I asked him why he invited his African American friend to help in the math lesson described earlier, Doug explained: [My friend] is great role model for these kids too. He’s been volunteering in schools. He works great with kids. He is just like a real good-hearted person so it’s always good to have more people around in the classroom to help out and provide those good influences for other kids, and I feel like a lot of times it is the minority students that do tend to slip to cracks because they are overlooked or there are a lot of teachers in the building in the school are primarily white teachers. They have trouble responding to, relating to the other teachers. So oftentimes those are the kids do need most help or need the most attention just because they don’t have somebody they can connect with or look up to, or somebody knows how to communicating with them on the level that they understand the best. (Interview #2, Doug)

Doug continually tried to provide this type of support he believed that students of color need the most. During a post-teaching conference, Doug articulated the actions he took outside of the classroom to provide extra support to these students:

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2  Who Celebrates Kwanzaa? The Struggle for Critical Reflection and Transformative… I mean there are a couple kids in this class that I stayed with at lunch every day and work with. There’s this one kid I work with a lot—he just gets frustrated with himself a lot of times if he doesn’t get it right away. So, part of it was I was trying to give positive feedback and everything—keep him focused ‘cause that’s what he needs. It’s like just a little nudge. You tell him like, “You’re on the right path” and everything and then they stay focused. (Interview #2, Doug)

From Doug’s statements during interviews and post-teaching conferences, it is obvious that he had a deep understanding of the needs of students of color. Instead of seeing them from a deficit view and further ignoring or excluding them from learning opportunities, Doug believed that these students were “overlooked” or “they don’t have somebody they can connect with or look up to, or somebody knows how to communicating with them on the level that they understand the best.” Based on this insight, Doug provided the support he believed these students need—inviting guests as role models to help in his classroom, spending time with students at lunch time, and providing positive feedback. All these actions conform with the literature that teachers of color serve as role models for all students, have more positive perceptions regarding the academic potential of students of color (Ingersoll & May, 2011, 2016; Villegas & Irvine, 2010), and therefore inspire students of color to work toward success (Sleeter, 2001). However, Doug did not include any of these thoughts or actions described above in his ePortfolio reflection. Instead, he minimized his written reflection to no more than upload of short video clips and descriptions of lessons, stripping off the rationale, critique, and actions visible in interviews and observations. For example, in his reflection on teaching a math lesson, Doug uploaded a short video of his teaching with the following description: I am in my practicum site which was a 2/3 classroom. This particular clip was a tangent off of the original activity I had planned to supplement students’ understanding of our science experiment. Our students seemed to be struggling with the concept of fractions. I took some extra time to focus on helping students recognize equivalent fractions and how to determine whether fractions are greater than, less than, or equal to one half. With that context in mind, this clip demonstrates a few of the methods I used to help students more fully understand these concepts. (Doug Fourth Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

Doug did explain the reason for offering this lesson on fractions, an imaginative speculation process exploring an alternative way of teaching fractions to help his students understand the science experiment. However, he did not explain how he came to the decision of the level of content and the strategies, nor did he continue to reflect on the consequences of this teaching. Did it help students recognize equivalent fractions more? If not, what were the problems and what should be further changed in his future teaching? In sum, there was no critical reflection evident in Doug’s ePortfolio reflection regarding his teaching practice in the micro classroom as well as the macro context of schooling, even though conversations and classroom observations clearly demonstrate that he engaged in sophisticated critiques of socially distorted assumptions about students of color and searched for  and implemented alternative solutions described earlier as transformative actions to better support those students. In

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Doug’s case, then, the absence of evidence for critical reflection in his ePortfolio is highly misleading and does not constitute evidence of absence of transformative action  in his real teaching practice. As in Karla’s case, Doug’s case continues to demonstrate how vital it is for teacher educators to understand prospective teachers’ teaching and learning by triangulating written reflections with long-term field observations and interviews.

2.3  Critical Reflections Struggle to Emerge The following stories of Ella and Judy give us another picture—how ePortfolio reflection can support prospective teacher growth, enabling emergent features of critical reflection in their analysis of their assumptions, their occasional critique of their own actions, and the articulation of their concerns about social–cultural aspects of teaching. As we shall see, however, these reflections can misleadingly suggest transformation when read in the absence of triangulating evidence of their teaching practice. This misdirection is an important reason to ground truth what they claim in their reflection in what they actually do in their teaching.

Languages Spoken at Home are Comforts Ella was placed in a kindergarten classroom with students of diverse language and cultural backgrounds for her third-semester practicum. Ella’s major goal for this semester was to build a safe community for her students to learn from each other because she believes that “classroom community and culture is a large part of a successful classroom” (Ella Third Semester ePortfolio Reflection). One of the units Ella designed was to teach geometric shapes to her students. In order to help her students learn to identify different shapes, she created a computer game in which, when students clicked a shape, the computer spoke  the name of the shape. Ella worked very hard to create the game because she wanted to do something different: Instead of just recording herself reading the names of the shapes in English, she recorded the parents of some of her students who speak languages other than English reading the names in their native languages. Ella reflected in her ePortfolio, I had each shape name translated into the languages of the students that are in my classroom. Each shape was in English, Spanish, Khmer (Cambodian), Arabic and Albanian…. [When they played the game,] I could tell that they felt a genuine connection in the classroom. When one of my students clicked a shape and heard the sound, he was excited and said, “It’s my dad!” I could tell that they felt a genuine connection in the classroom. The ability to affirm these students’ identities was so fulfilling…. Having the students feel that their culture is important in the classroom was important to me. (Ella Third Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

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Fig. 2.2  Ella’s reflective process in teaching the shape lesson

In addition to reflecting on the positive outcomes, Ella also reflected on future improvements. She took some pictures of her students when they were paired up playing the game, then later went through them and found that, in one picture, while one student was playing the game, the other student in the pair was impatiently waiting without even looking at the computer screen. Ella reflected that “the uniqueness seemed to wear off when watching a partner in the driver’s seat.” This insight gained from the reflection made her to continue that, in the future, she “would not have all of the students work in pairs” (Ella Third Semester ePortfolio Reflection). Furthermore, she reflected on improving the game. She thought the game was created in a rush so she did not have time to add the Albanian names of the shapes to the game and indicated that she would make it complete before teaching it again in the future. A semester later, Ella included the Albanian language in the game; she was so proud of the results that she worked with the ePortfolio support office to upload the game to her ePortfolio in spite of significant technical difficulties in doing so. I diagram Ella’s thinking process for her shape lesson in Fig. 2.2

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Ella’s ePortfolio reflection thus showed some signs of critical reflection in the micro classroom context as defined in the first chapter. She actively searched for alternatives and implemented them; she analyzed the results of her teaching and questioned previous assumptions about pairing students based on her analysis. She also implemented changes in her future teaching based on her reflections. In addition, Ella’s written reflection also documented her concerns with social– cultural factors of teaching, in this case, the languages spoken at home, although she did not provide a rationale for doing so beyond stating that “the ability to affirm these students’ identities was so fulfilling.” Ella did not question or critique common teaching practices that ignore students’ family languages, but she did demonstrate the cultural awareness that language is part of identity, and that including the languages spoken at home can show that the teacher values those languages and affirms those identities. However, this interpretation of Ella’s reflection and action, while a “partial truth” (Clifford, 1986), is greatly weakened by later data triangulation. In a follow-up interview, on being asked why she included her students’ home languages in the computer game, Ella responded, I knew that languages spoken at home are comforts and I want to bring that into the classroom. Also I’ve done a lot of reading about language, and how learning a concept in your native language and translating it to English is more successful than learning in English if you are not a native English speaker. Kids learn languages very successfully at a young age and so I felt introducing them to multiple languages at a young age would give them a start at multiple language learning. (Follow-up interview with Ella)

From this reflection on her rationale, we see that the critical aspect of her computer game lays in an attempt to break down the barriers between formal schooling and home life by addressing her conception of her students’ feelings of discomfort with schooling. She showed a concern with teaching strategies and learning outcomes in the micro classroom context, not with the larger social and political context of a school system that often ignores the cultures and languages of minoritized students. The strategy is based on her belief that these students learn English more efficiently when content is also presented in their home language—in part because the scraps of their home language comfort them in the presumably alien milieu of the majority English-speaking teachers and students. This reflection is disconnected from Ella’s earlier reflection affirming her students’ identity and shows the complexity of analyzing prospective teachers’ reflections. Ella’s reflection was critical in terms of challenging the common teaching methods of teaching students with diverse linguistic backgrounds in English, but from Zeichner and Liston’s (1996) social reconstructionist perspective, it was not critical of the macro aspect of education because the fundamental rationale of her approach did not deal with issues of equity and injustice in school and society. In short, although quite able to articulate the importance of minoritized identity, social justice, and equity in her ePortfolio reflections, Ella’s classroom practice lapsed into the more practical application of surface diversity in service to core conformity.

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 he Principle of Equity Is What I Strive to Achieve In and Out T of My Classroom Let’s go back to Judy’s classroom as described at the beginning of this chapter. The class was engaged in the first lesson in Judy’s equity unit on celebrations of light. They had a special community guest who is African American that day, a language arts resource teacher in the school district with whom Judy had built a working relationship and friendship. The guest celebrated Kwanzaa with the students in class; Judy later reflected that the lesson was a success: She mailed individual Kwanzaa Celebration Invitations to the students, she read the book “The Seven Days of Kwanzaa” by Ella Grier, we made Kwanzaa mats and cups, we learned about the 7 principles, and applied the principles to our own lives. (Judy Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

In addition to the guest for Kwanzaa, Judy also invited other community guests to teach other celebrations such as Hanukkah and Chinese Winter Solstice. Judy used the descriptions quoted in what follows as evidence in her fifth-semester ePortfolio to describe the implementation of her equity unit. Why did Judy design and implement a unit on different celebrations of light? This was Judy’s student teaching semester. She was placed in a kindergarten classroom with students from diverse language and cultural backgrounds, something she was very aware of, reflecting that “my students are minorities, White, English Language Learners, from varying class backgrounds, and from different family structures” (Judy Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection). At the beginning of the semester, Judy set teaching for equity as a goal in her student teaching, responding to the ePortfolio requirement to set a goal, writing, The principle of equity is what I strive to achieve in and out of my classroom. For me, it is the common thread in my thinking about students, planning, and reflection. (Judy Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

Guided by this goal, Judy designed the equity unit on celebrations of light around the world. She learned about the celebrations held in different students’ homes by sending a questionnaire to the parents. Based on this knowledge, Judy wrote: I focused on a unit about Celebrations of Light. I wanted to base my unit on the students’ lives and also give them an opportunity to learn about “lesser known” celebrations. The unit was a reflection of my students as well as an opportunity to learn about celebrations different from their own…. In order to become knowledgeable about my students’ family celebrations, I sent home a Winter Celebrations Questionnaire. (Judy Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

Judy then first assumed that she would teach the unit by herself but she immediately encountered the challenge of doing such a project on her own due to her limited experience outside the white, Christian majority. After reading the book Black Ants and Buddhists (Cowhey, 2006) she realized that she could do better by drawing on community resources.

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I am a White woman, a native English speaker, and middle-class. My students are minorities, White, English Language Learners, from varying class backgrounds, and from different family structures. What do I know about Kwanzaa? Or Hanukkah? How can I teach these very important celebrations relevantly? In reading Black Ants and Buddhists, I realized that I don’t need to be an expert on everything. What I do have is the passion and enthusiasm to learn right along with my students. I started thinking about people I knew who also shared their passion for teaching equitably. (Judy Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection, emphasis Judy’s)

Based on this reflection, Judy invited three people from the community to teach specific celebrations based on their life experiences: The African American Elementary Language Arts Resource teacher for Kwanzaa, a Jewish student’s father for Hanukkah, and me for the Chinese Winter Solstice celebration. In her ePortfolio, Judy then described these lessons in some detail but without further analyzing the effect of this unit on her students’ learning or her own teaching. For example, she described the lesson on Hanukkah like this: During [the guest speaker’s] Powerpoint presentation we learned about the miracle of Hanukkah, the meaning of the menorah, the symbolism of the Dreidel, and we sang a Dreidel song. At the end of his presentation, he gave each student their own Dreidel. (Judy Fifth Semester ePortfolio Reflection)

I diagram Judy’s teaching and thinking process as expressed in her reflections on teaching the equity unit in Fig. 2.3. Looking at this unit on celebrations of light, it is clear that Judy started to tackle some macro aspects of teaching, specifically those of different cultures in the classroom and the equity of inclusiveness. Judy did not just articulate her belief in equity and social justice in her reflections, but also implemented this belief in her teaching practice. Moreover, this was not the first time Judy expressed her interest in issues lying beyond the technical and practical aspects of teaching in the micro classroom. One semester earlier, Judy had posted a journal entry reflecting on her conversation with an African American bus coordinator. Judy commented, I was so impressed with her management of this busload of children and commented, “You’ve really got things under control on this bus.” She said this to me: “Well, we have to get them in control so they don’t end up in jail. It starts on day one.” This really hit me! [She] said this is such a nonchalant manner—like it was everyday knowledge that black students will end up in jail if she didn’t lay down the law “on day one.” I understood that comment to mean that a lot of these students come from rough family backgrounds and they need to learn respect and responsibility somewhere—and for [her], she is this figure for many students. Is this even OK for me to be saying though? (Judy’s Fourth Semester ePortfolio Reflection, emphasis Judy’s)

Judy brought up this puzzle during a conversation with me—how she was disturbed by the bus coordinator’s comments and confused to hear such comments coming from an African American woman. As Judy reflected, she was still “grappling with the issue of race” and was looking for external inputs to help her deal with her puzzlement—in Dewey’s (1933) terminology, the puzzle presented by an unexpected encounter with race triggered genuine reflection, not just the performance of reflection, something signaled by the question “is this even OK for me to be

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2  Who Celebrates Kwanzaa? The Struggle for Critical Reflection and Transformative…

Fig. 2.3  Judy’s thinking process in teaching the equity unit

saying?” Judy’s puzzle in turn triggered my own thoughts about race too, and I asked rhetorically: The question is when a Black woman made such a comment about children from her own background, was it truly from what she believed? Where was this belief and assumption coming from? (Author Conversation with Judy)

According to Mezirow (1990), there are social–cultural distortions involving taken-­ for-­granted assumptions that pertain to power, which in return legitimize and enforce these assumptions. Mezirow points out that a common social–cultural distortion is failing to recognize self-fulfilling and self-validating beliefs, acting as if they were objective reality. As a consequence, he pointed out, “if we believe that members of a subgroup are lazy, unintelligent, and unreliable and treat them accordingly, they may become lazy, unintelligent, and unreliable” (pp. 15–16). In our conversation, I shared Mezirow’s point with Judy, connecting what he called social–cultural distortions to the way the Black bus coordinator commented about the Black students: I think one thing that Mezirow did not mention directly is that if the mainstream group believe that a subgroup are lazy, unintelligent, and unreliable and treat them according, the subgroup people may BELIEVE that they themselves are lazy, unintelligent, and unreliable.

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An important question the society needs to ask is what the causes are for those kids in this subgroup ending up in jail. (Author Conversation with Judy)

Judy then reflected on our conversation in her ePortfolio under the section on equity issues. I had a conversation … about my interaction with [the bus coordinator]. We talked about the fact that society contributes to the inequalities. [The coordinator] may have been told to believe that some of the students may end up in jail, or she has personally experienced black children ending up in jail. Either way her comments seem to perpetuate the system. (Judy Fourth Semester ePortfoio Reflection, emphasis Judy’s)

From this story, we see that Judy had the awareness to look beyond the micro classroom environment of her teaching to a broader context of schooling with regard to issues such as race and equity. At the same time, she did not really know how to deconstruct the social–political implications embedded in the coordinator’s comments; therefore, she sought external input to enrich her understanding of these issues. Even so, her summary statement suggesting that the Black bus coordinator’s attitude itself perpetuated the cycle of African American children’s misbehavior leading to criminal sanctions demonstrates Judy returning to the paradigm of the majority White population blaming the minority for the minority’s downtrodden status. Judy’s stories demonstrate that she brought an intellectual awareness of broader social and cultural aspects of education into her teaching and reflection, even if, on closer inspection, the depth of that awareness is questionable. Also important to note, however, is that her ePortfolio reflection did not reveal if she followed up with the students to gauge the effect of the unit on the cultural understandings of her students and their parents. For example, how did Jewish parents respond to their children’s description of Kwanzaa, which is partly modeled after Hanukkah, and did the students bring the response back into the classroom? What was the effect on the African American students of bringing Kwanzaa into the classroom? More important, did the community “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) and Judy’s “grappling with the issue of race” help her have a better understanding of different cultures, and consequently, embrace the differences of the students who have different cultural backgrounds? There are many examples like these stories of Ella and Judy showing that prospective teachers can be quite articulate in discussing critical aspects of teaching and learning in the micro classroom context and, on occasion, even reaching the macro aspect of education. As the next stories will show, however, when we focus on the actions prospective teachers take in the classroom, we can unpack the performative features of both their reflections and classroom teaching and see what happens when those performances are interrupted by social and cultural realities.

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2.4  Performative but Not Transformative When I followed prospective teachers by observing their field experiences and interviewing them, I typically found gaps between what they articulated about their teaching and what they actually did in the classroom, and between what they did after careful design and preparation versus how they responded to unexpected situations. I found, in short, that prospective teachers’ reflections and planned teaching did not necessarily lead to transformative learning in their future teaching if their response to unexpected events fell back on unexamined assumptions. This was particularly true when the unexamined assumptions involve core social and political issues permeating both schools and the surrounding community, such as the linkage of behavioral patterns with cultural and racial identity.

Even Johnny, Who Should Not be Included, Worked Well! It is a lovely spring day and Ella’s first graders are very excited for the performance that they will conduct with a group of fifth graders. This is the semester right after the one in which Ella designed and taught the shape identification game with a goal of focusing on community building and cultural inclusiveness. In a continuation of that goal, Ella and another prospective teacher placed in the fifth-grade classroom of the same school have decided to address inter-age-group bullying by having students in both classes collaborate to create and perform skits about the problem. Today is the time for them to perform! The fifth graders are coming in and it is apparent they have built some rapport with each other: fifth grade boys fist bump with the first-grade boys; fifth grade girls hug their younger partners. Ella and her peer start the event by giving the students instructions on the procedures of the performance, recapping the bullying themes to be performed, and reminding them of the behavior expectations for the students in the audience. (Ella Observation #2)

The performance lasted some 35  min and was followed up with a post-teaching conference with the university supervisor. During the debriefing, Ella and her partner explained to their university supervisor why they designed this performance. They had observed that there was bullying going on in the school, especially with older students bullying younger ones. Since Ella and her partner knew each other, they started to plan how to bring this issue up and at the same time involve their students in decision-making and problem-solving. They came up with the idea of letting the two groups of students work together to act out scenarios that they created based on real life in the school. The supervisor gives them highly positive comments (“awesome, awesome!”) on two aspects of the lesson, classroom management and the transitions to and from the activities, then asks Ella if her lesson fit into her goal of building a classroom community and connecting the class with the larger school and community, Ella’s response: “Oh, absolutely!” We think it went really well! All the students participated in the performance and they were all active. We’re surprised that even Johnny, who should not be included, worked well! He could have messed things up! (Ella Comment at Post Teaching Conference).

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Johnny is an African American fifth grader and he did indeed work well in this lesson. Yet it is striking to see that Ella and her peer were so sure Johnny was not supposed to be included in the activity that they didn’t even notice their admission of a practice of exclusion in the classroom. A question to be asked here is why Ella and her peer had this opinion of Johnny? Presumably, it was based on information or comments from the mentor teachers, since the two prospective teachers were only recent additions to the school. The “need” to exclude Johnny was clearly part of the unspoken assumptions with which Ella and her peer worked, something that slipped out into the open as they tried to put a positive spin on their performance, implying they did a good job because they even made the “problem student” work. Johnny’s lack of “disruption” in fact constituted an unexpected disruption to their carefully planned performance in the classroom—is it possible that Johnny’s ability to work well indicates that their presumptions about him could be wrong, or that they could teach him in a different way so that he could do well regularly, rather than segregating him from the rest of the class? This story shows us that Ella’s critical reflections in her ePortfolio on the value of cultural diversity, her goal of equity and inclusion in the classroom and her well-­ designed lessons nevertheless failed to trigger her transformation in the understanding of the essence of cultural diversity and community building. In a non-prepared situation such as the post-teaching conference, Ella was not able to reflect critically on her presumption of an organic linkage between “problematic” behavior and certain groups of students. When a “problematic” student was accidentally included and worked well, that became a perfect opportunity to celebrate successful performance, rather than a chance to analyze and question prior assumptions.

I Think That’s Her Culture Now let us turn our lens back to Judy. While designing her equity unit on celebrations of light, Judy contacted me to see if I would give a guest lesson on the Chinese celebration of light in her class in December. I was happy to accept this request and decided to talk about Winter Solstice celebration in China. Judy and I then discussed what the lesson should be focusing on and what activities to be included. We decided to have students make dumplings (jiaozi) after introducing the history of eating dumplings on Winter Solstice. Judy and I went to the Asian grocery store together to buy the ingredients for making dumplings as well as ready-to-eat vegetable and meat dumplings to cook for students to taste after the dumpling-making activity (thinking that the students’ first effort at dumplings might not be successful). This was the lesson in the unit, following Kwanzaa, Hanukah, and Christmas; both Judy and her mentor teacher were very excited for this lesson. When I came into the classroom, students had already been informed about the lesson and tables were set up for making dumplings. Before I put down the dumpling ingredients and materials to show the physics of the solstice with a globe and a lamp, Judy and her mentor teacher pulled me to a corner of the classroom and said:

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“We have to warn you that we have a difficult child in the classroom. If you feel there is any problem, please let us know and we’ll take her out” (Judy and the Mentor teacher). This “difficult” child they referred to was Rebecca. Rebecca was the only African American student in the class and the one whose name was frequently called as a warning during classes when I visited before. A very gregarious child, Rebecca had joined them in the middle of the semester, having had no prior schooling experiences, and thus little understanding of classroom routines and behavioral expectations—sitting still unless given permission, raising her hand before speaking, working by herself at appropriate times, and so forth. Judy and her mentor teacher were thus alert to the possibility that she might disrupt the class and were ready to segregate her from the rest of the students at the first sign of trouble. However, during my presentation, Rebecca showed no signs of “problematic behavior.” She was very active in making dumplings, brave to eat them with kuaizi (chopsticks), and even encouraged other students who were more hesitant to try the dumplings by saying: “Yum, everybody should try it!” At the end of the day, students were given free choice time before going home. Judy explained the rules: “Free choice time is a privilege, so you have to earn it. You have to behave well and I will decide whether you’ll have free choice or not.” Each student then was allowed to choose a fun thing to do from a list of painting, playing puzzles, drawing, and hands-on with Judy to paint lamp covers. Rebecca picked painting. Students were supposed to put on the “artist” T-Shirt before painting to protect their clothes from the paint—Rebecca did not do this. She was very excited about painting, creating an image of the mentor teacher and labeling it with the teacher’s name. Then she painted an image of a cat and proudly asked several other students to look at her work. As a consequence of failing to follow the rules and interrupting other children’s activities, she was taken out of the classroom. As Judy and the mentor teacher warned earlier, Rebecca ended the day being taken out of class as a “difficult child.” A few days later, in a conversation with Judy, I asked what she thought of Rebecca and her classroom behavior. Judy described her as “defiant,” then explained her “defiance” this way: She’s very challenging. You know, she’s very defiant, very much “I am in control, this is how I am going to do things,” and you know…. I think that’s her culture. So she feels like she can move her body because she wants to move her body. I didn’t feel it’s bad to move her body. I mean, it’s fine for me if she wants to move her body. (Judy Follow-up Interview)

In her response, Judy made what appear to be simple connections between race, culture, and student behavior. That is, when she observed Rebecca behaving in a way that did not fit into the norms of the class, she attributed the “problematic” behavior to a difference in Rebecca’s cultural values rather than to her inexperience with classroom routines. Moreover, I assert the additional complication of race here, even though Judy did not herself so label her understanding of Rebecca’s behavior, because she grounded a culturalist explanation of that behavior by appealing to Rebecca’s relationship to her body—an African American body that “wants to

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move”—and then responded by disciplining that body through zero tolerance and segregation. So what we are doing is we give her one chance and then if she did it again, or didn’t listen, or talk back, she was out. But I think she needed that; she needed the consequence; otherwise she would walk over you. (Judy, Follow-up Interview).

Judy’s culturalist explanation thus rests on a foundation of race, a sense of identity that cannot be changed, but can only be controlled. Although Judy stated that she didn’t feel it was bad if Rebecca wanted to move her body, in reality she and her mentor teacher disciplined this violation of classroom norms by segregating Rebecca from the rest of the class. Judy was not the primary decision maker—that was the mentor teacher. Neither, however, did Judy show an effort to rethink or disrupt the longstanding practice of punishing certain students through temporary segregation, nor did she link this practice in her classroom to her intellectual awareness of the historic overapplication of segregation and detention to minoritized students who transgressed classroom norms.

2.5  Problematizing the Performance The four cases of prospective teachers demonstrate that their ePortfolio reflections present a spectrum of performance from positive description of teaching with little sign of critical reflection (Karla) to little evidence for critical reflection that is undeniably going on (Doug). In between—where many prospective teachers and their teacher educators find themselves—are Ella and July’s sophisticated signs of critical reflection that could be mistakenly considered as the evidence of transformative actions in teaching. Triangulating prospective teachers’ written reflection with classroom observations and interviews, the four cases demonstrate another spectrum of performance of action from actively avoiding transformation (Karla) to actively implementing transformation (Doug). In between, again, are Ella and Judy’s efforts to implement transformative learning in planned lessons; nevertheless, those well-designed lessons failed to trigger transformative actions under unprepared circumstances. The problems presented by the performances at the two ends of both spectrums and those in the middle reveal the challenges in preparing critically reflective teachers for transformative learning. Karla’s ePortfolio reflections demonstrate a lack of serious engagement with critical analysis of her teaching beyond a scattering of buzzwords and positive descriptions of the technical procedures of her teaching. Her written reflections show little concern with the social–political aspects of schooling or the impact of her teaching on her students’ learning. Observation of her teaching and post-­ teaching conferences, however, clearly reveals the gap between the positivity in her written reflection and the concerns and questions raised by her supervisors, especially regarding the exclusion of students of color in her teaching. Doug, on the other hand, thinks deeply about his own experiences as an African American male

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in U.S. schools and society. His critical analysis of the social and political aspects of schooling, and more importantly, his actions to provide support to students of color that are grounded on his analysis, are evident in conversations and classroom observations. Such analysis is missing from his ePortfolio reflections, however, which are no more than brief and technical  descriptions of specific lessons or activities. Both Ella and Judy’s ePortfolio reflections demonstrate their competence in designing and implementing different lessons with careful preparation. As the stories told above show, Judy invited community members of different cultures to teach different winter celebrations, including the African American Kwanzaa celebration; Ella, as well, invited parents who speak languages other than English at home to record their languages in her computer game. Opening up the class to people they had never before taught with is a critically reflective process for them to break down their own paradigm of control. Further, the whole idea of inviting community people to bring their funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) into the classroom is a paradigm shift from teaching the prescribed curriculum, which focuses on mainstream culture and knowledge, to embracing and celebrating diversity. However, although they both accomplished their goals of community building and teaching for equity at the level of planning and carrying out classroom activities, Judy and Ella nevertheless failed to transform their own assumptions or actions when they encountered unscripted classroom issues. In Judy’s case, even after the introduction of different cultures by community members, she still thought Rebecca had culturally based behavioral problems that made her “different” from the other students—when Rebecca did not sit still, Judy blamed the girl’s “culture.” Judy further labeled Rebecca’s behavior as problematic and thought that disciplining her with only one chance was not only appropriate but helpful. Similarly, in well-­ prepared lessons and written reflections, Ella was able to incorporate the concepts of community and identity into her teaching. However, when faced with unexpected success in incorporating Johnny into the anti-bullying activities, Ella fell back on her previous assumptions of who should be included and who should not without questioning the validity of those assumptions or even realizing that she was making those assumptions. Ella and Judy’s reflections demonstrate that they are able to articulate the social and political aspects in teaching and learning, going beyond the technical aspect of teaching (van Manen, 1977). However, the challenge for teacher educators lies in how to help them extract meaning and take further actions based on the insights they gain from their reflections. The observation by Ladson-Billings (2006) that prospective teachers have difficulty understanding how culture operates proves true here: Karla, Judy, and Ella all demonstrated a deficit view of students of color and made apparently simple connections between race, culture, and behavior without understanding the deeper implications of the events in the classroom. Ella and Judy were able to construct examples of cultural equity in prepared lessons and articulate social–cultural issues critically, but were unable to respond to the need for equity arising spontaneously in the classroom, instead of falling back on the combination of culturalist explanations and a request for discipline and segregation. Karla, on the other hand, actively

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avoided engagement in the social, cultural, and political aspects of education in both her written reflection and post-teaching conferences. In her teaching practice, she was observed repeatedly ignoring or excluding students of color from learning activities. Before closing the stories, I would like to argue that both Ella and Judy, to a certain extent, through their carefully designed lessons and well-written reflections perform well the requirement of their teacher education program and the social discourse that construct the figured world (Holland, Lachicotte Jr., Skinner, & Cain, 1998) of competent teachers. Both their prepared teaching and written reflections fit well into the social discourse of their program and the state teacher education standards calling for the preparation of reflective teachers committed to social justice and equity. However, these well-crafted performances failed to trigger transformative learning which, as Mezirow (1990) argues, “involves a particular function of reflection: reassessing the presuppositions on which our beliefs are based and acting on insights derived from the transformed meaning perspective that results from such reassessments” (p.  18). That is, critical reflection—challenging established and habitual patterns of expectation—is required for transformative learning to take place. Such challenges of the conventional criteria of self-assessment are always fraught with “threat and strong emotion” (Mezirow, 1990, p. 12). It should be clear from Ella and Judy’s stories that they seldom engaged in this kind of critically reflective process, denying themselves the opportunity for transformative learning. On the contrary, when confronted with a challenge to their assumptions, as in the unexpectedly successful participation by Johnny in the anti-­ bullying performance, they responded by celebrating their own teaching abilities, whereas when presented with behavior that fulfilled their expectations, as in Rebecca’s unfamiliarity with the norms of classroom etiquette, they responded by acting from their unexamined assumptions. In other words, if the reflection triggered by a puzzle does not in turn prompt a transformation of actions and attitudes that have been supported by distorted presuppositions, no matter how critical the reflection sounds, it serves little educational purpose for both prospective teachers and the students they teach. Through the theoretical lens of critical reflection for transformative learning, we can envision the interaction of critical reflection in the ePortfolio and transformative action in the classroom as two axes of a chart, with prospective teacher reflections and classroom actions taking place within the combined space of this chart (Fig. 2.4). I have placed the vignettes from the four cases discussed in this chapter in appropriate areas within this chart. Researchers have long observed that teacher educators need to develop more detailed systematic analysis of written reflection (e.g., Cimer, 2012; Kaasila & Lauriala, 2012; Liu, 2017; Mortari, 2012; Rogers, 2002) in order to provide empirically and theoretically supported reflection in teacher education (Marcos, García-­ Rodríguez, & Tillema, 2013). A framework such as that diagrammed in Fig. 2.4, which combines critical reflection and transformative action could be used by teacher educators as an analytical tool to understand and research on prospective teachers’ written reflection in the context of their classroom practice. Based on this understanding, teacher educators can implement it as a pedagogical framework to

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Fig. 2.4  The spectrums of written reflection and classroom teaching

foster prospective teachers’ critical reflection for transformative learning. Our goal, as teacher educators, is to move prospective teachers out of the lower-left quadrant of the chart (little to no critical reflection and little to no effective classroom transformative action) into the upper-right quadrant (meaningful critical reflection and serious classroom transformative action).

2.6  Epilogue: Fading Memories At the end of Judy’s student teaching semester, I sat down with her to review her teaching over the past year. I asked Judy if she felt that she had accomplished her teaching goals. Judy responded: Oh gosh I forgot my goals! I know one of my goals was to know what a typical kindergartener was like. I don’t know much about kindergarteners and I learned that there isn’t any typical kindergartener and they are all so different but so I just learned a ton about five or six-year olds and what they like, their imagination, and their humor, so I learned a lot about kids. Another goal was to develop better classroom management. (Judy Follow-up Interview)

Judy’s original goal, educating for equity and inclusion, did not come up in this conversation. Unable to remember what she had used as her primary focus that

References

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guided her equity unit about a month earlier, she seemed to fall back to knowing the students and classroom management as her goals, perhaps the most common concerns among prospective teachers—but not ones she had ever seriously articulated in her reflection or previous interviews. The erasure of equity from Judy’s memory of the year is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the gap between what prospective teachers claim to value the most and what they are actually concerned about. As many researchers point out (Brookfield, 1995; Liu, 2011), technical aspects of teaching such as classroom management are by no means unimportant—teachers have to make numerous technical decisions during the day concerning time and process. However, what should concern us is limiting reflection to the technical aspects of classroom teaching, losing sight of the sociopolitical underpinnings, dimensions, and consequences of the teaching practice (Liu, 2015). The tendency of performance to dominate transformation among prospective teachers, visible only by triangulating written reflection, probing interviews, and classroom actions, presents a problem for both prospective teachers and teacher educators. What causes this imbalance, how is it perpetuated by teacher educators and teacher education programs, and how can prospective teachers’ capacity for critical reflection and transformative learning be nurtured in a  collaborative and democratic manner? It is to these questions that I turn in the next chapters.

References Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Cimer, S.  O. (2012). The effect of portfolios on students’ learning: Student teachers’ views. European Journal of Teacher Education, 34(2), 161–176. Clandinin, D.  J., & Huber, J. (2002). Narrative inquiry: Toward understanding life’s artistry. Curriculum Inquiry, 32(2), 161–169. Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial truths. In J. Clifford & G. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 1–26). Berkeley: University of California Press. Cowhey, M. (2006). Black ants and Buddhists: Thinking critically and teaching differently in the primary grades. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers. Delpit, L. (2012). Multiplication is for white people: Raising expectations for other people’s children. New York: New Press. Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Jr., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howard, T. C. (2010). Why race and culture matter in schools: Closing the achievement gap in America’s classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press. Ingersoll, R., & May, H. (2011). Recruitment, retention and the minority teacher shortage. The consortium for policy research in education. Retrieved from http://www.cpre.org/images/stories/cpre_pdfs/minority%20teacher%20shortage%20report_rr69%20sept%20final.pdf. Ingersoll, R., & May, H. (2016). Minority teacher recruitment, employment, and retention: 1987–2013. Learning Policy Institute: Research Brief. Retrieved from https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Minority_Teacher_Recruitment_Employment_ Retention%20_BRIEF.pdf.

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Irvine, J.  J. (1990). Black students and school failure: Policies, practices and prescriptions. New York: Greenwood Press. Kaasila, R., & Lauriala, A. (2012). How do pre-service teachers’ reflective processes differ in relation to different contexts? European Journal of Teacher Education, 35(1), 77–89. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 7–12. Liu, K. (2011). Enhancing prospective teachers’ critical reflection in the ePortfolio environment. University of Wisconsin-Madison: Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Liu, K. (2015). Critical reflection as a framework for transformative learning in teacher education. Educational Review, 67(2), 135–157. Liu, K. (2017). Creating a dialogic space for prospective teacher critical reflection and transformative learning. Reflective Practice, 18(6), 805–820. Marcos, J. M., García-Rodríguez, M. L., & Tillema, H. (2013). Student teacher reflective writing: What does it reveal? European Journal of Teacher Education, 36(2), 147–163. Mezirow, J. (1990). Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A guide to transformative and emancipatory learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Milner, R. H., Cunningham, H. B., Delale O’Connor, L. D., & Kestenberg, E. G. (2019). “These kids are out of control”: Why we must reimagine “classroom management” for equity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Mortari, L. (2012). Learning thoughtful reflection in teacher education. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 18(5), 525–545. Rogers, C. (2002). Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking. Teachers College Record, 104(4), 842–866. Sleeter, C. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools: Research and the overwhelming presence of whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94–106. Thomas, M. K., & Liu, K. (2012). The performance of reflection: A grounded analysis of prospective teachers’ ePortfolios. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 20(3), 305–330. van Manen, M. (1977). Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical. Curriculum Inquiry, 6(3), 205–228. Villegas, A. M., & Irvine, J. J. (2010). Diversifying the teaching force: An examination of major arguments. Urban Review, 42(3), 175–192. Zeichner, K.  M., & Liston, D.  P. (1996). Reflective teaching: An introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Chapter 3

Looking Back on What Was Good and What Was Bad: Prospective Teachers’ Understanding of Critical Reflection

Sitting comfortably in my little office, her hair tied into a ponytail at the back, Ella carries herself with self-confidence and positivity. Now having completed all four semesters of practicums, Ella is going to start her student teaching in the fall semester. Over a whole semester of interviews, informal conversations, classroom observations, and post-teaching conferences, the two of us have developed a trusting relationship. Our conversation starts with very general and broad topics such as teaching and learning this semester; when the topic shifts to reflection and reflection tasks for her ePortfolio, Ella smiles at me and gives me a long, nonstop response: We reflected on everything! Every assignment is like, do your assignment and reflect on it, do this and reflect on it. It’s kind of like, it becomes meaningless when it turns into an assignment and it’s just like I have to get this done and submit it in order to get a grade. We wrote a lesson and taught it in the methods class. We were asked to write a reflection on how we thought the lesson ran. And there were only ten-minute chunks of the lesson. Why am I reflecting on something that, (a) I didn’t teach to students, (b) I didn’t teach a whole lesson? What benefit am I getting from it? (Ella, Interview #2)

Ella’s comments echo what researchers have long criticized: the phrase “reflective teaching” has been so broadly used in teacher education that its meaning has become elusive (Rogers, 2002; Smyth, 1992; Zeichner & Liston, 1996; Zeichner & Liu, 2010). As Rogers (2002) critiques, “in becoming everything to everybody, [reflection] has lost its ability to be seen” (p. 843). Research shows that prospective teachers and teacher educators are often confused and puzzled by the purposes and requirements of reflective writing and how it is evaluated (Liu, 2011; Pellicone & Raison, 2009). Even so, prospective teachers are often required to write journals to reflect on their teaching and learning, and more recently, to use online platforms such as ePortfolios to document their journey of learning to teach and meeting all the teacher education requirements (Barrett, 2005; Oner & Adadan, 2011; Slepcevic-­ Zach & Stock, 2018; Zeichner & Wray, 2001). As discussed in Chap. 1, within the reflective teaching practice in teacher education programs, some teacher educators and researchers further called for preparing critically reflective teachers for socially just and equitable teaching (Ball & Ladson-Billings, 2020; Dinkelman, 1999, 2000; © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. Liu, Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01955-0_3

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Hickson, 2011; Howard, 2003; Jones & Charteris, 2017; Liu, 2015, 2017; Liu & Ball, 2019; Mezirow, 1990; Ossa Parra, Gutiérrez, & Aldana, 2015). Although this call is appealing, and the rationale is convincing for teacher educators, what critical reflection looks like and how one does it is not conveyed clearly to prospective teachers (Liu, 2011; Rogers, 2002). Rather, programs run on the assumption that prospective teachers understand what critical reflection is and that their understanding aligns with the vision of their teacher educators (Thomas & Liu, 2012). The teacher education program producing the participants of this research, for example, puts special emphasis on preparing reflective teachers with a commitment to teaching for social justice and equity, laying out expectations for the prospective teachers’ reflection, including connections between society and schooling and social justice and equity issues in teaching. The vision promoted by Ella’s teacher education program aligns well with the concept of critical reflection for the ultimate goal of educational equity as defined in Chap. 1: Teacher education students learn to recognize how their own background and experience shape their thinking and actions, to reflect on their practices, and to develop and adapt practices that serve the needs of their students. Through their preparation, students gain awareness of how schools reflect both the strengths and inequities of our increasingly multicultural society and become more committed to advancing social justice and equity through their classroom practice and community interactions. (Introduction to the program)

However, as will become clear through this chapter, the prospective teachers did not make a connection between the processes of reflection, the content of their reflection, and the goal. In other words, their notions of how one reflects and what one reflects about did not lead them toward educational equity. Rather, the ways in which they reflected, and what they reflected about, tended to bring them back to themselves, rather than to their students. Given the fact that the teacher education program announced its goal of preparing critically reflective teachers, how did Ella, Judy, Karla, and Doug understand reflection and critical reflection? Did their perceptions align with those of their teacher educators as well as the vision of the program? Understanding prospective teachers’ perceptions of reflection in general, and critical reflection in particular, should shed light on why their reflections demonstrate the features described in Chap. 2. For this purpose, I organize my analysis by following the same sequence as in Chap. 2, starting with Karla followed by Doug, Ella, and Judy.

3.1  Looking Back on What Was Good and What Was Bad Karla’s understanding of critical reflection at the beginning of her program consisted of using specific examples in the criticism of one’s teaching. I think critical in a sense the word means harsh criticism. But I also think it means a vital … so what were the vital aspects of your teaching that makes your reflection critical. So for example, in a critical reflection, you need to have specific examples of what you are criticiz-

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ing. But it doesn’t just all have to be negative. So like I said vital, it doesn’t mean like oh, this huge dramatic thing happened, more just being more realistic about what happened. (Karla Interview #1)

By the end of the student teaching semester, Karla had modified her thoughts about reflection, suggesting that hers were critical because she looked at her teaching from multiple perspectives. Like criticizing and really … To me, critical reflection means looking at my teaching and constructively analyzing my instruction. I do think that my reflections are critical reflections because I am not afraid to look at my teaching from multiple angles: from the perspective of the students, myself, the standards. (Karla Follow-up Interview)

Karla’s understanding of critical reflection focuses on what happened, lacking the basic elements discussed in Chap. 1: analyzing one’s assumptions about teaching, searching for alternatives based on assumption analysis, and implementing changes based on new insights as a result of reflection. Being critical, to Karla, is synonymous with criticism in general. What’s more, Karla did not connect critical reflection to the larger social and political context of education or the ultimate goal of better schooling and a more just society for all children. Karla’s generic understanding of critical reflection, according to Zeichner and Liston (1996), should not really be considered “reflection,” because teachers are responsible not only to reflect on whether or not they have met the objectives or goals they make for their teaching but also on the impact of their teaching, asking broader and more open questions such as, “are the results good, for whom and in what ways?” (p. 11). Elsewhere (Liu, 2015), I argue that critical reflection is achieved by a critical analysis of assumptions and taken-for-granted ways of thinking and doing, rather than “talking about it in a general way so that it becomes mere jargon” (p. 148). Comparing Karla’s very generic concept of critical reflection to the writings she posted in her ePortfolio and analyzed in Chap. 2, it is not surprising that her reflection consists of a technical and linear description of what happened in the classroom. During the fourth interview at the end of her student teaching semester, Karla talked about a moment in which her mentor teacher prompted her to think about changes in her future teaching. Her instant response was that she did not know what changes she should make. Although her mentor teacher made some suggestions, Karla did not indicate whether or not she took those suggestions into consideration for her later teaching. Moreover, this entire incident is missing from her ePortfolio reflection; as analyzed in Chap. 2, Karla’s pattern of avoiding talking about future transformation, even when her mentor teachers and supervisors suggest some improvements, is common. One example is one of my mentor teachers. I did like a cross math center, and she asked if you’d do it again, what would you change? Honestly, I said, I don’t know! I said, was it bad? Why was it bad? I need your advice. She said, oh, maybe give them less options than I have given the kids like ten different things. So she said maybe less options. (Karla Interview #4)

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3.2  Reflection as an “Assignment Term” Now, we turn our lens to Doug. Doug understood reflection as more a personal thing; any thought or idea in his mind qualifies as reflection. As Ella critiqued, Doug thought that “reflection” has been used as an “assignment term” (Doug Interview #1) and was primarily a prerequisite to accomplish other tasks. To Doug, ePortfolio work was not for reflection, but simply an assignment to be completed as efficiently as possible. Doug believed that he reflected more through conversing with his mentor teacher and thinking about his conduct in his mind than through writing. Critical reflection, to him, meant simply criticism. It’s important to reflect critically. So critique is to criticize and for a lot of people, criticism is difficult to handle so a lot of times it’s best to try to do that for yourself before you have the other people criticize you and critiquing your methods. That could be hard to handle, but if it’s something you’ve already been considering then I feel like handling the other people’s constructive criticism is a lot easier because you are all at the same page (Doug Interview #4)

When asked what he reflected on in his teaching, Doug produced a list focusing mostly on how he conducted the teaching, but nothing concerning why he was teaching the way he did, just as he tended to write in his ePortfolio. How students are doing, how are they responding to specific tasks, how am I leading the class, how I conduct myself, the kind of language I used with students, the kind of activities that I am expecting them to do, how students are handling my expectations, things like that, just try to make sure that I’m doing my best to create a positive working climate for these students and hopefully to give them the most beneficial experiences while they are here at the school. (Doug Interview #4)

Although Doug expressed his understanding of the social and political aspects of teaching and how they impact the learning of students of color in his educational philosophy and conversations with his mentor teachers, he did not link those aspects to his definition of critical reflection. As discussed in Chap. 2, in addition to critiquing the distorted social assumptions about students of color, Doug actually took actions to implement alternative solutions to better support students of color such as inviting guest teachers of color to help around in his class. However, this aspect of transformative action is missing in his articulation of the concept of critical reflection as well.

3.3  Where You Go from Here Finally, I turn to Ella and Judy’s understandings of critical reflection. According to Ella, reflection meant looking back on previous actions and thinking critically about any successes or failures and then making decisions for future improvement based on that reflection. What did critical mean to Ella? As she put it I mean critical, being analytical, and critical of yourself, you know constructively, obviously you don’t want to be hard on yourself, but I really think you have to look at what

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you’ve done that wasn’t all good or bad, but what was good and what was bad. (Ella Interview #1)

By the end of the fifth semester of student teaching, Ella thought her understanding of reflection had not changed much. According to her definition, critical reflection should be forward looking and focused on future changes rather than dwelling on what happened in the past. It is obvious that, by the end of her student teaching, Ella specifically addressed the importance of changing actions based on previous reflections instead of stopping at searching for alternative solutions, or as Thomas and Liu (2012) term it, producing a “wouldspike,” meaning prospective teachers tend to state that they “would” make changes in their future teaching, but never actually follow up. I think the huge aspect of critical reflection is where you go from here. I don’t think it matters how you reflected yesterday. I think it matters how you move forward, and critical reflection to me means you are constantly making changes in every step you take forward, because often reflection can be dwelling on the past and on what happened before and so I think really true reflection is moving forward. (Ella Interview #4)

Similarly, Judy expressed her understanding of critical reflection—looking at negative aspects of one’s teaching—but she admitted that she did not know much about it. I don’t know anything about it actually. So maybe we haven’t addressed it. I guess critical reflection, thinking critically about your teaching, yah, just, I don’t know, maybe looking at yourself trying to look beyond surface level like what’s going on like, looking at maybe negative aspects of your teaching style, because it’s easy to see the good things. (Judy Interview #1)

Judy gave an example of how she reflected on some chaos she had in a science lesson she taught about paper and wood. The students were floating and sinking pieces of wood, the water spilling on the table. I reflected about it afterwards, and really thinking what was going to my head at that time, what happened, and thinking what I could have done differently, and then just, the following week, I had three more lessons to do, and I really I thought about those lessons very differently because I had had that experience and actually thought about it and learn from it, my next couple of lessons were much better. (Judy Interview #1)

As shown in this example, the focus of Judy’s reflection was managing the lesson better without chaos rather than the learning processes and learning outcomes of her students. When asked what was the chaos and why, Judy thought it was because she wanted things to go the way she planned, was nice and neat without students spilling water all over the table. When that didn’t happen, she saw the result as chaos. By the end of the fifth semester, Judy still thought that she did not really know what critical reflection meant but she still felt taking action to improve her teaching was important. I don’t know if I ever knew what that meant. Thinking critically … analyzing ummm, how you do as a teacher affects student learning. Thinking about a lesson and reflecting upon that and thinking okay, what I can do differently next time, so I guess critical reflection, will be not just thinking about it, but taking action and changing something to make it better. (Judy Interview #4)

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Both Ella and Judy’s notions of critical reflection fit into the stage of imaginative speculation that focuses on searching for alternative solutions and reflection-based actions aiming at implementing changes based on the insights gained from reflection. In the analysis of their written reflections and classroom teaching in Chap. 2, it is obvious that searching for alternative actions was certainly visible in both Ella’s written reflection and in her classroom teaching. Under certain circumstances, Ella was able to implement reflection-based actions as well. For example, after she implemented the shape computer game, Ella reflected that she should have included more of the languages spoken at home by the students and based on this reflection, she did invite more parents to participate and she then recorded them to modify the shape computer game. Judy, on the other hand, started with analyzing assumptions about African American students based on her conversation with the bus coordinator and searched alternative solutions to include different celebrations of light in her unit. She further implemented actions of inviting community members as guest speakers to help her teach the unit. However, if we used Judy’s understanding of critical reflection—making changes in future teaching—as a criterion to analyze her written reflection and classroom practice, we would find that her written reflections do not actually meet her own criteria. As discussed in Chap. 2, Judy’s written reflections on the equity unit contained more general and positive descriptions of what she did as a teacher than how her teaching affected her students’ understanding of equity and what improvements she would make in her future teaching. It is also important to point out that both Ella and Judy articulated the importance of teaching for social justice and equity in their educational philosophy. However, their definitions clearly show that, to them, critical reflection is an individual-based and internal examination of one’s teaching in the micro classroom, without questioning or critiquing taken-for-granted and often distorted assumptions that undergird teaching and learning as emphasized by Mezirow (2000) or analyzing the sociopolitical aspects of schooling as highlighted by researchers such as Zeichner and Liston (1996), Valli (1997), Dinkelman (1999, 2000), and van Manen (1977). From the analysis of the four participants’ understanding of critical reflection we see the word “critical” was taken for granted and was used to denote reflection without actually defining “critical.” In addition, although both Ella and Judy mentioned that changes in action are important to critical reflection, only Ella demonstrated efforts to implement changes in her teaching. Their understanding of critical reflection helps explain why their written reflections focused on issues related to daily teaching, and seldom on the social and political dimensions of teaching. The definition of critical reflection (Chap. 1) guided this study has two important dimensions, the content of what to reflect on and the process of how to reflect on that content. The four cases’ understanding of critical reflection shows limited understanding of the two elements, nor do they relate critical reflection to the ultimate purpose of student learning and the fostering of better schooling and a more just society. Although reflection is essential for prospective teachers to learn to teach, the difficulty lies in how to help them extract meaning from experiences through reflection (Toom, Husu, & Patrikainen, 2015). Therefore, when teacher educators set up the goal of preparing critically reflective teachers, we cannot take it for granted that prospective teachers will automatically know what critical reflection means and be

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able to reflect critically without support. Instead, we need to teach prospective teachers what critical reflection is and how to accomplish it, facilitating them to reexamine their assumptions, understand the social–cultural context of their teaching, search for alternatives solutions, and more importantly, highlighting the value of transformative action as an important outcome of critical reflection. Elsewhere (Liu, 2015) I state that if there are no changed actions in the teaching that follows reflection, “the value of these processes remains minimal” (p.  153). This echoes Brookfield (1995) in saying that “reflection in and of itself is not enough; it must always be linked to how the world can be changed” (p. 217), and Mezirow (1990) in insisting that “reflective discourse and its resulting insights alone do not make for transformative learning. Acting upon these emancipatory insights, a praxis is also necessary” (p. 354).

3.4  Epilogue: The Goal of Preparing Reflective Teachers As shown earlier in this chapter, preparing prospective teachers to reflect critically has been a goal of the program for a long time. According to some faculty members, reflective teaching is an important way to prepare future teachers to think about and improve their teaching. Laura, a senior teacher educator in the program, believed this is how the teacher education program at Midwest University distinguishes itself from other programs in the country. So we have to distinguish ourselves in some way, so coming here means getting prepared in a particular way. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t agree it is an appropriate goal for preparation of teachers. (Laura Interview)

Having set the goal of preparing reflective practitioners in the program, what do teacher educators think of the concept and practice of reflection? Some faculty members believe critical reflection means raising specific issues such as race, gender, and poverty, rather than focusing on the thinking process as John suggests. For example, I really want them to think about perspectives that are not typically included in their classrooms. So the idea is about gender, about race, about ethnicity, and about homophobia, and that’s the sort of really typical definition of what critical means. (Peggy Interview)

However, in reality, most Midwest University prospective teachers are quite young, and their upbringing has been in homogenous, middle-class communities, giving them little experience dealing with these social, cultural, and political issues. They are representative of the graduates of many teacher education programs in the United States (Sleeter, 2001, 2008). For this reason, Laura, herself a critical race theory scholar, was unsure if enhancing critical reflection could be achieved in the teacher education program. I am actually more sympathetic towards who our students are. These people are in their young twenties. How much have they reflected about? What have they been through? I would hope that their ability to become more critically reflective would grow as their career grows. (Laura Interview)

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To some faculty members and educational staff, reflection in itself is always critical. From this point of view, the reflection that directs teachers to think about and improve student learning is itself critical reflection. For example, Kant, a senior faculty member in the teacher education program, thinks that when teachers ask questions about what to teach and how to teach in order to be effective with the students they are working with, they are being critical. I mean one of things that the program tries to do is for prospective teachers to think, not only should you ask yourself what you are going to teach, but also why you are going to teach. So it’s critical from the standpoint of saying what should you do, how should you go about teaching in a way that best facilitates learning for the students that you’re working with. (Kant Interview)

In sum, there appears to be no consensus among the faculty on either how to reflect critically or what to reflect about. The combination of their understandings represents the concept of critical reflection and the processes of becoming critically reflective conceptualized in Chap. 1. That is, critical reflection not only requires the cognitive processes of questioning, challenging, and reframing, but also the objects of this process, the taken-for-granted assumptions related to teaching and learning. As we can see, the program put great emphasis on preparing critically reflective practitioners able to take into consideration the social and political aspects of teaching. However, based on the definitions from prospective teachers, they did not achieve this understanding. The quotes from prospective teachers and teacher educators also demonstrate a gap: teacher educators show a more sophisticated understanding of critical reflection while prospective teachers’ understanding is very general. Zeichner’s (1992) research suggests that, when only looking at a program’s self-­ description, it is hard for prospective teachers to identify critical aspects such as the process of moral deliberation, desirable classroom actions, and how the program’s conception of reflective practice affects subject matter knowledge. This vagueness about the programs’ conceptual orientation and purpose of preparing reflective teachers, especially with regard to critical reflection, may also cause dissonance between teacher educators and prospective teachers’ perceptions of reflective teaching and their approaches to represent their reflections. Compounding this issue is the reality that most teacher educators in the elementary teacher education program in this study were graduate students taught or supervised by teacher education faculty members. As such, it is important for teacher education programs to convey the goals of preparing critically reflective practitioners to these teacher educators and provide training to them so that their visions and perceptions are in alignment with those of the teacher education program. Prospective teachers’ perceptions of critical reflection to a certain extent can explain why they reflected the way they did in their ePortfolios. In general, a large portion of the reflections shown in their ePortfolios, despite some signs of critical reflection in Ella and Judy’s work, were technical and positive descriptions of what they taught. Seldom were reflections concerned with the impact of the macro social and political aspects of education other than issues involving the microenvironment of classroom teaching and learning. The mere description without analysis, according to Zeichner and Liston (1996), is generic reflection. The generic description of

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what happened in the classroom, both good and bad (although in reality they seldom brought up any “bad” aspect of their teaching) fits well with what prospective teachers’ understanding of critical reflection analyzed in this chapter—a general process of looking back on their teaching in terms of both good things and bad things. Although the focal point of this chapter lies in prospective teachers’ perceptions of critical reflection, I do not intend to conclude that their perceptions are the only factor that impacts what they write in their ePortfolio reflection. As discussed in Chap. 1, teacher socialization theory has long established that the social context of teacher education programs—particularly during field experiences—has strong impact on what prospective teachers believe and do (e.g., Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999; Zeichner & Conklin, 2008; Zeichner & Gore, 1990). Lorti (1975), on the other hand, suggests in his theory of the apprenticeship of observation that prospective teacher’s learning is heavily informed by their previous classroom experiences. For these reasons, we should not understand prospective teachers’ reflection as a static and individualistic phenomenon. As such, the next chapters will unpack how prospective teachers’ attitudes toward and actions in both writing their reflection and teaching in the classroom dance with the teacher education program in which they are situated.

References Ball, A. F., & Ladson-Billings, G. (2020). Educating teachers for the 21st century: Culture, reflection, and learning. In N. S. Nasir, C. D. Lee, R. Pea, & M. M. Royston (Eds.), Handbook of cultural foundations of learning (pp. 387–403). New York, NY: Routledge. Barret, H. (2005). White paper researching electronic portfolios and learner engagement. The REFLECT Initiative Researching Electronic Portfolios: Learning engagement and Collaboration Through Technology. Retrieved from http://www.taskstream.com/reflect/whitepaper.pdf. Brookfield, S.  D. (1995). Becoming a critical reflective teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Dinkelman, T. (1999). Critical reflection in a social studies semester. Theory and Research in Social Education, 27(3), 329–357. Dinkelman, T. (2000). An inquiry into the development of critical reflection in secondary student teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16, 195–222. Grossman, P. L., Smagorinsky, P., & Valencia, S. (1999). Appropriating tools for teaching English: A theoretical framework for research on learning to teach. American Journal of Education, 108, 1–29. Hickson, H. (2011). Critical reflection: Reflecting on learning to be reflective. Reflective Practice, 12(6), 829–839. Howard, T.  C. (2003). Culturally relevant pedagogy: Ingredients for critical teacher reflection. Theory Into Practice, 42(3), 195–202. Jones, M., & Charteris, J. (2017). Transformative professional learning: An ecological approach to agency through critical reflection. Reflective Practice, 18(4), 496–513. Liu, K. (2011). Enhancing prospective teachers’ critical reflection in the ePortfolio environment. University of Wisconsin-Madison: Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Liu, K. (2015). Critical reflection as a framework for transformative learning in teacher education. Educational Review, 67(2), 135–157.

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Liu, K. (2017). Creating a dialogic space for prospective teacher critical reflection and transformative learning. Reflective Practice, 18(6), 805–820. Liu, K., & Ball, A. (2019). Critical reflection and generativity: Toward a framework of transformative teacher education for diverse learners. Review of Research in Education, 43(1), 68–105. Lorti, D. C. (1975). Schoolteachers. Chicago: The Chicago University Press. Mezirow, J. (Ed.). (1990). Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A guide to transformative and emancipatory learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Myers, K. D., Bridges-Rhoads, S., & Cannon, S. O. (2017). Reflection in constellation: Post theories, subjectivity, and teacher preparation. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 38(4), 326–341. Oner, D., & Adadan, E. (2011). Use of web-based portfolios as tools for reflection in prospective teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(5), 477–492. Ossa Parra, M., Gutiérrez, R., & Aldana, M. F. (2015). Engaging in critically reflective teaching: From theory to practice in pursuit of transformative learning. Reflective Practice, 16(1), 16–30. Pellicone, L., & Raison, G. (2009). Promoting the scholarship of teaching through reflective E-portfolios in teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 35(3), 271–281. Rogers, C. (2002). Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking. Teachers College Record, 104(4), 842–866. Sleeter, C. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools: Research and the overwhelming presence of whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94–106. Sleeter, C. (2008). Preparing white teachers for diverse students. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-­ Nemser, & D.  J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 559–582). New York, NY: Routledge. Slepcevic-Zach, P., & Stock, M. (2018). ePortfolio as a tool for reflection and self-reflection. Reflective Practice, 19(3), 291–307. Smyth, J. (1992). Teachers’ work and the politics of reflection. American Educational Research Journal, 29(2), 267–300. Thomas, M. K., & Liu, K. (2012). The performance of reflection: A grounded analysis of prospective teachers’ ePortfolios. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 20(3), 305–330. Toom, A., Husu, J., & Patrikainen, S. (2015). Student teachers’ patterns of reflection in the context of teaching practice. European Journal of Teacher Education, 38(3), 320–340. Valli, L. (1997). Listening to other voices: A description of teacher reflection in the United States. Peabody Journal of Education, 72(1), 67–88. van Manen, M. (1977). Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical. Curriculum Inquiry, 6(3), 205–228. Zeichner, K. (1992). Conceptions of reflective teaching in contemporary U.S. teacher education program reforms. In L.  Valli (Ed.), Reflective teacher education: Cases and critiques (pp. 161–173). New York: State University of New York Press. Zeichner, K., & Conklin, H. (2008). Teacher education programs as sites for teacher preparation. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, D. J. McIntyre & Association of Teacher Educators (eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education: Enduring questions in changing contexts (3rd ed., pp.  269–289). New  York: Routledge; co-published by the Association of Teacher Educators. Zeichner, K., & Gore, J. (1990). Teacher socialization. In W.  R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 329–348). New York: Macmillan. Zeichner, K., & Liu, K. (2010). A critical analysis of reflection as the goal of teacher education. In N. Lyons (Ed.), Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry (pp. 67–84). Berlin: Springer. Zeichner, K., & Wray, S. (2001). The teaching portfolio in US teacher education programs: What we know and what we need to know. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17(5), 613–621. Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. (1996). Reflective teaching: An introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Chapter 4

It’s Me Doing Work for Someone Else: Prospective Teachers’ Attitudes Toward the ePortfolio Reflection Requirements

It’s toward the end of the student teaching semester and the ePortfolio career and services lab has been very busy. One by one, or in small groups, prospective teachers come into the lab to work on their ePortfolios. They have downloaded the templates created by the ePortfolio career and services lab so that they can work on their own computer, but many of them choose to work in the lab to finalize and submit their ePortfolio reflections. Doug is among the prospective teachers working in the lab. He collected pictures of his classroom during his student teaching semester and now he is writing descriptions for the pictures. The next step is to “to get everything uploaded and link to each other and set them up like a whole web of different things” (Doug ePortfolio Work Observation).

We talked while he worked on his pictures; when I asked what he thought of the ePortfolio reflection requirements, Doug was very upfront: It’s probably cutting edge but at this point of time, it is the whole run-around that you have to go through. It is just another hoop to go through. It has been another way of how I can show somebody on an ePortfolio page that I already did all the work. It’s me doing work for somebody else. (Doug ePortfolio Working Observation)

In order to jump through the hoops, Doug admitted that he followed the requirements without much thought. I feel there’re a lot of reflections that we are supposed to do that I kind of … I know I got everything turned in, but to be honest with you, there’re not really anything that I put much thought onto. (Doug Interview #3)

Doug’s sentiment echoes what other teacher educators and researchers have observed that teacher education students see reflection as “a formality, a tedious chore, written proof of their ‘thinking’ for their professor” (Myers, Bridges-Rhoads, & Cannon, 2017, p. 327). Teacher educators and recently graduated teacher education students can immediately recall the requirements for reflection, which are so broad that prospective teachers feel they reflect on almost everything: research articles and books,  classroom and community site  visits, planning and teaching

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lessons—and all these reflections are fodder for assessment by teacher educators. As Ella commented in Chap. 3, she had to “reflect on everything!” Doug’s characterization of the ePortfolio reflection requirement as a hoop to jump through and, therefore not worth putting real thought into, was shared by the other participants. Ella described the scene of many of her peers coming to the lab busy uploading pictures, videos, and reflections onto their ePortfolio toward the end of a semester as “so many people who just go through the hoops” (Ella Interview #4). Given the pervasive nature of this attitude among prospective teachers, an obvious question is where did this attitude come from? To what extent did the teacher education program itself—including the education faculty and other teacher educators as individuals—reinforce or even encourage it? In addition, given the fact that the teacher education program itself extols the virtue of reflection, and especially reflection in service to the goal of social justice and educational equity, where is this goal in prospective teachers’ response to the ePortfolio reflection requirements? There are many possible answers to these questions. In this chapter, I consider two: First, it is possible that confusion among the teacher educators on the meaning and purpose of critical reflection leads to prospective teachers to take a “just an assignment” approach to reflection. Second, the overall cognitive load the teacher education program places on prospective teachers, particularly in the structure and reflection assignments in the ePortfolio, itself militates against serious critical reflection. I deal with the first possibility by examining documentary and interview data with teacher educators, then return to the prospective teachers’ experiences with reflection assignments to consider the second possibility.

4.1  T  he Place of the ePortfolio in the Teacher Education Program The ePortfolio program under study here is a typical example of many university developed portfolio programs in the United States. It was designed with two primary purposes program assessment for prospective teacher performance and self-­ reflection for ongoing learning. In actual use, the program is situated in the current social–political context of teacher education, with teacher educators and prospective teachers as well influenced by a disciplinary discourse co-constructed by research, potential employers, reformers, and former graduates, each with their unique positionality. As a result, although some teacher educators and the ePortfolio designers had a vision of the ePortfolio as a reflective tool for prospective teachers, there was no consensus among teacher educators as a whole. However, some teacher educators did see problems with the program. For example, Karla’s fourth-semester supervisor, Roy, was very frank about the gap between the ideal of the ePortfolio “in the perfect world” and the reality he saw: I know the ePortfolio director talked about it as an extension of prospective teachers themselves. I know he wanted it to be a reflective tool. So in the perfect world, it’s a learning tool

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for students to reflect on their progress in teaching and learning to teach…. In reality, I think it’s a hoop for them to jump in order to get their license. I see the majority of my students see it as an assignment and get it finished, instead of a journey of their teaching and really reflect on it. (Roy, Karla’s Fourth Semester Supervisor Interview #2)

According to John, the ePortfolio started as a way to replace the paper portfolio that was used as a formal assessment tool for prospective teachers, because of the advantage in accessibility and virtual conversations over the paper portfolio. I was one of those who pushed for the ePortfolios because of the accessibility issues and because the work had been done with the paper portfolios, partly the potential of doing things like putting videos on and having virtual conversations about artifacts. Then we thought it would be a good tool for promoting deep and critical reflection. (John Interview #1)

John believed that, in addition to fostering deeper reflection by prospective teachers, the ePortfolio could facilitate the standard-based assessment requirement of the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) teacher licensure—but the focus of the ePortfolio was still student learning through reflection. However, John indicated that there was opposition to the ePortfolio from teacher educators as well as from prospective teachers. Some teacher educators did not understand the concept of standard-based teacher education and saw the ePortfolio as a mere tool to fulfill DPI requirements, while for others the fragmentation of the program caused a lack of communication among teacher educators about the purpose of and approach to integrating the ePortfolio into their teaching. I interviewed students each semester starting from the first semester they used the portfolio and there’s a lot of confusion in the first professional semester. They are getting conflicting messages from different TAs. (John Interview #1)

For John, the ePortfolio was not an intrusion into an individual teacher educator’s territory, but a tool with the potential to connect the program across semesters. Laura agreed with John that the ePortfolio could be a tool or prospective teacher reflection as well as a space to bring communication among teacher educators (Laura Interview). Sarah also thought that the ePortfolio could be a great tool for prospective teachers’ learning, but that the potential was not fully achieved. [The ePortfolio] is a brilliant technology that’s really helped us as a program I think. I’d like to see much more explored as a tool for learning, I’d love to see the ePortfolio shared among the students and do something to make it more authentic assessment of learning, rather than a drop box, but I actually think it would be remarkably helpful in changing people’s thinking about what constitutes a tracking system for learning. (Sarah Interview)

Kant, another faculty member who was involved in the elementary teacher education program and supervised some graduate student teacher educators, felt that the goals of the ePortfolios changed over the years: The whole notion of the ePortfolio being an excellent service tool for employers to hire potential teachers from my understanding, was only fairly received. So then the idea of the ePortfolio and the purpose of it somewhat shifted. It’s still shifting. Now by that I didn’t mean in the beginning that people didn’t say it could be used for reflection, but increasingly, the ePortfolio is being argued not by all faculty, but some faculty in the department, that it can be used as a tool for reflection. I mean no one is saying you can’t. (Kant Interview)

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Another goal of the ePortfolio, he believed, was to fulfill the political requirements of the state, which he called “political currency.” This perception of the ePortfolio was very different from John’s repeated insistence that the ePortfolio was not a response to DPI demands because they did not determine either the quantity or quality of the prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflection. Kant, on the other hand, insisted, The other thing that is happening, the ePortfolio has picked up, let me call it a political currency, because it is a requirement, it is becoming a requirement of the state, and one wonders about the soundness in the politics of that whole idea. (Kant Interview)

Finally, many teacher educators in this program in general saw the ePortfolio as an institutional requirement or a repository for assignments. For example, Karla’s fourth-semester supervisor saw it as a “hoop” for prospective teachers to jump through for certification. The social studies methods instructor thought the ePortfolio took away from prospective teachers’ instructional time and identified technical challenges making it difficult for prospective teachers to reflect collaboratively; she preferred using other online tools for collaborative reflection such as blogs. Similarly, Ella and Doug’s fifth-semester supervisor Beth complained that the requirements for the ePortfolio ignored the material challenges encountered by prospective teachers. Thus teacher educators’ understanding of the goal of the ePortfolio and their attitudes toward it had influenced their approaches to integrating the ePortfolios into their teaching and supervision. In sum, teacher educators have different (sometimes conflicting) perceptions of both the goals and procedures of the ePortfolio. These mixed perceptions are highly correlated to what mixed views prospective teachers reported they received in the program. At the same time, their perceptions and attitudes determine how they use ePortfolios in their teaching. Shulman (1998) contends portfolio is a theoretical act, meaning that every time someone designs, organizes, or creates a template, a framework for a teaching portfolio, they are engaged in an act of theory making. This theory making will then determine what is worth documenting and reflecting on. As seen in the stories shared above, ambiguity in the theoretical act of the ePortfolio design encouraged confusion among teacher educators—a hoop to jump through or a tool for reflection or a platform for assessment. The fundamental confusion among the teacher educators was then accurately transmitted to the prospective teachers, as we will see in the rest of this chapter.

4.2  We Get Mixed Views Toward the end of her program, even after putting a great amount of work into her ePortfolio, Ella still had trouble understanding the purpose of the ePortfolio, in no small part because of the conflicting information she received from different people in the program.

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I think we get very mixed views on the ePortfolio. Because I understand the people who work for it and support it in the school of education. They see a different thing from we see as students. They see it as a reflective tool. And it is something we all kind of struggle with it, because as we heard many times, principals look at it, they use it for hiring and see what is in your ePortfolio, but then we hear from former students and we hear even from principals, that [they] don’t really use the ePortfolio. So I feel like we are kind of given two different stories on the portfolio. (Ella Interview #1)

Even so, Ella still held strong to the idea that the mixed information about the ePortfolio reflection played an important role on her understanding of it and that differing requirements by her teacher educators during different semesters reinforced that confusion. Looking back on her ePortfolio reflection in the past semester, Ella noticed that she put a great amount of work in the third semester but relatively little in the fourth semester: During the third semester, Ella developed two units for her ePortfolio reflection, integrating artifacts such as pictures, video clips, and an interactive computer game she integrated into her teaching. During the fourth semester, however, the only thing she uploaded was a short reflection of 288 words along with a supporting video clip. She commented that her fourth-semester reflection was “horrible,” saying, I don’t know. I think honestly this is horrible that I didn’t put much work there during the fourth semester, but it was not required. I have all those stuff; I really should just throw up there because it would look good. It’s a good place to keep them all, but it was not required. (Ella Interview #4)

Note her assertion that she should have done a better job because “it would look good.” The question is for whom would it look good? She fulfilled the (minimal) requirements for that semester so that assessment presumably didn’t concern her, but the possibility that someone else might see her fourth-semester reflection remained in her mind, indicating ambiguity in the purpose of the ePortfolio. Similarly, Judy admitted that she had mixed emotions about the ePortfolio reflection. During an interview at the end of her student teaching, Judy expressed these mixed emotions with a sense of puzzlement. As a liaison with trainings from the ePortfolio career and services lab, she was told that it was a “cool tool to reflect” (Judy Interview #4) and she was also committed to convey this belief to her peers whom she provided support with; however, from her own experience, the ePortfolio was just container to put things she had already worked on before: I have mixed emotions. It was a positive way to reflect, I think. To be honest though, it wasn’t my preference of reflection. I found myself a lot of times looking in my journal to put on artifacts onto the ePortfolio. So it was almost like a repeating step. (Judy Interview #4)

This puzzlement continued when Judy talked about the potential use of her reflections in the future. As Ella and other peers, Judy first thought the ePortfolio reflections could be useful for job interviews, but then she quickly commented that it was wrong to think that way because she was told so by the designers. If I use it in an interview, I think it will be useful. It sounds bad because it’s the wrong reason to do it. (Katrina: why do you think it’s a wrong reason?) Oh, Allen has always said, if you are doing this for a principal, then it’s the wrong reason. I think what he meant was

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4  It’s Me Doing Work for Someone Else: Prospective Teachers’ Attitudes… if you are writing things that you think the principal wants to hear and respond to a question, then that’s not right. But I would use this as a tool to talk about my practice and reflection, and student learning, I think it’ll be really effective. (Judy Interview #4)

Similarly, Karla thought her ePortfolio reflection would be useful for future job applications: Based on my understanding, the goals of the ePortfolio are to provide us with a way to articulate and prove the work we have done throughout the School of Education. After writing about our experiences, we have the chance to put them into electronic form (making it permanent and easily accessible) so that when we apply for jobs we have the chance to look back and show what we have done throughout the semesters. (Karla Follow-up Interview)

These stories vividly reveal that prospective teachers were given different messages about the purposes of the ePortfolio. They then combined these messages with their own interpretations and experiences to form a unique but somewhat disturbing view of the ePortfolio reflection requirements. The word “mixed” they frequently used best describes this phenomenon: they had a mixed view about the purposes of the ePortfolio reflection and what they could use it for. Regardless of the mixed views prospective teachers received, or how they internalized these views with their own experiences, they all shared a similar attitude—the ePortfolio reflection as a hoop to jump through, or as Ross (2014) describes it, “a tick box” (p. 225), rather than as the learning tool envisioned by some faculty members. Doug’s comment was representative: I plan on getting it done so that they can give me my certification as a teacher and I don’t really want anything else to do with the ePortfolio. To me, it’s just, it’s frustrating…. In my opinion, I could show you everything that you would want to see and I have them all together and things like that, but for me to put all of them onto the web is going to be, like 16-hour process ahead of me before I can get all that in and for me, to spend 8–16 hours … just for clicking things and making uploading them and having them go through, it’s just irritating. (Doug Interview #4)

4.3  It’s a Good Form of Accountability Karla was busy working on her fourth-semester ePortfolio reflection at the lab. Unlike most of her peers, who did not write much for their ePortfolios this semester because it was required, Karla uploaded all her social studies methods course assignments, a journal reflection, and her practicum seminar final presentation. When being asked about her attitude toward the ePortfolio reflection requirements, she treated it as a form of accountability: I always thought it’s just the right amount of requirements to keep you thinking, to keep you working, you know and keep you accountable for what you are doing in your classroom, you know, the practicum, and your methods classes. I thought it is good form of accountability…. How does the ePortfolio influence my teaching and thinking? I probably still stick to its accountability. (Karla Interview #4)

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Given this attitude of treating the ePortfolio reflection as a form of accountability, it is not difficult to understand why Karla uploaded the work she had already done for different courses to her ePortfolio. As described in Chap. 2, Karla’s ePortfolio reflections were very general, technical descriptions of her teaching without analysis or thoughts for future improvement. Her conception of the ePortfolio as a form of accountability helps explain why Karla used it as an information container to prove she did the work required by her teacher education program. Doug shared Karla’s attitude toward ePortfolio reflection. Although he considered all the requirements such as taking pictures and writing reflections as “busy work,” he had to do it because he had to prove that he did them all: I’ve taken pictures and scanned and resized them and put them online just prove that I did it. That’s all it seems like to me. It’s me posting a bunch of different papers and assignments and everything online and writing those little documents about them just prove I know what I’m doing. (Doug Interview #4)

Notwithstanding his accountability approach, Doug’s strategy of working on his ePortfolio was very different from hers. Instead of uploading as much work as he could, as Karla did, Doug put in the minimum. Chapter 5 discusses prospective teachers’ strategies in working on their ePortfolio reflections; here I will simply point out that sharing the same attitude toward ePortfolio reflection tasks does not guarantee similar results. This is another reminder that teacher educators must look beyond the quantity of reflection themselves, ground-truthing prospective teachers’ apparent fluency (or lack thereof) in reflection with interview and observation data.

4.4  Epilogue: I Actually Benefit From It Although none of the four participants particularly liked the ePortfolio, most of them admitted that they did benefit from working on it. Doug was the only participant who thought that the ePortfolio reflection had no value to him at all. Even toward the end of his program, Doug was still very critical of it and insisted that he would not need it in the future. Nevertheless, the other three found something useful about the ePortfolio, although not necessarily what the teacher educators might have expected to hear. Ella came closest to articulating the value of the ePortfolio in promoting reflection, even though she was quite frank about her opposition to the ePortfolio reflection assignments. I am realizing I do feel like I benefit from artifacts, the students’ work because it’s really where I start to reflect and realize what’s really going on. After I took the pictures and then I sit down and look at them, I noticed that one student was just waiting impatiently for the other student to finish playing, so I thought that pair work did not really work well at that moment. (Ella Interview #4)

Ella also admitted that reflection occurred when she sat down at the computer to put artifacts in the ePortfolio, whether that was her intent or not. This contradicts her earlier statement that writing reflections was not a useful activity.

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4  It’s Me Doing Work for Someone Else: Prospective Teachers’ Attitudes… I sit down at the computer and okay, I need to put artifacts in my ePortfolio, that’s when I sit and start to look at students’ work and like, oh yah, this is really influential, it’s a forced time to sit down, but I think also it’s like when you do have the time, to sit down and really think about it, you start to notice things that you don’t notice before. (Ella Interview #4)

Another form of reflection that Ella found helpful was video-based reflection in a group. In the fourth-semester practicum seminar, prospective teachers created a video of their teaching and chose a 5-minute clip to watch together with their peers in the seminar. After doing this, the supervisor suggested they put the video and the reflection resulting from the seminar discussion onto their ePortfolios. I think the fourth semester was the first time we ever actually sat down in the seminar and we discussed the clip, because we had to watch it as a class. I had to put in my tape of teaching, pick a five-minute clip and get critiqued, and that was meaningful because that was my peers telling me oh it was good you did this, you know you should think about this. (Ella Interview #4)

This type of teacher educator practice—designing specific assignments intentionally to facilitate collaborative reflection and then letting prospective teachers use the artifacts as evidence to fulfill ePortfolio reflection requirements—is the closest to what John envisioned for the ePortfolio, achieving the goal of learning while also fulfilling other program and licensure requirements. At the end of that semester, Ella did post the short video clip to her ePortfolio showing her interacting with the students to set up the goal of community building. Along with the video, she provided a brief reflection explaining why building a community in the classroom became the focus of her curriculum and how she triggered a conversation among her students about the concept of community and the topic of friends and safety. What is missing from Ella’s reflection is what she learned from the video-based collaborative reflection that she thought beneficial and what transformative actions in her teaching resulted from this collaborative reflection. Therefore, a question for teacher educators to reflect on is how we can help prospective teachers articulate their learning resulting from purposefully designed assignments such as video-based collaborative reflection and, more importantly, help them implement changes in their future teaching based on what they learn (in Chap. 7, I provide some reflection and guidance on just such a comprehensive use of video for collaborative reflection). Like Ella, Judy felt she benefited from some of the ePortfolio reflection assignments, particularly when she was allowed to choose her goals: I also kind of evaluated what was important for me for that semester, and I thought in my head different goals and I was already thinking, what can I do maybe to work on this goal? I picked what I thought I could manage and do … it’s nice that we can choose something that it’s important to us and something that we are passionate about. (Judy Interview #1)

Through this activity, Judy acknowledged that she learned about her students as well as her own long-term goals. I think I got my feet wet with it you know, I did something pretty small, but even that little small thing showed me that it could have a big impact on students and on how they think about their learning, so it really helped me just get a little experience with it, and gives me more motivation to keep working on that, it’s definitely not a goal that I just checked off,

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you know, done, it definitely not like that at all, it’s definitely an ongoing goal. (Judy Interview #1)

During the fourth semester, however, Judy was not required to set up goals and therefore she did not do so. Later, Judy observed that she should have had concrete goals for the semester, even though this hadn’t been required. What is my goal for this semester? That is such a good question! I haven’t been like, I should have, I wish I would have written something concrete down … I don’t know, what is my goal for this semester? I don’t know, that’s bad I can’t answer that question. (Judy Interview #1)

Karla did not see benefit to ePortfolio reflection in supporting her learning, but did find it useful for storing her coursework because it was like “personal notes” (Karla Interview #4) that she could come back to in the future. This links to Karla’s view of the ePortfolio as an accountability system as discussed earlier, but extends that to include the possibility that she might want to make use of the uploaded materials later in her career. Again, this use of the ePortfolio, while potentially valuable to prospective teachers, does not require reflection of any kind, but simply treats the online system as a cupboard for holding teaching materials. The examples provided above demonstrate the dilemma of reflection assignments: when reflection was assigned, prospective teachers saw it as a hoop or checkbox, and handled it in a perfunctory fashion; when reflection was not assigned, it was not done at all. The outcome of the dilemma, then—no meaningful reflection— was the same regardless of which horn the prospective teacher chose. Given the fact that teacher education is a professional program, there must be a strong assessment component and one that incorporates licensure standards. As a result, it is probably inevitable that a tool such as the ePortfolio, containing examples of the prospective teacher’s classroom teaching, would be understood at least in part in terms of assessment rather than reflection. The question is not how teacher educators can eliminate the sense of assessment, but how we can design assignments that encourage prospective teachers to feel that the ePortfolio is there for their learning and development, and not just for assessment. We might be surprised by the fact that prospective teachers had such mixed information about the purpose of the ePortfolio reflection and yet their attitudes toward the requirements were undivided—jumping through the hoop and getting it done. As introduced in Chap. 1, ePortfolio reflection has been used for at least three purposes in teacher education: assessment, employment showcase, and learning. These three purposes are often contradictory to and interfere with each other (Strudler & Wetzel, 2012). However, most often teacher educators convey the ePortfolio reflection requirements to prospective teachers with a combination of all three purposes. Shulman (1998) cautions that there is conflict between the high stakes assessment and the private self-reflection purposes. This combination of different purposes into ePortfolio reflections also represent the current trend of educational reform that focuses on concepts such as scientific research, economic efficiency, and best practices that believe in the power of certain technical tools as solutions to strengthen teacher education (Selwyn & Facer, 2013; Thomas, 2012). In addition, what is often

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ignored is the culture, contexts, and policy in which DeVoto and Thomas (2020) call for attention to. Similarly, Reynolds and Patton (2014) caution that imposing highlevel standards and requirements for ePortfolio reflection may actually bring about the hoop-jumping attitude we see with Ella, Judy, Karla, and Doug. So where do we go from here? It should be clear from the experiences of the prospective teachers detailed in this chapter that the cognitive load resulting from the contradictory uses of ePortfolio reflection assignments as well as the way in which those assignments are structured and framed tends to derail their critical reflection. The result is that they treat completion of the ePortfolio as a self-­contained assignment, unconnected to the ultimate goals of social justice and educational equity envisioned by the founders of the ePortfolio program, and limit their reflection to, in van Manen’s (1977) terms, technical or practical concerns. This is a pervasive problem in teacher education and is only exacerbated as the assessment aspect of ePortfolios moves outside institutional control with programs such as edTPA, in which the evaluators of the ePortfolios are no longer even associated with the teacher education program. The results shown in this chapter echo Donovan and Cannon’s (2018) argument that teacher education programs need to pay special attention to their social justice missions and develop new critical pedagogies in the context of external demands such as the edTPA.  There are other critiques of the edTPA, notably Gitomer, Martínez, Battey, and Hyland (2019), who assess the design and validity of the instrument itself and find its use inadvisable on more purely technical grounds. However, Wahl (2017) argues that understanding the opposing sides of debates over high stakes assessments, such as the edTPA, especially their grounding in different philosophical approaches to teacher preparation, can also help us evaluate learning and growth on the part of prospective teachers. I believe strongly that these two takes on high stakes assessments, be it in the context of homegrown ePortfolios, or external assessment portfolios such as the edTPA, indicate that a regime of assessment makes it harder to encourage critical reflection among prospective teachers, but it does not make it impossible. The next chapters detail some of the ways in which prospective teachers seriously struggle with becoming critically reflective, in spite of the contradictions in the use of ePortfolios, and then lay out some ways in which teacher educators can improve both ePorfolios and teacher education programs as a whole.

References DeVoto, C., & Thomas, M. K. (2020). Cultural sense-making and the implementation of edTPA technological tools: Lessons for the field. Educational Technology Research and Development. Donovan, M. K., & Cannon, S. O. (2018). The university supervisor, edTPA, and the new making of the teacher. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 26(28), 1–24. Gitomer, D. H., Martínez, J. F., Battey, D., & Hyland, N. A. (2019). Assessing the assessment: Evidence of reliability and validity in the edTPA. American Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831219890608.

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Myers, K. D., Bridges-Rhoads, S., & Cannon, S. O. (2017). Reflection in constellation: Post theories, subjectivity, and teacher preparation. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 38(4), 322–337. Reynolds, C., & Patton, J. (2014). Leveraging the ePortfolio for integrative learning: A faculty guide to classroom practices for transforming student learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Ross, J. (2014). Performing the reflective self: Audience awareness in high-stakes reflection. Studies in Higher Education, 39(2), 219–232. Selwyn, N., & Facer, K. (Eds.). (2013). The politics of education and technology: Conflicts, controversies, and connections. New York, NY: Springer. Shulman, L. (1998). Teacher portfolios: A theoretical activity. In N.  Lyons (Ed.), With portfolio in hand: Validating the new teacher professionalism (pp.  23–37). New  York: Teachers College Press. Strudler, N., & Wetzel, K. (2012). Electronic portfolios in teacher education: Forging a middle ground. Electronic Portfolios in Teacher Education., 44(2), 161–173. Thomas, G. (2012). Changing our landscape of inquiry for new science of education. Harvard Educational Review, 82(1), 26–51. van Manen, M. (1977). Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical. Curriculum Inquiry 6(3), 205–228. Wahl, R. (2017). What can be known and how people grow: The philosophical stakes of the assessment debate. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 36(5), 499–515.

Chapter 5

I Want to be Seen as the Best I Can: How the Teacher Education Program Conditions Prospective Teachers’ Reflection Strategies

Time flies and the deadline for final submission of the ePortfolio is approaching. This is the last semester of the participants’ teacher education program for the four participants—student teaching. Ella has been sitting in front of her computer for a few hours working on her ePortfolio artifacts, sorting and labeling. Before this, she met with her university supervisor and obtained information about what her evaluators expect to see in her ePortfolio. At hand, she has piles of documents she collected from her student teaching: pictures she took in the classroom, lesson plans, reflection journals, and some students’ work. Ella’s job now, she thinks, is to select artifacts to demonstrate her best teaching practices in order to meet the State standards for licensure. Later, during an interview, Ella reflected on this process and her rationale behind it: I list all the standards and thought, how do I meet them? That wasn’t working for me because at the beginning of the semester, I was, like, getting the job done. Now I understand what they are expecting from me, so I sat and talked to my supervisor for a while and then I started to list all the things I was excited about that I had done in my teaching and then I linked the standards to them. That’s how they told you to do it. So there’re things that I have done I was very proud of that, I thought it was quality education. (Ella Interview #4)

Instead of using the state teaching standards as a starting point for  her lesson planning, instruction, assessment, and reflection, Ella did the reverse, going through the materials she had collected and selecting evidence to justify her belief that she had met the standards. Thomas and Liu (2012) call this process cherry-picking— that is, selecting a small number of artifacts from a much larger pool of materials in order to create a positive and successful representation of one’s teaching. Researchers have long observed this manifestation of  the performative nature of prospective teachers’ reflective writing (Liu, 2011; Newcomb & Edwards, 2018; Ross, 2011, 2014). For prospective teachers, the classroom and the ePortfolio reflection constitute two separate sets of scriptable scenarios (Goffman, 1959) that encourage different © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. Liu, Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01955-0_5

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performance roles. Moreover, the resulting performance difference is not accidental, but represents strategies to achieve different goals. Research clearly shows that prospective teachers engage in a limited range of strategies in representing their class performance in written reflections (Peck, Gallucci, & Sloan, 2010; Ross, 2014). Nevertheless, by triangulating written reflection with classroom observation, we can use those strategies to help prospective teachers reach beyond scripted performance to authentic transformative learning.

5.1  Cherry-Picking To return to the vignette at the beginning of this chapter, Ella’s cherry-picking strategy is extremely common among prospective teachers. For example, like Ella, Judy admitted that she seldom thought about the standards or the ePortfolio reflection during her daily planning and teaching. Rather, as the submission deadline approaching, she picked artifacts to demonstrate mastery of the standards after teaching the lessons, viewing this process as simply fulfilling requirements: It sounds horrible, but I did rush through this part. This to me was more of a requirement. How can I make the easiest to me? What do I already have on the ePortfolio so as to fulfill the standards? So what I did was looking back and used the stuff I already have to address the standards. (July Interview #4)

In practice, Judy used the picture of Melanie, the guest who taught on Kwanzaa celebration as an example of meeting the goal of teaching for equity. Along with the picture, she wrote in her ePortfolio reflection that Melanie’s lesson and celebration of Kwanzaa was marvelous. She mailed individual Kwanzaa Celebration Invitations to the students, she read the book “The Seven Days of Kwanzaa” by Ella Grier, we made Kwanzaa mats and cups, we learned about the 7 principles, and applied the principles to our own lives.

What is the rationale behind their strategy of cherry-picking? As discussed in Chap. 4, prospective teachers reported that they saw the ePortfolio as a high-­stakes institutional demand and an accountability system that determined the entrance to their future career. Although they were given mixed information about who would be the audience of their ePortfolio reflection, they were very aware that their ePortfolios would be read and assessed by “professional people who hold your career at their hands” (Ella Interview #1). Therefore, they had to first think about how to meet the expectations of those “professional people” instead of “really putting who we are down in the ePortfolio” (Ella Interview #1). Although some teacher educators and ePortfolio designers hold to the belief that the ePortfolio is meant to support prospective teachers’ ongoing reflection in order to improve their teaching and learning, this institutional goal is in conflict with the goal of prospective teachers: meeting the institutional demands and obtaining the teaching license successfully. The following stories unpack prospective teachers’ perceptions of their ePortfolio reflection audience and their strategies of performing to their audience. These stories further reveal the disjuncture between prospective teachers’ ePortfolio

5.2  I Know Who My Audience Is

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performance and their teaching practice: As Doug ironically commented, “they are two different things.”

5.2  I Know Who My Audience Is Ross (2014) observes that high-stakes assessment makes students extremely “audience-­aware” in their reflections (p. 219). This is certainly true of all four participants, although each of them interpreted the “audience” in their own way based on the mixed information they received from different people while going through the program. For example, Ella admitted that she received mixed information about who would read her ePortfolio reflection. It is something we all kind of struggle with because as we heard many times, principals look at it, they use it for hiring, and they see what is in your ePortfolio, but then we hear from former students and we hear even from principals that [they] don’t really use the ePortfolio. So I feel like we are kind of given two different stories on the portfolio. (Ella Interview #1)

The uncertainty over the identity of the audience had a similar impact on Judy’s perception of the ePortfolio reflection as well. Judy thought the ePortfolio reflection might be useful for her future job interview. Specifically, she planned to show her ePortfolio to principals even though she was told by the ePortfolio director that she should not construct her reflection with a specific audience in mind. In addition to imagining their audience as professionals outside of the teacher education program (such as potential employers), both Karla and Doug were aware of the audience of their teacher educators in the program who designed the ePortfolio assignments and required prospective teachers to prove, with evidence, that they had completed those assignments. Doug commented critically, They said we needed artifacts to prove that we did everything we said we did. I think it could be helpful for somebody else trying to understand and see what I’m talking about here. If I talked about all the things I did, these activities and lessons that I went through and I have pictures of students’ work on it, sure that helps. Is it helping me reflect? No. (Doug Interview #4)

In other words, like Ella and Judy, Doug saw a fundamental disconnect between two of the goals of the ePortfolio—but his conception of those goals differed. Along these lines, Karla saw the ePortfolio as an information container to upload her work to provide that she had done all the work required by the teacher education program, and done it well: “Based on my understanding, the goal of the ePortfolio is to provide us with a way to articulate and prove the work we have done throughout the school of education” (Karla Interview #4). It is obvious that prospective teachers had mixed information about who might read their ePortfolio. The lack of consistent information and resulting confusion about the ePortfolio audience is not unusual, given other contradictory information in the program such as different concepts of reflective teaching and multiple and often contradictory purposes of ePortfolio reflection. This lack of consistency has

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long been a challenge in teacher education programs, not just the one under study (Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999). Ross (2014) suggests categorizing the audience imagined by prospective as assessment criteria, instructor preferences, and a general “other” (p. 219). In the case of the four participants in this study, it is clear that they attended to all three types of audience in their ePortfolio reflections. In addition, due to the messages they were given, they kept in mind another audience, future employers. Yet no matter who the audience was, they exerted magical control over what the prospective teachers decide to include in their ePortfolio. All four prospective teachers put great efforts into their ePortfolio reflections, integrating pictures and videos of their teaching as well as samples of their students’ work. These carefully constructed ePortfolio reflections provide vivid pictures of what they did in their teaching—or, at least, what they wanted to show about their teaching. For example, Fig. 5.1 shows how Ella presented student work on number estimation and writing ability in her ePortfolio. Given the magnetic pull of the audience, but at the same time, the confusion over who that audience might be, how did prospective teachers decide what to be included in their ePortfolios and what to leave out? The following stories will reveal their strategy of performing to their audience.

Fig. 5.1  Ella’s presentation of student work in her ePortfolio

5.3  I Want to be seen as the Best I Can for My Job

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5.3  I Want to be seen as the Best I Can for My Job Ella had completed her student teaching ePortfolio, due by the end of her student teaching semester. Feeling more relaxed, scrolling through her ePortfolio, Ella admitted that writing a reflection was based on her understanding of what the supervisors, or whoever would read her ePortfolio—“the professional people”—expected from her reflections. Therefore, she thoughtfully selected and polished the language in her reflection for her audience, carefully choosing what to talk about and what to avoid. I think the writing process has become so … in our generation that it’s so easy to just produce. And I don’t think it’s raw, I think it’s refined because we’ve been taught how to be very refined writers. (Ella Interview #4)

Ella’s ePortfolio reflection, “thought through before it’s put down on paper” (Ella Interview #4), was not “raw” but “refined.” The central focus of this thinking and refining process is performing for an audience, not for the purpose of analyzing or critiquing her assumptions or finding alternative solutions to improve future teaching as advocated by scholars such as Zeichner and Liston (1996) and van Manen (1977). I mean I realize who’s reading my reflective journal in my ePortfolio when I turn it in, and yah, I’m going to be honest, but I may not be brutally honest. I’m not going to say how I am really feeling…. I want to be seen as the best I can for my job. (Ella Interview #4)

Ella thus recognized, as Ross (2014) observed, that writing for any audience can result in a perceived loss of honesty or openness. Similarly, the other participants developed their own strategies to perform to their perceived audience. For example, Karla uploaded video of her teaching onto her ePortfolio for her fourth-semester practicum. One reason for she did so was the belief that she had to create the video for an assignment in her seminar, a rationale reflecting her perception of teacher educators as the primary ePortfolio reflection audience. Another, more important, reason for including the video is that she thought the video was “more visually pleasing [than a textual narrative] if you were to show it to someone” (Observation of Karla Working on her ePortfolio). Like her peers, Karla used the word “someone” to refer to the unseen, mysterious audience. She was not sure who else might see her ePortfolio, but she imagined there might be another reader in the future, one for whom she wanted a “visually pleasing” ePortfolio. On the other hand, Doug treated the ePortfolio much more simply than Karla: “For me, the ePortfolio is just typing it out. It seems like a busy work because the thoughts are already done in my head” (Doug Interview #4). Similar to Ella, Doug admitted that he understood he was writing his ePortfolio reflection for his teacher educators to see and therefore he tailored his writing accordingly. All the reflections that the teachers want me to turn in, like a page-long paper, are written in a style that I usually don’t speak or think, but I can easily do it. I just have different communication patterns and I know how to meet the academic communication style that they expect in a written piece of paper. I don’t think it is the way I actually think about issues or discuss them with the other people. (Doug Interview #4)

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Finally, Judy felt a strong sense of contradiction in completing her ePortfolio reflection. On the one hand, as an ePortfolio liaison trained by the ePortfolio Director, she had been told that the purpose of ePortfolio reflection was to support her own learning and that it was not right to use it to perform for other people; on the other hand, as she received different idea about the audience for her ePortfolio from other teacher educators, like her peers, she wanted to meet the teacher educators’ requirements and please that audience. We are thinking, what should have happened or what does the teacher want to hear? I try not to do this but it is almost just like intuitive. You want to get it right and you want to be a good teacher. So you are going to write like this. (Judy Interview #1)

These stories from the prospective teachers revealed one of their strategies: carefully crafting their ePortfolio reflection to meet the expectations of their audience. Although they had mixed perceptions of who their audience might be, they all felt the impulse to select, refine, and tailor their work through a cherry-picking process to please their audience, rather than revealing their own feelings or unpacking what they actually thought or did in the classroom. As Doug’s student teaching cooperating teacher commented, the high-stakes assessment discouraged them from talking about mistakes they might have made while learning to teach: “there is a pressure to not make mistakes, there is a pressure to not admit that you made the mistakes” (Interview, Doug’s Student Teaching Cooperating Teacher). This lack of authenticity to prospective teachers’ reflection should encourage teacher educators to seriously consider the efficacy of ePortfolio reflection as a pedagogical tool for learning to teach in the context of high-stakes prospective teacher assessment.

5.4  I Present It in the Way to Meet Expectations of the Teacher Having shared her thinking process of refining and tailoring the language of her ePortfolio reflection to her audience, Ella explained her strategies of selecting artifacts for her ePortfolio this way. I think we are presented as “you’ll need a video clip to put onto your portfolio….” So the wrong emphasis is being put on the ePortfolio in terms of like, so many people come to rent video cameras to videotape themselves teaching because they have to pick a clip and put it onto the portfolio. Not because they want to watch themselves teach and truly reflect on how they do. I have 40 minutes of video tape of myself teaching. I’ve never watched it. (Ella Interview #4)

Even though Ella put significant effort into her ePortfolio, analyzing the pictures she took during the third semester and putting in a video clip of her teaching in the fourth semester, she still described the whole process as “busy work … doing it for the portfolio rather than teaching people what you are doing it for” (Ella Interview #4).

5.4  I Present It in the Way to Meet Expectations of the Teacher

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Like Ella, Doug did not see the value of writing reflections in his ePortfolio beyond meeting the requirements of his teacher educators: They ask me to write a reflection, that’s what I am going to do: go home, reflect and make sure I can present it in the way that meets the expectations of the teacher; so, well crafted paragraphs, well written sentences, well articulated ideas, etc. (Doug Interview #4)

Different from Ella, Karla, and Judy in terms of the amount of work for the ePortfolio, Doug’s strategy was put in the minimal work to meet the requirements and just get it done: I plan on getting it done so that they can give me my certification as a teacher and I don’t really want anything else. I’ve taken pictures and scanned and resized them and put them online just prove that I did it. That’s all it seems like to me. It’s me posting a bunch of different papers and assignments and everything online and writing those little documents about them just prove I know what I’m doing. (Doug Interview #4)

This comment clearly shows Doug’s general strategy toward the ePortfolio: put in the minimum work to meet the requirements. For example, when he was required to set up goals in the third semester, he uploaded his goals; when he was required to put a video or audio clip during the fourth semester, the audio clip was the only piece he uploaded because “they didn’t require as much on the ePortfolio, so I did what I had to do” (Doug Interview #4). Following the letter of the requirements, Doug “completed” his ePortfolio assignments each semester with minimal effort. This explains why he thought what shown in the ePortfolio and what he actually thought and did were “two different things” (Doug Interview #4). Finally, it is worth pointing out that the participants were not unaware of the performative nature of their ePortfolio reflection. For example, Judy, with a sense of guilt, commented that it might be helpful for her to write a reflective journal for her own purposes without having to share it with an instructor. So maybe it will be better to have reflection just for yourself, not something to turn in. We would do reflection journals and I will write about anything, any thought in my mind, especially about teaching and the children, situations that I wasn’t sure about. (Judy Interview #4)

Karla expressed the same feeling about writing a personal journal: “what I like about it is it’s personal. It’s not like you’re trying to impress anybody. It’s more just an honest reflection of how you did and what happened” (Karla Interview #3). These statements suggest that when prospective teacher have a safe space in which to reflect, they are better able to articulate their concerns and questions, and share feelings that can be honest, or even “brutally honest,” in a way that does not happen in an evaluative context. The need for a safe environment calls for teacher educators to consider how to build trust relationships with prospective teachers (Liu, 2017) so that they feel comfortable sharing their real-life experiences in teaching, rather than yielding to the impulse to hide their feelings or “downtone” problems (Thomas & Liu, 2012).

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5.5  D  isjuncture Between Performance and Program Expectations What are the consequences of prospective teachers’ performing to their audience? As shown earlier, it is obvious that Ella and Judy deliberately cherry-picked positive and successful scenarios, refining their writing to describe their teaching and learning in their ePortfolio reflection. Karla and Doug on the other hand, adopted two somewhat different approaches to perform to their audience: Karla uploaded the work she had done to her ePortfolio as much as she could but Doug uploaded the amount of his work to meet the minimal requirement he interpreted. These different strategies the four participants adopted help explain, to a large extent, the content and quality of their ePortfolio reflection discussed in Chap. 2, demonstrating a disjuncture between what their teacher education program expected them to learn from reflection and what they actually did with their reflection. The teacher education program is committed to preparing critically reflective teachers who can foster high academic achievement in all students, especially students of color, students from minoritized racial, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as students with disabilities. The ePortfolio reflection was designed and implemented as a tool to help prospective teachers achieve this goal. Nevertheless, as the stories here demonstrate, prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflection was performative but not transformative. Most of the time, prospective teachers cherry-picked successful examples described with positive and technical language to demonstrate competence meeting the prescriptive requirements demanded by their teacher education program; Seldom did they mention challenges or struggles in teaching and supporting underserved students for educational equity. This disjuncture between prospective teachers’ performance and their teacher education program’s expectation is not at all surprising. Prospective teachers do not deliberately invert standard and curriculum, reflection and action, because they are not committed to achieving mastery in teaching or, for that matter, to the larger social goals underlying practices like “teaching for social justice and equity.” Rather, they are responding to conflicts between the ostensible purpose of the ePortfolio reflection and its function as assessment in the teacher education program with logical choices and rational solutions. In a high-stakes and evaluative context, prospective teachers’ performative strategy seems unavoidable. Dewey (1929) observed almost a century ago that “prospective teachers come to training schools, whether in normal schools or colleges … want very largely to find out how to do things with the maximum prospect of success” (p. 15). The question then becomes what teacher educators can learn about fostering prospective teachers’ critical reflection and transformative learning in implementing ePortfolio reflection. As suggested above, prospective teachers follow performance strategies in writing their ePortfolio reflections. Therefore, keeping these strategies in mind should enable teacher educators to work with ePortfolio reflection performances with special attention to issues underneath the presentation, identifying motivating concerns and opening opportunities for authentic reflection.

5.6  Epilogue: The Performance of Reflection

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5.6  Epilogue: The Performance of Reflection If my professor or my supervisor is very interested in, very involved in equity, you know, gender equity, then I’m going to make sure that my paper, or in my reflections I talk about how important that it is to me as well, whether that is really is or not. So one of the things will be very interesting or probably very difficult to do is the daily communication of the cooperating teacher and the student teacher. What do they really talk about? What do they really think about? Versus the formal reflections which can be very different. (Interview, Doug’s Student Teaching Cooperating Teacher)

This performative nature of prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflection commented by this cooperating teacher needs to be addressed by teacher educators. For the ePortfolio designers and some of the teacher educators in the program, ePortfolio reflection is meant to be a learning tool to support prospective teachers’ professional development through ongoing reflection and performance-based assessment. Although prospective teachers were well informed of this institutional goal, they received conflicting information from multiple directions about the purpose and benefits of the ePortfolio. Both Ella and Judy wanted to show their best work in their ePortfolios because they believed professionals would read them, while Karla and Doug saw their ePortfolio as accountability tools for their teacher educators. Although they did not have a common understanding of who would view their ePortfolio, one thing is clear: they all kept in mind the word “audience.” This audience, however vaguely imagined, then played an important role, an “unseen hand,” in the strategies prospective teachers took to their ePortfolios. Some researchers have questioned the value of data about prospective teacher reflection when taken from written reflections only, with no effort at triangulation (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015; Thomas & Liu, 2012). Certainly, research in this book shows the need for data triangulation to understand the connections between prospective teachers’ written reflection and their real thoughts, feelings, and classroom actions. Some students are quite articulate in their written reflections and provide a great amount of information in their ePortfolios, carefully selecting, refining, and polishing bits of evidence in order to perform to their unseen audience. However, as we saw in Chap. 2, their actions in real classroom situations do not rise to the transformative, suggesting that what they included in their ePortfolio was not “brutally honest” about what really happened in their teaching. Moreover, as we saw with Doug, others do the minimal work in order to pass, resulting in an ePortfolio containing none of the efforts they made to transform their students’ learning. These two strategies represent the ends of a spectrum: overrepresenting competence on one end and under-representing it on the other. In either case, however, it should be clear that teacher educators cannot and should not assess prospective teachers’ readiness for licensure solely based on their ePortfolio reflection. Rather, the findings in this study call for data triangulation using sources such as classroom observation, nonevaluative conversations to elicit real reflection, and substantive conversation with cooperating teachers. The stories in this chapter make clear that the fundamental disjuncture between portfolio-for-reflection and portfolio-for-assessment must be addressed if

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ePortfolios are to achieve their potential. Several scholars have explored the tensions between reflection for learning and reflection for assessment, arguing that the two cannot be achieved simultaneously. For example, Crème (2005) believes that reflection for assessment kills the very qualities that reflection is intended to foster (p. 291). She argues that reflective writing is valuable only to the extent that it frees the writer to experiment with self-construction and that the reflective writing of these experiments needs to be read by an interested, empathetic, and nonjudgmental reader (p. 294). She suggests that reflective writing might be useful through formative and nonevaluative feedback, but not through summative assessment. Similarly, Boud and Walker (1998) argue that “students expect to write for assessment of what they know, not reveal what they don’t know” (p. 194). Furthermore, the regime of assessment encourages prospective teachers to focus on technical and practical reflection, avoiding (or even forgetting about) the ultimate goal of critical reflection and educational equity. Thoughts about efforts to convey content and manage the classroom, already foremost in prospective teachers’ minds as a result of their inexperience in teaching, overwhelm any turn to equity issues when it seems clear that this is what they will be assessed upon for both program requirements and licensure. This disparity can be observed in Judy’s experiences discussed in Chap. 2: She taught a whole unit on equity based on her educational equity goal. However, barely 1 month later, she was not able to recall this goal at all. Bearing in mind the theory-driven nature of ePortfolio design (Shulman, 1998) broadens the instructional functions available to teacher educators from standard-­ based assessment to the generation of assignments that can capture teaching and reflection in a more authentic way. When designing an ePortfolio, then, designers and teacher educators should rethink their theories about teaching and learning and consider how those theoretical orientations could be embedded into the ePortfolio system. For example, the conceptual perspectives of teacher educators on reflective teaching should be reinforced through ePortfolio design, assisting teacher educators in providing consistent information on reflective teaching to prospective teachers throughout their teacher preparation, and clarifying what kinds of reflections are expected from prospective teachers and each stage in their development. Shulman (1998) frequently emphasizes the importance of collaboration, critique, and supervision in enhancing portfolio-based reflection, arguing that “those portfolios only begin to scratch the surface of their potential if the only reflection done is by the student in his or her own portfolio” (p.  32). Halverson (2003) has rightly argued that a professional community is a special form of social capital that results, in part, from the design and implementation of facilitating structural networks and generated by networks of trust and obligation developed around shared instructional practices. A professional community is thus a system of practice, a “complex network of structures, tasks and traditions that create and facilitate practice in organizations” (Halverson, 2003, p.  2). In the context of ePortfolio systems in teacher education programs, the concept of professional communities can inform teacher educators and technical designers to design, facilitate, and model collaborative reflection both in the face-to-face world and the online environment (Liu, 2012) to help reinforce the reflective purpose of ePortfolios. If a teacher education program

References

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makes the move toward collaborative reflection in a professional community, teacher educators need to take serious consideration of questions such as how to nurture a collaborative and nonevaluative culture in the community, what roles prospective teacher play in such a community, and what critical pedagogies teacher educators should implement to support collaborative and critical reflection within the community. In short, prospective teachers behave rationally when they (mis)represent their classroom actions and attitudes, responding to very basic contradictions between the scripts for their current program, their internal development needs, and an imagined job market in the near future. Teacher educators can use these contradictions as a key to opening prospective teachers to authentic reflection, but only by increasing engagement with and assessment of their charges in other ways. In the long run, it might be more efficient to develop ePortfolio systems that can support—and separate—self-directed reflection from externally mandated assessment. However, these changes must be grounded in data obtained from observation in the classroom and reinforced through careful supervision. In the next chapter, I examine the pitfalls of classroom transformation resulting from supervision that is not linked closely to an understanding of the processes and goals of critical reflection for transformative learning.

References Boud, D., & Walker, D. (1998). Promoting reflection in professional courses: The challenge of context. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 191–206. Cochran-Smith, M., Villegas, A. M., Abrams, L., Chavez-Moreno, L., Mills, T., & Stern, R. (2015). Critiquing teacher preparation research: An overview of the field, part II. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(2), 109–121. Crème, P. (2005). Should student learning journals be assessed? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 30(3), 287–296. Dewey, J. (1929). The sources of a science of education. New York: Horace Liveright. Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/details/sourcesofascienc009452mbp. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books. Grossman, P. L., Smagorinsky, P., & Valencia, S. (1999). Appropriating tools for teaching English: A theoretical framework for research on learning to teach. American Journal of Education, 108, 1–29. Halverson, R. (2003). Systems of practice: How leaders use artifacts to create professional community in schools. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 11(37), 1–34. Liu, K. (2011). Enhancing prospective teachers’ critical reflection in the ePortfolio environment. University of Wisconsin-Madison: Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Liu, K. (2012). A design framework for online teacher professional development community. Asia Pacific Education Review, 13(4), 701–711. Liu, K. (2017). Creating a dialogic space for prospective teacher critical reflection and transformative learning. Reflective Practice, 18(6), 805–820. Newcomb, M. J., & Edwards, N. (2018). Pretending to be authentic: Challenges for students when reflective writing about their childhood for assessment. Reflective Practice, 19(3), 333–344.

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Peck, C.  A., Gallucci, C., & Sloan, T. (2010). Negotiating implementation of high-stakes performance assessment policies in teacher education: From compliance to inquiry. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(5), 451–463. Ross, J. (2011). Traces of self: Online reflective practices and performances in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 16(1), 113–126. Ross, J. (2014). Performing the reflective self: Audience awareness in high-stakes reflection. Studies in Higher Education, 39(2), 219–232. Shulman, L. (1998). Teacher portfolios: A theoretical activity. In N.  Lyons (Ed.), With portfolio in hand: Validating the new teacher professionalism (pp.  23–37). New  York: Teachers College Press. Thomas, M. K., & Liu, K. (2012). The performance of reflection: A grounded analysis of prospective teachers’ ePortfolios. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 20(3), 305–330. van Manen, M. (1977). Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical. Curriculum Inquiry, 6(3), 205–228. Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. (1996). Reflective teaching: An introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Chapter 6

Awesome, Awesome: Missed Opportunities for Transformative Learning

In previous chapters, I provided a hermeneutic analysis of what Ella, Judy, Doug, and Karla reflected about in their ePortfolios. This analysis shows critical reflection struggling to emerge in written reflections that primarily featured positive descriptions of the technical aspects of their daily teaching without critiquing their prior assumptions about teaching and learning, especially assumptions related to diversity and equity. Guided by teacher socialization theory, I further explored factors shaping the way they reflected with the belief that their choice of what to include and what to avoid in their ePortfolio reflection was largely determined by context. Therefore, I delved into the participants’ perceptions of reflective teaching and critical reflection, their attitudes toward ePortfolio reflection requirements, and the strategies they adopted for completing their reflection requirements. This analysis revealed the participants maintained relatively limited understanding of the concepts of reflection and critical reflection and largely constructed written reflections as performances within the context of their teacher education program. Prospective teachers also imagined an unseen audience comprising potential employers as well as faculty, supervisors, and cooperating teachers, professionals holding their future career in their hand. Thus the factors influencing prospective teachers’ efforts at critical reflection—particularly the regime of assessment permeating the teacher education program—also influenced their relationships in the classroom with supervisors and cooperating teachers. In this chapter, I continue following the stories of Ella, Judy, Doug, and Karla, turning now to their interactions with their supervisors and cooperating teachers, to what opportunities to stimulate critical reflection and transformative learning they embraced—or missed.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. Liu, Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01955-0_6

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6.1  Awesome, Awesome, You Guys Did a Great Job I begin by returning to the story Ella’s fourth-semester practicum in which she and her peer prospective teacher in another classroom facilitated a scenario-based performance by first graders and fifth graders on bullying. This lesson was codesigned by Ella and her colleague to address a real issue in the school, but also to fit with multiple state teaching standards, including “the teacher understands how children with broad ranges of ability and provides instruction that supports their intellectual, social, and personal development,” and “the teacher uses an understanding of individual and group motivation and behavior to create a learning environment that encourages positive social interaction, active engagement in learning and self-motivation.” As described in Chap. 2, there was a post-teaching conference after the lesson between Ella and her peer prospective teacher and their supervisor; I was there as a silent observer. Ella and her peer talked briefly about how they felt about the lesson and their supervisor checked a list of things that went well related to classroom management and the transition between two groups of performers, both of which were part of the routines in their post-teaching conference. In addition, the supervisor tried to guide Ella to think about the link between this specific class to her overall goal of the semester by asking her whether or not the lesson fit into her goal—building a classroom community and connecting the class with the larger school and community. Ella responded with “Oh, absolutely!” then continued, We think it went really well! All the students participated in the performance and they were all active. We’re surprised that even Johnny, who should not be included, worked well! He could have messed things up! (Ella and Peer Comment at Post Teaching Conference).

As discussed earlier in this book, Johnny was an African American fifth grader and indeed he worked well in this specific lesson. In Chap. 2, I drew attention to the fact that Ella and her peer were so sure Johnny was not supposed to be included in the activity that they didn’t even notice he was meant to be excluded from a lesson specifically designed with special focus on positive social interaction and community building. When they realized that they did not exclude Johnny, they used his (unexpectedly) good performance to praise their own success, rather seeing it as a critical incident (Brookfield, 1995) or what Dewey would call a “puzzle” (Dewey, 1933) leading them to question their normal practice of exclusion. This was an opportunity for Ella’s supervisor to prompt deeper reflection on the social–political nature of schooling, particularly with reference to exclusionary practices that so often emphasize controlling and punishing the behaviors of children of color. How did Ella’s supervisor respond? Awesome, awesome, I think you guys both reflected on what ought to go with this lesson. I think it was a solid lesson, a lot of kids, it was noisy, but when you stop and look past the noise, every kid was engaged. I think it came because you guys set it up very well, you got this very clear explanation of what we need to do, the goal for that session was to explore above the line of behavior, how it plays out in the decision making in the school, and so kids got that. You guys did great about that. I think the explanation was great, l love both of your

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energy… Both of you were animated, kids can vibe off of that, and you are fun, you just feel good up there, good job once you guys got them into the transition. (Ella’s Fourth Semester Supervisor, Post Teaching Debriefing)

The supervisor indeed asked a great question to prompt Ella to articulate the rationale behind this lesson in relation to her overall goal of the semester; however, it was equally inappropriate to ignore what Ella and her peer had to say about Johnny. The positive comments above might have built up prospective teachers’ self-­ confidence, but what about prompting them to question their assumptions, the first step of critical reflection? Prompting questions could include: Who is Johnny? What information or evidence led you to think that he should not be included? What do you think of Johnny now, since he did do a great job in this activity, and what does that tell you about exclusion as a teaching strategy? Given the situation of this post-­ teaching conference in the context of dealing with bullying and community building, Ella and her peer’s comments could have been a great instructional opportunity to unpack the sophisticated yet popular topic of community building—What does it mean by a community? Who is included in a community? What equal opportunities do members have in a community? What assumptions are unacceptable in a community? These questions, positioned in the real classroom activity linking to a specific case, would be extremely constructive to enhance prospective teachers’ understanding of the abstract concept of “community,” just as other abstract ones such as “social justice” and “equity” that are frequently mentioned in teacher education without being linked to actual classroom practice. However, for Ella and her peer prospective teacher, this story is one of a missed opportunity. Ella and her peer left feeling proud of their well-designed lessons and smoothly run activities but without fundamentally transforming Johnny’s place in the classroom or his treatment in future activities. Instead, they constructed a performative lesson to demonstrate that they met their own goal of community building and, judging by their supervisor’s positive comments (“Awesome, awesome!”), confirmed their success in meeting their goal. This type of missed opportunity can also appear in practicum or student teaching seminars designed to create a space to bridge prospective teachers’ “know that” with the “know how” needed in a real classroom environment. As Sarah, a seminar instructor in the program, commented, many prospective teachers do not understand what reflection is because they are not able to critique each other’s work or their own. Teacher educators thus have the responsibility to facilitate critical discussions during seminars and meetings to enable them to analyze and question their own work for the purpose of transformed actions in their teaching. The following observation is an example of how opportunities slip away in this context. Ella and other eight peer prospective teachers were sharing excitedly about their field experiences. Once a week, they had to come back to campus for the seminar where they could meet their peers, share their emotions, and sometimes present work required by the supervisor running the seminar. That day they were required to give a virtual tour of the schools in which they were placed and formulate some questions emerging from observations they had made there in the first weeks of

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placement. During the presentation, Ella brought up her puzzle—the gender ratio of the teachers in her school was more balanced than she usually saw. Responding to her puzzle, a male prospective teacher in the group said that he was the only male teacher in the building where he was placed. They both wondered what the reason was, but the supervisor simply moved on, missing the opportunity to situate elementary teacher gender ratios in the social and historical context of education. According to Lortie’s (1975) groundbreaking work on the sociology of education, American society has treated teaching, especially early childhood and elementary education, as if it were nursing. Women were first liberated from doing housework and brought into the teaching profession during the early nineteenth century, but the concept of teaching as nursing has influenced, and is still influencing the profession, especially at the elementary level. This distorted social assumption has had long-standing impact on issues such as gender equity among teachers and teacher professional trajectory and is part of the reason the proportion of male teachers increases from negligible in preschool to dominant in secondary and higher education. This gendered, nursing conception of teaching also supports the low pay and respect accorded teachers in the United States. It is important for young prospective teachers to understand their career in this social–political context and this knowledge is important for them to develop professional agency to advocate for changes. In an interview at the end of the semester, Ella brought up her frustration with the supervisor’s lack of response and wondered whether or not her responsibility was only limited to getting the assignment done rather than posing questions and seeking answers. The big theme of my virtual tour, the initial theme, was how the diversity of the school, how there are a lot of more male teachers in the school and if that will affect things. I feel like we never came back to answer the questions about our virtual tour. So we formulated these emerging questions, we never really went back to address them. (Ella Interview #2)

Another example of a missed opportunity is an audio clip that Doug included in his fourth-semester ePortfolio reflection in which he interviewed his second- and third-­ grade students about racism. This audio clip was his response to an assignment in his social studies methods course. In the interview, Doug asked his students what racism means and whether or not they believe there is racism in the society. Along with the audio clip, Doug reflected that This sound clip is a short segment of an interview I conducted with a student from my class regarding a controversial issue. This is one of nine students that I interviewed on this topic in order to get a feel for where these students knowledge foundations stood on this subject. It was interesting to hear different student's responses and understandings of racial issues in the U.S. and how it impacts their lives and perceptions of the world around them. These interviews helped me begin to plan lessons that would meet students at their levels of understanding on some of these issues in social studies.  (Doug Fourth Semester ePortfolio Reflection) 

It is apparent from this description and the audio clip that Doug treated this activity as an assignment without much effort to make it meaningful both for him and for his students because the questions he asked were not well designed for the age level of his students. When I asked Doug what he had learned from the interview activity,

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Doug thought that second and third graders were naive about a lot of things they face every day, including racism, and that only one student out of the nine he interviewed understood the word “racism.” When I asked what lessons he planned to implement, as he mentioned in his reflection, Doug admitted that he did not have any plan yet—“Teaching it or leaving it unaddressed, it is a dilemma” (Doug, Interview #3). Based on Doug’s teaching philosophy and his own educational experiences, it is apparent that he was very aware of racism and how it operates on a daily basis in schools. His dilemma might be due to the challenge of translating his lived experiences into pedagogical approaches to teach second- and third-grade students about racism in an age-appropriate way. However, Doug did not talk about the dilemma in his ePortfolio reflection. When I asked him if he discussed his interview activity in the methods course, Doug’s response was very similar to Ella’s experience: “I don’t remember…. I feel like those reflections are busy work. Every time you teach a lesson, you would have to write a one-page reflection to it. It’s more like a description of what happened” (Doug, Interview #3). Doug’s experience could have been an opportunity for him and his peers to learn about age-appropriate practices to teach about race and racism, which is certainly within the scope of a social studies methods course. Doug and Ella’s experiences in completing the assignments their teacher educators designed for their ePortfolios revealed many missed opportunities to reflect on critical aspects of teaching and learning. Their teacher educators put great effort into designing assignments to meet the program and state standards for preparing future teachers. However, the focus on designing assignments as an end goal prevented opportunities to build upon the assignments for collaborative and critical reflection on broader issues of education. As Delandshere and Arens (2003) rightly critique, portfolios and written tasks in teacher education tend to include “some sort of empirical data collection ventures to build on key words from the standards but missing the broader theoretical perspectives indispensable to make sense of these data” (p. 72). The negative impact of these missed opportunities was obvious: prospective teachers’ initial passion was discouraged, not to mention further conversation on these teachable moments, reinforcing their perception that their instructors did not truly care what they learned from the assignments.

6.2  I Don’t Really Have Anything for You to Focus on: Influences by Cooperating Teachers Cooperating teachers play another important role in prospective teachers’ learning to teach. They spend the most time with prospective teachers during their practicum and student teaching semesters and have many opportunities to observe prospective teachers’ lesson planning, instruction, assessment, and interaction with students outside of the classroom. How did the cooperating teachers help foster prospective teachers’ critical reflection and transformative learning? The following comment

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from Doug’s fourth semester cooperating teacher, Ann, demonstrated her self-­ reflection on a missed opportunity to prompt Doug to think about the larger picture of teaching and learning. Anne observed that when Doug reflected on his own teaching, he tended to think that things went well, or sometimes reflected on management issues such as timing. In retrospect, she thought she missed the opportunity to challenge him. Ann reflected that I don’t think that I asked enough pointed questions. I could have carved out the quiet time to be more challenging to him, why do you want to do this. The big picture questions I wish I spent more with him, not the day to day questions like, how do you teach multiplication facts, how do you do this and how do you do that? But why do you want to do this? It’s a lot of work, are you ready for it? I missed the opportunity to ask that kind of questions. (Anne Interview)

The following stories further demonstrate how other cooperating teachers also missed opportunities to help prospective teachers to achieve transformative learning. Karla was placed in a fifth-grade classroom for her student teaching. The cooperating teacher, Katy, had been taking prospective teachers every year in the past years, hosting seven prospective teachers prior to Karla. Katy believed in the importance of informal reflection after each lesson and thought she modeled it for her prospective teachers by asking questions such as what didn’t go so well or how you would do this differently. On this particular day, Karla had just finished teaching a writing workshop on how to write a story by starting with a simple word. She wrote “BLUE” on the board, telling her own real story of having a blue pen exploded in her bag. With the beginning sentence written down, Karla said, “I’m done.” The students looked confused; Karla then followed with what they had talked before about writing: when you think you’re done, you’ve just begun. She took this opportunity to prompt the students to think that if they were the teacher, what they could ask a student to do to expand the story. Karla refreshed the students’ prior knowledge of the “six traits of writing” strategy starting with where, when, why, how, what, and who. She then called a few students to use these starting words to expand the story. Some students were given the opportunity to try their expansion of the story, but many hands were up before the class ended, especially those from several students of color. It seemed that in Karla’s rush to complete her lesson some students were not given the opportunity to ask their questions. In general, I noticed that a few African American and Latinx students sitting at the same table were not called to ask or answer questions. What’s more, some of the Latinx students were pulled out of the classroom for ESL lessons. When I asked Karla in a later interview if she was going to show these students the writing strategies she did for the whole class, Karla’s response was simple—“No, I won’t.” After Karla’s teaching, the supervisor, the cooperating teacher, and Karla sat down to have the post-teaching triad conference, with me as a silent observer. As I described in more detail in Chap. 2, after a brief overview of the lesson by Karla, the supervisor, Juan, praised Karla’s overall strategy of including students’ voices. He also emphasized the need to make sure some of the voices were not silenced. Before Karla could respond to Juan’s comment, however, Karla’s cooperating teacher, Katy, immediately jumped in saying, “This is a 35-min class. For the answers in the

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class, the shorter the better because they are struggling with focus. But the students were excited. They were engaged” (Katy, Triad Meeting). Katy continued to make positive comments about Karla’s teaching in relation to classroom management: She’s really running most of the day when I’m gone. I don’t see any areas that I’m concerned about. They do really enjoy you. Her organization is great. I don’t really have anything for you to focus on. Really just make it your own week. Try it and have fun. (Katy, Karla’s Student Teaching Cooperating Teacher, Triad Meeting)

With these positive comments from Katy closing down further discussion, Juan shifted the conversation to standards. It is obvious that the cooperating teacher’s comments cut short the conversation on how to better include the voices of students’ color in such a lesson. Later in the semester, Juan told me he felt that the cooperating teacher never had in-depth conversations about Karla’s teaching. When I talk to her, she’s always just so general and positive. I am not sure how to describe this, but she never goes in depth in anything…. So she would say a few things like how wonderful Karla was. (Juan, Karla’s Student Teaching Supervisor Interview #2)

As for the specific lesson described above, it might be true about the challenge to include all the students’ voices in a limited time. However, explaining the behavior in terms of rushing through a planned lesson in the interest of time was a technical rationale, the immediate effect of which was to annihilate the opportunity Juan created to prompt Karla to reflect on including students of color in her lessons. If time becomes a barrier in one lesson, a follow-up question could be then how to make it up in other lessons later that day or the next day. It is understandable that prospective teachers need to be concerned about technical issues such as following lesson plans and time management, but that should not be an excuse to overlook issues such as failing to provide equitable learning opportunities for all students.

6.3  I Think We Are Just Similar: Forming Conformity to Defend the “Outsider” As introduced in Chap. 1, Judy was in the Professional Development School (PDS) program for her practicums and student teaching. Due to the unique structure of the PDS program, Judy was able to remain in the same school with the same cooperating teacher, Sue, for her fourth-semester practicum and her student teaching semester. Judy thought this structure was beneficial for her to build a trust relationship with the cooperating teacher because she wanted them to guide and mentor her but at the same time give her enough freedom and support to decide what to teach in the classroom. [My cooperating teacher] and I were mostly, it was mostly like team teaching for most of that. So that’s really cool because we just had a really good relationship and worked well together since I had practicum Four with her last spring. So definitely we’ve had that trust and friendship already established so. (Judy Interview #4)

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This relationship and mutual respect were confirmed by her cooperating teacher, Sue, who thought the trust they built before the student teaching semester enabled them to swing right into a smooth start in the student teaching semester. We can get started not having to worry about getting to know one another, that task is done, we know each other, we respect each other, we really like working together. We can just start and just boom, the kids will be our priority, not getting to know each other again. (Sue Interview #2)

Based on my multiple classroom observations and interviews, it was clear that, similar to Karla’s cooperating teacher, Sue also provided very positive comments to Judy’s teaching during informal conversations after Judy’s teaching or the post-­ teaching triad meetings. For example, during an interview at the end of the fourth semester, Sue expressed her excitement at having Judy back in the next semester: Judy is so conscientious and hardworking. I will have her back and I’m so happy! She is so much fun to work with. She is really great with computers and she has great organizational skills already. (Sue Interview #2)

During the interview, Sue also mentioned Judy’s concerns in the classroom, which Sue was confident she could support: Judy has worried about the management piece in the classroom—how do I solve the behavior problem or that social problem, whatever. With that, I feel that it’s an area that I can interfere very well. I always have the ability to do that. I think either you have that and just can jump in and solve any problem without getting rattled, or you don’t have that. You have to really work on that. I think it is a big piece that all prospective teachers need the most practice with and have them with confidence. But I guess Judy has been great! I just look forward to having her back. She is full of enthusiasm. (Sue Interview #2)

In post-teaching conferences in the triad, Sue also carried a positive tone into the conversation through direct praising or supporting Judy’s side in response to the supervisor’s questions. For example, Judy was observed by her supervisor, Maggie, during a science lesson where Judy implemented an activity for the students to observe snails in an aquarium. In the post-teaching triad conference after the lesson, Sue gave very positive comments on Judy’s teaching, focusing on the technical aspects of the lesson: I thought it was pretty smooth, you know, everybody has done picking up. You had everything just ready and the students raised their hands and the observation went pretty much smoothly. (Sue, Judy Post-Teaching Triad Meeting)

In addition to direct praising, Sue actually responded to some of the questions Maggie raised for Judy. For example, Maggie mentioned two moments in which Judy prevented the kids from doing what they wanted to do and tried to prompt Judy to rethink her teaching strategies: One kid was rocking the snail in his hand because he was thinking to take care of the snail. Another time was a kid using the magnifier and Judy you probably thought she was not using it to look at the snail. These are the only two times I saw you didn’t let them do what they wanted to do because you thought it was off track. Do you still think it’s of track? (Maggie, Judy Post-Teaching Triad Meeting)

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Before Judy responded, Sue intervened immediately: Sue: You were reading her because Judy: Yah, because I know her… Sue: You were taking the step that you need to take before it happens again. Now you handled it beautifully!

Judy then echoed what Sue said, and a joint defense formed: Judy: As for the girl, I was afraid she would get silly with the magnifier. Also, I was thinking the other kid who was rocking the snails. I was concerned, because I know how he can get things sometimes bigger. Sue: You just have a good sense of reading kids and you did in this case!

The conversation above shows that Sue defending Judy in front of Maggie. Both Judy and Sue had assumptions about the two students that they did not question; instead, Sue praised Judy’s actions based on those shared assumptions. This defense by the cooperating teacher and confirmation from Judy muted Maggie’s attempt to interrupt Judy’s way of teaching by controlling what the students did. The triad meeting concluded with hurrahs and applauses from three of them—the issue of control was not revisited. This type of outcome—celebrating—was what Sue thought about the purpose of triad meetings: [The triad meeting] usually goes very well. It feels very honest, very open, just like we are having tea together. I know that’s not always the case. I mean it’s not the time to be super critical of anyone, it’s just the time to talk about how things are going and to celebrate. (Sue Interview #2)

One thing that Sue brought up repeatedly was that she and Judy worked well because they were very similar and that Judy understood her perceptions. She was happy to see that Judy sometimes would do things just as she did without further thinking about the power hierarchy that could potentially motivate Judy to simply follow her teaching style. She just has a lot of the same mannerisms that I have and it’s not because she has copied me, it's just her. Sometimes she would say things or do something that I look, wow, that’s me, but she’s never seen me do it. How did she know? Well, I think we are just similar… So it’s been going really well, nice and smooth. (Sue Interview #3)

Although Sue believed Judy was not copying her, it is likely that Judy was copying her, having observed her for more than a semester and having learned what she would be happy to see. Research has shown a tendency for prospective teachers to follow their cooperating teachers’ pattern due to the power hierarchy between the two (Anderson, 2007; Borko & Mayfield, 1995; Feiman-Nemser, 1998; Gao, Liu, & McKinney, 2019; Post, 2007). As Anderson (2007) observes, prospective teachers have an acute awareness of cooperating teachers’ power due to their evaluation role, content expertise, and the rewards they can offer (e.g., reference letters) and consequentially, prospective teachers may change their behavior to comply with or even please their cooperating teachers. This helps explain why Sue was happy to see Judy had the same “mannerisms” as she did; nevertheless, Sue did not necessarily realize the reason behind it.

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Because of this similarity and conformity, critical conversations between Judy and her cooperating teacher were unlikely and the “educative mentoring” (Feiman-­ Nemser, 2001, p. 18) failed to happen. According to Feiman-Nemser (2001), educative mentoring emphasizes cultivating novice teachers’ abilities to inquire, reflect, and learn from their practice. Dewey (1938) states that “Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into….” (p. 38). Therefore, Dewey believes that in order to make that experience educative—promoting rather than preventing future growth—educators need to make deliberate effort to create physical and social conditions so that learners can achieve growth. Although both Sue and Judy believed they had built a relationship of trust during the semesters, Sue’s mentoring philosophy and strategy seemed to emphasize emotional support and positive comments on technical procedures, avoiding critical and constructive feedback to make the mentoring experience educative.

6.4  Teacher Educators Push for Transformative Learning Having shared stories of missed opportunities by supervisors and cooperating teachers to support prospective teachers’ transformative learning, it is important to recognize that there are also inspiring stories in which they take great effort to push prospective teachers into transformative learning. These stories are also instructive, providing insight into how to encourage prospective teachers to look beyond the technical and practical aspects of classroom teaching and use critical reflection to transform their teaching and learning.

Transformative Learning Outside of the ePortfolio Both Karla’s fourth-semester supervisor and her fifth-semester supervisor asked pointed questions during triad meetings to try to guide her to think about her teaching from multiple perspectives and they also brought up broad societal issues such as race and diversity in relation to classroom teaching. But these conversations did not appear in Karla’s ePortfolio reflections due to the “cherry-picking” and “sunshining” strategies (Thomas & Liu, 2012) discussed earlier in this book. Her ePortfolio reflection continued to be highly positive description of her teaching. The knowledge generated from this type of reflection, as Mena-Marcos et al. (2013) put it, remains at a “descriptive, habitual level” (p. 13). For example, Karla’s fourth-­ semester supervisor, Roy, tried to push her to reflect in a deeper way to ask why questions instead of just what questions in the seminars and post-teaching triad meetings.

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I try to push them to go a little deeper, like why did it happen, instead of what happened. If they reflect on the lesson that didn’t work, I would push them to think what the reasons are. We try to find out the problems and what are the solutions. Some of them just describe, “This is what I did and it went well.” So we need to talk. (Roy, Karla’s Fourth-Semester Supervisor Interview #2)

Juan, Karla’s fifth-semester supervisor also tried to prompt Karla to reflect beyond the technical procedures of her teaching. But he had difficulty seeing how his prompts helped I think I said to her there’s this tension between equality and equity. Overall the idea was we really need to look at different cultures and see how we have understood different policies and proposals that have impacted equity of different groups of people…. But unfortunately I never really got a sense of how much she was really, yeah if she was using my comments or not or if those were helpful for her. (Juan, Karla’s Fifth-Semester Supervior Interview #2)

After reading Karla’s reflections in the fifth semester, some of which were analyzed in Chap. 2, it appears that she did not follow up with her supervisors’ suggestions or questions in her teaching as revealed in her ePortfolio. For example, Juan prompted her to think about how to include the voices of students of color in the writing workshop lesson, but Karla never brought it up in her ePortfolio. In fact, there is little influence from her teacher educators apparent in her ePortfolio. Her discussion remained very descriptive and generic, even though some of her teacher educators did push her to think more deeply. As introduced earlier, Judy was in the PDS program during her teacher preparation. Judy saw one of the benefits was that she was able to build up a trust relationship with her supervisor, Maggie. The length of time working with Judy through four semesters provided the Maggie more opportunity to know Judy’s personality and interact with her through seminars, conversations, and classroom observations that would not otherwise be possible. To be consistently in [the two partner schools] throughout the two years, was huge for me, just because relationships are important for me and I was able to really build really good relationships with staff and families at those schools and that is important. Having one supervisor I think, that’s probably the biggest thing for me because she saw us from the very beginning and she knows us so well that she can really you know, reflect with us and guide us because she knows us so well… It just seemed so weird to me, like why would you have different supervisors each semester because by the time of your student teaching, that new supervisor has no clue where you started. (Judy Interview #4)

This feeling of understanding and trust was seconded by Maggie, Judy’s supervisor. She, too, thought that as time passed, her understanding of the prospective teachers grew. I think it’s a good way to supervise students because my learning about them really, I could never know as much about them if I only had one semester and I could never know as much about how our relationship can work if we didn’t have time to develop it and have bad times with it and good times with it and try to come to some way of really pushing each other and it takes time. (Maggie, Judy’s Supervisor Interview #1)

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Maggie believed that critical reflection was to question oneself as well as the larger social–political context. It was to her a way to solve the puzzles of her teaching by thinking through the complete context. I think it’s questioning themselves and not being satisfied and also questioning larger political context, social context, so being reflective not only about themselves, but reflective about schools and reflective about society, in a way that says, I’m not sure if this is right, or I’m not sure if this works and I want to know more. And I have questions about it. (Maggie, Judy’s Supervisor Interview #1)

At the same time, Maggie believed that one important motivation for reflection is for teachers to feel responsible to the students and the people around. This concept of responsibility is in accordance with the importance Dewey (1933) placed on responsibility in reflection. I think a big motivator for reflective practice is feeling responsibility towards children, towards your colleagues, and towards the family. So if you are responsible towards them, you need to really be questioning what you are doing a lot, so for me that’s what reflection is. (Maggie, Judy’s Supervisor Interview #1)

Due to her tremendous experiences working with prospective teachers, Maggie was able to recognize some of the problems in prospective teachers’ reflection—some students were merely describing their ideals as “beautiful dreams.” So some do the beautiful dream because they think other people need to hear that, some I think because they cannot yet open it up, it’s just too scary. They certainly don’t want to open up that kind of fears in front of other people because they are afraid of what will happen. So the ones who are confident enough to say, what my ideas are and what my practices are really is far apart. I think in my mind, they are the most successful ones. (Maggie, Judy’s Supervisor Interview #1)

Based on this critical lens, Maggie was able to interfere with their “beautiful dream” written in their ePortfolios by asking critical questions. Also, Maggie understood different prospective teachers would have different reflections on their teaching due to their different personalities and prior experiences. Therefore she treated their reflections differently, not making hasty conclusions about who was reflective or who was not. She gave the example of how Judy and another PDS prospective teacher responded to a similar class situation differently, the science lesson for kindergarteners on how wood sinks and floats in water described above. When Judy saw students spilling water all over the tables, she was very upset and felt that the lesson had been “chaos.”). On the contrary, another PDS prospective teacher taught the same lesson and the same situation happened, but she treated it as a successful lesson and happily informed her students that “science is messy” (Maggie Interview #1). Maggie understood why they responded to the similar situation differently because she knew their personalities and prior teaching experiences. She knew that Judy “wants to be good, but she’s so afraid that she’s making a wrong choice” (Maggie Interview #1). But the other prospective teacher just started to feel comfortable and confident in the classroom after two semesters of being “frozen” in the classroom (Maggie Interview #1). During the interview, Maggie still showed great

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pleasure in reflecting on this lesson she observed: “Look, science is messy! It’s such a beautiful moment!” (Maggie Interview #1). At the same time, Maggie understood why Judy thought this lesson was a failure and felt her job was to help Judy overcome her anxiety and fear of failure. On the one hand, she told Judy that it was okay to have water all over the table; on the other hand, she thought the other prospective teacher would help Judy to feel more confident and therefore created many opportunities for the two of them to work together. This provided a solid example confirming, as Judy believed, that Maggie had a deep understanding of her prospective teachers’ weaknesses and strengths. Maggie observed that some prospective teachers would not open themselves up for feedback and critique: They will say, some come from this cultural norm, you don’t complain, but you worry very much about what the others think of you, and you always try to look happy, not to stir the waters too much. It’s the weird paradox that they are living in: they are trying to be very nice, but they also feel insecure… They like to feel good about each other, but if someone really puts something on the table and says it is wrong, and they feel it’s directed to them, ohhh, they don’t know what to do with that. (Maggie, Judy’s Supervisor Interview #1)

To deal with these problems, Maggie tried to build up trust throughout the semesters and figure out when is the appropriate time to help them move beyond this insecure feeling. This was confirmed by Judy’s comment that she and her supervisor could really reflect together on her teaching. I’ve had students who sort of do the superficial report. When I feel there is enough trust, I just start to challenge them. It depends on the feeling I get from them, if they feel secure in themselves, I will challenge them because they know who they are and I can challenge them and I don’t have to worry about that. I would really go in and say, what about this? Do you really think that’s true? But they have to be ready for it. (Maggie, Judy’s Supervisor Interview #1)

Maggie perceived critical reflection as a way to question and challenge oneself as well as the larger social–political context of schooling. She thought the openness and responsibility of prospective teachers are key elements for their reflection. When she observed superficial descriptions and self-praising from her prospective teachers’ written reflections, she would challenge them, but only after building a relationship of trust. Trust takes time to build; sometimes it took more than one semester for her to start asking hard questions. The structure of the PDS program provided the possibility for her to take time to learn about her students and reflect on specific approaches to support her students.

Critical Reflection Through Reading and Discussion Ella’s fifth-semester supervisor, Beth, thought the notion of reflective teaching was unspecified in the program, and in order to clarify the concept in her seminar, she had them read Reflective Teaching by Zeichner and Liston (1996).

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6  Awesome, Awesome: Missed Opportunities for Transformative Learning One of the very first seminars, we reread some excerpts from Reflective Teaching, the chapter where Zeichner talked about reflection in action, reflection on action, and then they talked about the five traditions of reflection. When I talk about reflection, I’m really explicit through that reading. (Beth, Ella’s Fifth-Semester Supervisor Interview #2)

Beth also tried to enhance this kind of reflection by shifting her prospective teachers’ focus from the student as problem to the teacher–student relationship as key. So one of the things I am trying to do it to get them not to think about what’s wrong with the kid that I could fix, but what can I do to better meet this child’s needs. But then also to take a step back and saying, what am I doing that’s contributing to this problem, because everything that’s happening in the classroom is interaction, it’s relationship. (Beth, Ella’s Fifth-Semester Supervisor Interview #2)

Beth was well aware of the challenge to engage the prospective teachers and the cooperating teachers with critical reflection. Therefore her strategy was getting the prospective teachers to talk about their goals at the beginning of the semester. I have them at the beginning of this semester thinking about the strengths and weaknesses in relation to standards and who they want to be as a teacher and they frame them in terms of the three things that I should see. If you will be the teacher you want be, what should I see when I come to your class and what is the thing that you’re going to be working on this semester. (Beth, Ella’s Fifth-Semester Supervisor Interview #2)

Beth admitted that this approach was not very successful because of the time constraints during the triad meeting and, more importantly, because their goals were very technical. That sort of springboards conversation because a lot of goals, they will usually have a goal that is very technical, like I really want to learn how to get kids to line up and I really want to be able to meet all my students’ needs because I believe in a diverse classroom. (Beth, Ella’s Fifth-Semester Supervisor Interview #2)

Beth expressed that she wanted to enhance critical conversations during the triad meeting, but there were fundamental barriers to achieving this goal due to various reasons. First, there was insufficient trust between her, the prospective teacher, and the cooperating teacher, because the latter felt her prompts were from an outsider’s perspective. Second, the vague, often technical nature of the prospective teachers’ goals limited the possibility of reflection during the triad meetings. Third, the limited time available for triad meetings prevented her from going deeper and asking more pointed questions.

6.5  E  pilogue: Program Fragmentation and Lack of Support for Teacher Educators … People (graduate students) get hired in these little cells and working on their PhDs. They do the teaching and supervision in those courses and there is very little communication across different parts of the program…. Mostly these TAs [Teaching Assistants] out supervising have not taken courses in teacher education, and don’t necessarily think of them-

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selves as teacher educators. It’s a job. So the most supervisors have is a one-day orientation conducted by EAS [Education Academic Services], most of which is bureaucratic. (John Interview #2)

The teacher education program under study here began with a faculty commitment to teaching undergraduate courses for prospective teachers. However, under the external academic influences that value educational research over teaching, faculty gradually distanced themselves from teacher preparation over the years. At the time I conducted my research, according to faculty member Sarah, “students can go through this program without ever having a faculty person to teach them” (Sarah Interview). During the participants’ student teaching semester, for example, of all the courses in the elementary teacher education program, only two were taught by faculty members; the rest were taught by graduate teaching assistants. At the same time, faculty members admitted that graduate students focused on their individual specialties (“cells”), which, John observed, were rarely teacher education, and seldom communicated with other TAs outside their cell. This separation encouraged fragmentation in the elementary teacher education program because most of the methods courses and seminars were taught by graduate students in different cells (John Interview #2). Furthermore, the structure of the elementary education program embodied this fragmentation. According to John, the elementary education program used an “elevator model,” in which the prospective teachers ride upward from floor to floor, never returning to the lower floors. To be more specific, the program was a five-­ semester sequence with each semester focusing on certain content areas and relavant methodologies. Each semester had its own group of teacher educators, primarily graduate students, teaching different courses, who rarely communicated with each other about their teaching, nor did they share their knowledge of prospective teachers’ coursework in different courses of the same semester. A related structural problem was that the length of the program and the number of courses, according to faculty member Laura, contributed to the prospective teachers’ “just another hoop” attitude toward. I think the length pushes people towards “I just want to get finished. I don’t want to reflect. I want to get a job and I don’t want to reflect.” The contradiction in our program is we want them to be reflective, but there’s no time in the program to be reflective. (Laura Interview)

John further pointed out that there was minimal preparation for the TAs in the practice of teacher education, most of whom are graduate students with research interests in areas such as literacy, mathematics education, and so forth, and they treat their teacher education involvement as a job to fund them through their Ph.D. programs. The direct consequence was that methods instructors and supervisors started teaching with the syllabus their predecessors developed or used before. Some of them initiated conversations with their peers for help, while others use their previous teaching experiences to guide their new teaching; when they graduated, another group of graduate students faced the same problems and went through the same struggles. Although some of the graduate students were experts in the teaching of reading or mathematics and they worked hard, as Zeichner pointed out (2010), they

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were often unaware of “what is known from research about how to support teacher learning and its transfer to the early years of teaching in the context of a university-­ based teacher education program” (p.  90). Listening to comments from some instructors about their understanding of the program’s goal of preparing reflective teachers clearly reveals this reality. For example, Karla’s fifth-semester supervisor admitted that he had only a vague understanding of the program goals. It’s kind of vague, but I believe it’s related to reflective practitioner, multicultural education. I learned this from the handbook that students have. And theoretically, from the standards. (Juan, Karla’s Fifth Semester Supervisor Interview #2)

Juan’s comment indicates a lack of communication between the fifth-semester supervisors and the faculty. Karla’s fourth-semester music methods instructor reinforced Juan’s comment. When I first started teaching the methods course, I did not really know what the goals are for this semester, especially about reflective teaching, and also culturally responsive teaching. I definitely think they should give me more guidance to design the syllabus and what the goals of the program are, how to guide students in their reflection. (Karla’s Music Methods Instructor Interview)

Placing graduate students as supervisors and methods instructors also raises the issue of evaluation: As graduate students who depend on the job to support their study, they are faced with the situation that their student evaluations may affect their ability to secure future funding by continuing their position. Thus they may not choose to ask pointed questions, but provide positive comments as shown in this chapter so that they can maintain positive evaluations from their students. This ironically echoes how prospective teachers’ perception of being under the evaluation of their teacher educators causes them to sunshine their performance. As a fifth-­ semester supervisor put it, I mean I think for [my faculty supervisor], the big thing is to look at our evaluations every semester from his informal talking with the students, and that helps determine I think probably how close he [the faculty member] needs to monitor us in what we are doing. (Beth, Ella’s Fifth-Semester Supervisor Interview #2)

Finally, due to the institutional structure of the program, each supervisor had to supervise nine to ten prospective teachers in a cohort in a semester. A supervisor was required to observe each prospective teacher twice during every practicum semester and four times during student teaching. Taking student teaching for example: if a supervisor had 10 prospective teachers in their cohort, 40 supervision visits were required during the semester. Often, the prospective teachers were placed in different schools that demanded travel time in addition to the classroom observation time. In addition, each supervisor had to run a once-a-week seminar for the cohort that lasted 90 min. Therefore every supervisor was heavily occupied and it was very common to see that they would constantly check their time during their observation because they often have another observation scheduled back to back. Due to the sole constraint of time, sometimes supervisors have to cut the post-teaching conversation short. This tight schedule posed a tremendous challenge to really build a trusting relationship among the three parties to the triad. Tom, Doug’s fifth-semester

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cooperating teacher brought up his concerns regarding the institution of the triad meeting. I feel respect and trust toward [Doug’s supervisor] because we’ve worked together on four prospective teachers. But that’s not always the case. One supervisor came in and you only see them three or four times… It becomes in some ways unfortunately a little bit kind of just formality going through the motions. (Tom, Doug’s Fifth Semester Cooperating Teacher Interview)

Based on the challenges brought about by institutional structures and external mandates, it is clear that supporting prospective teachers’ critical reflection for transformative learning is not an easy task. There is no simple or single solution to make changes overnight. These challenges, however, provide exciting possibilities as well for teacher education programs to research on and produce locally generated knowledge for transformative learning in the entire field. It is this question of how to support prospective teachers’ critical reflection for transformative learning that I will focus on in Chap. 7.

References Anderson, D. (2007). The role of cooperating teachers’ power in student teaching. Education, 128(3), 307–323. Borko, H., & Mayfield, V. (1995). The roles of the cooperating teacher and university supervisor in learning to teach. Teaching and Teacher Education, 11, 501–518. Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Delandshere, G., & Arens, S.  A. (2003). Examining the quality of the evidence in preservice teacher portfolios. Journal of Teacher Education, 54(1), 57–73. Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Chicago: Henry Regnery. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books. Feiman-Nemser, S. (1998). Teachers as teacher educators. European Journal of Teacher Education, 21(1), 63–74. Feiman-Nemser, S. (2001). Helping novices learn to teach: Lessons from an exemplary support teacher. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(1), 17–30. Gao, S., Liu, K., & McKinney, M. (2019). Learning formative assessment in the field: Analysis of reflective conversations between preservice teachers and their classroom mentors. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 8(3), 197–216. Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mena-Marcos, J., García-Rodríguez, M., & Tillema, H. (2013). Student teacher reflective writing: What does it reveal? European Journal of Teacher Education, 36(2), 147–163. Post, D. M. (2007). The cooperating teacher I’s: Effective mid-lesson responses to student teachers’ critical teaching incidents. Action in Teacher Education, 29(1), 61–70. Thomas, M., & Liu, K. (2012). The performance of reflection: A grounded analysis of prospective Teachers’ ePortfolios. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 20(3), 305–330. Zeichner, K. (2010). Rethinking the connections between campus courses and field experiences in college and university-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 89(11), 89–99. Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. (1996). Reflective teaching: An introduction. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Chapter 7

Supporting Prospective Teachers’ Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning

Chapter 2 provided an in-depth analysis of the nature of prospective teachers’ reflections in their ePortfolios and to what extent these reflections are critical. Chapters 3 through 6 endeavored to explore how their teacher education program impacted their understanding of critical reflection and the way they reflected in the ePortfolio environment. Findings demonstrate that the content and quality of prospective teachers’ written reflections in their ePortfolios varied considerably. Ella and Judy showed strong analytical skills regarding general issues in the micro context of classroom such as designing classroom activities and selecting instructional materials, while Doug and Karla only provided simple descriptions of their teaching to fulfill the institutional requirements of written reflection in their ePortfolios without attention to diversity and equity issues. Ella and Judy also brought up issues beyond the classroom walls, demonstrating deliberation on wider social, historical, political, and cultural contexts of education in their written reflection. Doug, on the contrary, constantly articulated his criticism of the educational system and his commitment to supporting marginalized students in daily conversations with his cooperating teachers; however, seldom did he integrate them in his ePortfolio reflection. However, triangulating their written reflections with classroom observations and interviews also reveals different actions when it comes to transformation of their teaching and their students’ learning. Overall, their practice of reflection often focused on meeting the institutional requirements without linking their teaching to the goal of fostering student learning and the construction of a more equitable, just, and democratic society.

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7.1  T  he Five Factors Affecting Prospective Teachers’ Reflection and Teaching Why did these prospective teachers reflect the way they did? Based on the framework of critical reflection for transformative learning, and the framework of the social and cultural context that guided my study, there are five important factors jointly affecting prospective teachers’ reflection and teaching practice. 1. Institutional policies, including the state standards for licensure as well as the school of education standards for assessing prospective teacher performance and dispositions, provide general guidelines for the teacher education program. The standards related to preparing reflective teachers with critical perspectives for teaching for social justice and equity establish a discourse in the ePortfolio program regarding what prospective teachers should focus on in their written reflection. On one hand, this clarity of mission is important in helping prospective teachers develop a professional disposition appropriate to work in an increasingly diverse school environment. On the other hand, the linkage of reflection and social justice and equity with assessment is made explicit in the two sets of standards, which encourages a surface articulation of compliance in order to demonstrate meeting the standards and discourages meaningful reflection. 2. Disagreement among education faculty and teacher educators on the definition and import of critical reflection is another major factor influencing prospective teachers’ reflection. As documented in Chap. 3, there is no consensus among teacher educators within the program about the meaning of reflective or critically reflective teaching, what a critically reflective prospective teacher would look like and be able to do, or how to support them to reflect critically, and what are the purposes and goals of the ePortfolio reflection in preparing future teachers. The lack of consensus in turn created difficulties for prospective teachers to decide what critical reflection means, how to reflect critically, and why they should be reflective. Teacher educators (mostly graduate students) adopted different strategies to encourage reflective practice of prospective teachers, but, mirroring the fragmented nature of faculty concepts of reflective teaching, there is a lack of conceptual clarity about critical reflection among them. As a consequence, Ella, Judy, Karla, and Doug all defined critical reflection in a generic way, not being able to recognize the importance of the social and political implications of education and the link between reflection and action that leads to transformative learning for them and their students. One common feature was that they seldom reflected on issues of race and ethnicity and how they dealt with them. Their simplistic notions of critical reflection discussed in Chap. 3 clearly influenced the way they reflected and what they reflected about. Further, teacher educators often focused more on positive feedback than critical questions to prompt prospective teachers to search for and implement alternative solutions for improvement, leaving prospective teachers without a clear understanding of the concept or value of critical reflection.

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3. The use of ePortfolio assignments to prompt reflection itself reinforced the association of reflection with assessment, leading to a generally negative view of the process among prospective teachers. Although ePortfolio reflection was envisioned by the designers as a pedagogical tool to support prospective teacher learning and development, prospective teachers treated it as an assignment to be evaluated and an institutional demand to fulfill in order to graduate and be certified. As demonstrated in Chap. 4, some of them only did the minimum work to meet the requirements; others saw ePortfolio reflection as the “busy work” of uploading assignments they had already completed for their courses. Although these attitudes were shaped by the other factors described here, the structure of the assignments themselves—largely retrospective narratives explicitly linked to the standards—as well as the process of creating the entries by uploading images and audio/video clips to demonstrate they met the standards toward to the end of a semester did little to discourage a very instrumental approach. Therefore, as discussed in Chap. 5, it is difficult for prospective teachers to seriously consider critical questions and challenges while concerning to meet institutional assessments. Instead, prospective teachers carefully selected evidence and polished the language for their ePortfolio reflection in order to meet the expectation of their program. 4. A lack of intentional design to use the ePortfolio for collaborative reflection denied opportunities for prospective teachers to read and comment on each other’s reflections. Moreover, cooperating teachers were largely shut out of the ePortfolio unless deliberately invited by the prospective teachers—and, in any case, the bulk of the ePortfolio assignments were done individually, away from the field placements. As the ePortfolio reflection was often treated as a summative assessment constructed and submitted by the prospective teacher toward the end of a semester, it was not used as a pedagogical tool to support ongoing conversations between prospective teachers and their university-based teacher educators. In principle, the exclusion of peers as well as cooperating teachers and teacher educators from individual ePortfolios effectively eliminated the possibility of ongoing and collaborative reflection. 5. The lack of integration of cooperating teachers into the teacher education program meant that they also had a vague understanding of the concept of critical reflection and the purpose and practice of using the ePortfolio. As such, they were neither actively nor consciously involved in mentoring prospective teachers to become reflective practitioners, although they were constantly reflecting verbally with them. Similar to some teacher educators, cooperating teachers had a very generic understanding of reflection and critical reflection, tending to provide very positive feedback to prospective teachers without asking pointed questions. Therefore, as seen in Chap. 6, their conversations with the prospective teachers rarely triggered critical reflections in prospective teachers. Although scholars have critiqued the use of reflective practice as a tool to reinforce existing power relations in organizations (e.g.,  Siebert & Walsh, 2013), and the research in this book certainly attests to the powerful influence on ePortfolio

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reflection of its use as a high stakes assessment tool, other scholars suggest that reflective practice can be helpful for prospective teacher learning if used as part of a thoughtful and theoretical design. Dyke (2006), for example, argues that reflective practice and its subsequent outcome of personal development requires a theoretical framework of learning sensitive to the complex interaction between theory, practice, and reflection that takes place in social contexts and relationships with others. Siebert and Walsh (2013) contend that such a theoretical framework “enables the learner to ‘intellectualise’ reflection, and to translate their experience into a form of academic discourse which is assessable” (p. 168), which further leads to empowering individuals by developing agency. My own research speaks to the truth behind Dyke’s observation, leading me to argue for critical reflection for transformative learning (Liu, 2015; Liu & Ball, 2019) as an example of that theoretical framework to link theory and practice and reflection and action. In addition, by implementing critical reflection for transformative learning in teacher educators’ teaching and supervision, teacher educators can foster the agency among prospective teachers envisioned by Siebert and Walsh (2013), an important step for them to assert ownership over both their teaching and their learning. I further argue that this agency, when understood, as Mezirow (1990) states, to be transformative action based upon the insights gained from critical reflection, can transform both the experiences of the teachers and their students. As discussed in Chap. 1, critical reflection is a hermeneutic approach that involves repeated reexamination of one’s assumptions about knowledge and understanding, particularly those that are socially, politically, or culturally based (Liu, 2015). Mezirow (1990) and other scholars such as Brookfield (1995) and Habermas (1971) have pointed out that no matter how critical the reflection sound, it alone cannot lead to transformative learning—it is the emancipatory action, the praxis based upon reflective insight, that leads to transformation. Working from Brookfield’s stages of critical reflection (Brookfield, 1995), I developed a full hermeneutic model of critical reflection for transformative learning, including a cycle of six steps from assumption analysis to reflection on reflection-based action, and asserting an ultimate goal of educational equity. This framework, as demonstrated in Chap. 2, can guide teacher educators to analyze the content and quality of prospective teachers’ reflection. The synthesis of research and teacher education practice is fundamental to the professional growth of a teacher educator. Thus research results can inform a teacher educator’s practice and make the practice data grounded and on the other hand, teacher education practice gives the teacher educator firsthand knowledge about challenges and opportunities, triggering puzzles to conduct new research to transform practice. Therefore, I argue that based on knowledge gained from analysis of prospective teacher reflection, teacher educators can further adopt the framework of critical reflection for transformative learning as a pedagogical tool to help prospective teachers intellectualize reflection and translate their reflective insights into transformative action. The remainder of this chapter uses the theoretical understanding developed in this book to provide a data-grounded approach in teacher education that can enhance prospective teachers’ critical reflection for

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transformative learning in the endeavor of teaching all children, followed by an example of using the critical reflection for transformative learning in video-based reflection as an alternative approach.

7.2  A Data-Driven Approach to Teacher Education During the analysis of my four prospective teachers’ reflections, interviews, and observations, several important themes emerged from the data showing the disparity in different understandings of the concept of critical reflection, how prospective teachers’ interpreted the purpose of the ePortfolio project, how assignments and requirements in the teacher education program influenced the content and process of prospective teachers’ reflections, and what evaluation process could have enhanced prospective teachers’ reflection. These themes, grounded from the data, are able to provide the basis for grounded action (Simmons, 2006) for teacher educators and ePortfolio designers to reconstruct curricular and instructional elements in their programs.

Build Consistency Within the Teacher Education Programs The first task to develop a data-driven approach to teacher education is to build consistency within the teacher education program in terms of the temporal scope of the program, the engagement of the faculty, and the roles of supervisor, cooperating teachers, and placement schools. Build Consistency Over the Semesters Teacher education curricula tend to include different courses and field experiences each semester, which can contribute to prospective teachers’ confusion. This was certainly true of the program under study for this research, in which a lack of communication among teacher educators over the semesters resulted in a fragmented presentation of the goals, values, and skills prospective teachers needed to learn, and unexpected variation in the platforms to support their learning. There should be greater consistency across the semesters so that teacher educators think not only within their own semester but also from the viewpoint of prospective teachers as they go through their teacher education journey. For example, performance indicators for prospective teachers should be used throughout the practicum semesters and student teaching, rather than suddenly appearing in the last semester of the program, which only causes confusion and anger when prospective teachers confront inconsistent or conflicting information. The ePortfolio is well positioned as a platform to integrate the program across the semesters in terms of these indicators.

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Encourage More Faculty Involvement In teacher education programs that rely on graduate students to play the primary role of teacher educators, greater, faculty involvement can go some way in solving the problem of program fragmentation described above. This was certainly an issue in the teacher education program under study, in which the majority of the graduate students functioning as field supervisors were not even in teacher education, but even in programs drawing from teacher education graduate students, the longer term presence of faculty, and their commitment to the program, will help build consistency in goals and approaches to achieve the goals, and foster better communication among all parties. Restructure the Supervision Model to Support TAs and Supervisors In the program under study, supervisors only observed each prospective teacher twice each during the practicum semesters and four times during the student teaching semester. As a result, they could only see a small slice of prospective teachers’ teaching and often even the triad meetings were rushed and superficial. But to be fair, the supervisors were mostly graduate students with a heavy supervision workload, particularly at the practicum level, when they each worked with a different group of up to ten students every semester, placed across a large number of schools. In other words, the program set up the task of supervision in a way that made it difficult to accomplish the goals of the program. It would perhaps have been better to use the PDS model in which each supervisor works with the same prospective teachers through multiple semesters, and the prospective teachers in the cohort are placed in fewer schools. This would have made it easier for supervisors to connect on a deeper level with their prospective teachers and cooperating teachers and simplify the logistics of supervision. In addition to structural changes to the supervision model, providing training and continuing support to TAs and supervisors, especially those who are not teacher education majors, is absolutely vital. They needed an understanding of teaching, learning, and learning to teach, the tools to properly support prospective teachers at every stage, and a serious commitment to teacher education. TAs and supervisors also needed fundamental training in the big picture of teacher education, including a more thorough understanding of the realities of elementary education in an environment of increasing diversity, poverty, and pressure to perform under mandatory standardized tests. A teacher education seminar run by the faculty, with a field component and a critical reflection requirement, would begin to address this issue. However, what is really needed is a coherent community of practice among all the teacher educators to break down the “cells” within the program, ensure consistency of goals and procedures, and give prospective teachers the guidance and attention they need to break through their performative but not transformative dilemma to become reflective practitioners.

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Strengthen Connections with the Schools and Cooperating Teachers Schools and teachers have much to offer to prospective teachers and the teacher education program because prospective teachers spend significantly more time with their cooperating teachers than either university faculty or supervisors, and much of the experience is “onsite training” (Doug’s Fourth Semester Cooperating Teacher Interview). There should be a stronger connection between the university and the schools which makes teachers “feel like they are included and equal partners” (Maggie Interview #1), breaking down the boundaries between school and university. Instructors of methods courses could invite school teachers as guest instructors or the methods courses could be taught at the schools. In addition, supervision could be structured so that the supervisors are school-based, which builds a bridge connecting the university and the school. Due to the pressure prospective teachers have from their schools, districts, and the state, they are not able to practice all they learn in the teacher preparation program. They have no power (or experience) to negotiate with the political factors in education to reach a compromise between their need to practice innovative methods and the system’s need to achieve other goals. The teacher education program should be aware of these challenges that prospective teachers face every day and help negotiate with local schools by strengthening the communication with them. If the teacher education program does not even try to negotiate with local schools, how can it expect prospective teachers to do so?

Facilitate Critical Reflection among Prospective Teachers Prospective teachers are not born critically reflective practitioners; they need support from teacher educators over time. Critical reflection as defined in this book can only be achieved through meaningful theoretical and pedagogical framing that guides activities carefully designed and facilitated by teacher educators. It will not be advanced by sending prospective teachers off to the field and saying “reflect on your teaching critically,” or by having them read a book and asking them to reflect critically. Teacher educators need to design theoretically informed assignments and activities and provide timely feedback in order to foster prospective teachers’ capacity to reflect critically, and more importantly, to translate the knowledge they gain from critical reflection into transformative action. Clarify the Concept of Reflective Teaching and Critical Reflection Although the idea of teacher as reflective practitioner was slow to catch on after Dewey first proposed it (1933), by the 1990s, it became commonplace for scholars in the field to assume that most prospective teachers and in-service teachers knew the term “reflective teaching,” and knew they were supposed to demonstrate it in

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their teaching. In this context, prospective and in-service teachers know how to converse with educators about reflective teaching and often claim a high-level understanding of the concept, yet as shown in the previous chapters of this book this psychological self-examination is often rote and can be performed with jargon rather than in reference to the details of their daily teaching. The concepts of reflective teaching and critical reflection need to be clarified so that that prospective teachers can see them in action in their daily lives, making them something that they want to do, are inspired to do, and know the benefit of, rather than something they are told to do just because it is required. Emphasize Prospective Teachers’ Teaching Practice Through Observations Due to its emphasis on transformative action for the ultimate goal of educational equity, this framework of critical reflection for transformative learning provides a critical lens to guide teacher educators to conduct research on the real actions of prospective teachers in their teaching—whether or not their reflection brings about transformative actions in teaching all students, especially those who have been marginalized and underserved. A focus on how prospective teachers actually teach these students has been long missing in teacher education research on preparing teachers to teach diverse students, much of which stops at collecting and analyzing prospective teacher’s self-reported data such as written reflections (Anderson & Stillman, 2013; Cochran-Smith et al., 2015). Research based on classroom actions in addition to written reflections can help teacher education researchers gain a better understanding of how to improve their own support for prospective teachers to achieve transformative learning. For example, teacher educators can foster prospective teachers’ critical reflection by prompting them to explore their assumptions more deeply, to situate an educational problem in the larger social–political context, and to ground their discussion in specific examples of their teaching practices in the classroom through approaches such as classroom observations and video-recorded lessons. Therefore, the framework, on the one hand, points out the importance of focusing on prospective teachers’ teaching practices and, on the other hand, guides teacher educators to analyze prospective teachers’ actions to determine whether or not they are transformative in providing equitable education to all children. Design Appropriate Assignments As described in Chap. 5, reflective assignments themselves can discourage reflection. Teacher educators need to rethink the purpose and process of assignments regarding reflection. Often, teacher educators design assignments without clear theoretical underpinnings and timely feedback after assignments are completed. For example, asking prospective teachers to write reflective journals without talking about them in class, asking prospective teachers to videotape their teaching without watching the results in class and giving comments, and of course failing to provide

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feedback on ePortfolio postings. As demonstrated in Chap. 6, during the fourth semester, some seminar supervisors designed the video assignment in such a way that prospective teachers videotaped their teaching and chose a 5-minute clip to show in class, eliciting peer comments and suggestions. By the end of the class, prospective teachers wrote about the clip and uploaded it as an ePortfolio artifact. They were not equipped with some theoretical framework to guide them on what to pay attention to and how to provide feedback to peers while watching the videos in class. This was a golden opportunity to foster critical reflection among the prospective teachers, but that opportunity was lost because the assignment (and the assessment) ended with the act of uploading. In other words, much of the scaffolding for fostering critical reflection through assignments is technical; there needs to be more theoretical intention and better follow-through. Provide Appropriate Prompts to Engage Critical Conversation As the example of Doug (Chap. 2) shows, prospective teachers may not reflect critically in their ePortfolio, but that does not mean they are unable to reflect critically in other situations. Doug’s dismissal of the ePortfolio as a platform for reflection, and the characterization of ePortfolio reflection assignments by many of my research participants, indicates that prospective teachers have not been well supported to conduct reflection. Teacher educators should foster prospective teachers’ critical reflection by prompting them to engage in dialog within a community, to explore their assumptions more deeply, and to ground their discussion in specific examples of their classroom experience. Often we see prospective teachers claim that they have done this and that, but they speak in such a generic way that it is little more than repetition or paraphrasing of the words in the standards. This leads neither to authentic reflection by prospective teachers nor to authentic assessment of that reflection by teacher educators. Build a Nonevaluative but Supportive Environment Chapters 4 through 7 demonstrate that prospective teachers were extremely audience-­aware in the context of their ePortfolio reflections being used as evidence to assess their competencies and, as a consequence, constructed their ePortfolio reflections with strategies to please their audience. Due to the negative impact of high-stake assessment on the quality and process of prospective teacher reflection, many researchers reject outright the notion of directly assessing prospective teachers’ reflective writing (Ross, 2014; Boud, 2001; Thomas & Liu, 2012). Thomas and Liu (2012), for example, argue for a non-evaluative culture to nurture critical reflection in teacher education programs, in which prospective teachers do not feel a need to “sunshine” but “could be guided by way of non-evaluative discussion particularly during difficult discussions of equity, social justice, race, or special needschildren” (p. 327). 

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According to the ePortfolio designers, one of the important factors of the ePortfolio is audience. The ePortfolio has the capacity to provide an online space for prospective teachers, teacher educators, and cooperating teachers to build a trusting professional community so that the prospective teachers have an audience for their ePortfolio reflection. However, this capacity needs to be activated and used by them so that its potential can be fully achieved. At the same time, cooperating teachers should be included in this community, especially during the student teaching semester, due to the fact that prospective teachers spend most of their time with them on a school day. An audience regularly paying attention and giving comments on prospective teachers’ work on their ePortfolio would stimulate conversations around the initial thoughts and ideas that they already put to their ePortfolio. Some teacher educators, such as the supervisors in the fourth semesters, tried to use ePortfolio to model the interactions among prospective teachers and the supervisor in the pre-ePortfolio authorizing space. By doing this, prospective teachers had their work discussed and were able to adapt ideas from the seminar community to modify their teaching and deepen their thoughts. This practice should be formalized and expanded to other semesters by other teacher educators to address the tendency to use the ePortfolio as a static container and to build community among prospective teachers and teacher educators. This research makes it very clear that prospective teachers need constant feedback on their teaching and learning and that the feedback needs to be streamed into a conversation to ensure they understand the feedback and respond to it. Often supervisors or instructors provide some feedback, as Beth (a fifth-semester supervisor) did to the prospective teachers’ journals, but what do the prospective teachers think about these comments? Do they agree with them? If not, what are their reasons and justifications? It is possible that the comments do not fit into their situation because of the limited time supervisors have for observation and post-teaching conferences; or, it could be that the comments are too generic to help the prospective teachers. Without a give and take on reflection and comments, it is impossible to know if the comments are at all helpful. Moreover, when prospective teachers reflect superficially, they need to be coached to reflect on exactly where they need to reflect in a deeper way, lest they hold onto bad intellectual habits. This is not something that can be done in one shot, but requires a repeated cycle of refinement, just as with any skill that is difficult to acquire. Engage the ePortfolio as a Research Tool Since the ePortfolio is already there, and is (partly) required for prospective teachers to use, teacher educators can take this opportunity to use it as a tool for their development too: to better understand the prospective teachers and reflect on how to help them to move to the next level in their development. One of the sources of the “jumping through hoops” characterization of ePortfolio reflection assignments is the suspicion on the part of prospective that they don’t think anyone reads their

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ePortfolio. Sadly, this does appear to be true, particularly toward the end of their program when the focus is on verifying fulfillment of university and state standards. Teacher educators often ask prospective teachers to know their students and their thinking, but how well do we teacher educators know our own students? The ePortfolio is readily available as a tool to reveal the thinking of prospective teachers. Triangulating prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflection with data from classroom observation and pre- and post-observation conversation, teacher educators will produce a new level of understanding of prospective teachers’ dreams, concerns, and daily realities. Become Critically Reflective Teacher Educators Finally, teacher educators need to engage in critical reflection themselves to become better teacher educators. None of the recommendations provided above are one-shot solutions to improve the preparation of quality teachers for all children in this country. Rather, teacher educators should consider the specific context and needs of each individual prospective teacher, formulate appropriately specific educational strategies, and employ a critical lens to examine the consequences of every decision they make toward the development of prospective teachers. Without teacher educators’ critical reflection on their own assumptions, the consequences of their decisions, and their influence on prospective teachers’ attitudes toward teaching and learning, it is impossible to prepare reflective teachers. The questions that Bailey, Hawkins, and colleagues (1998) asked more than two decade ago are still vital, yet largely unconsidered today: When do teacher educators have the opportunity and time to reflect on their own teaching? How many teacher educators engage in collaborative critique and reflection of their own practices (p. 537)? I would add as well this question: How can teacher educators expect prospective teachers to engage in critical reflection if they do not model that behavior themselves? Moreover, although research shows that teachers reflect most effectively by interacting with the others (Shulman, 1998), similar to teachers, teacher educators’ reflections sometimes are limited to reflecting on their personal experiences at private moments (Russell & Korthagen, 1995). The research of Bailey et al. (1998) shows that collaborative practice among teacher educators can support them to move beyond the limit of their own experience. In so doing, teacher educators gain knowledge and skills of preparing future teachers through collaborative reflection, sharing, and negotiation, not as traditionally through “trial and error and intuition” (p. 543). It is inspiring to see that some faculty members in the elementary teacher education program under study did organize meetings for TAs and supervisors a few times a semester. In addition to such formal institutional meetings, smaller groups of teacher educators should meet regularly to discuss their practice, allowing themselves to overcome institutional constraints and support each other in critical reflection, just as they would like their prospective teachers to do.

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Ongoing Data-Based ePortfolio Design and Modification Multiple studies demonstrate that ePortfolios have the pedagogical capacity to enable prospective teachers to reflect across time periods, connecting their previous teaching experiences with their current teaching (Darling-Hammond &  Snyder, 2000; Slepcevic-Zach & Stock, 2018). However, Shulman (1998) cautions that the ePortfolio should be considered as a theoretical design and that there is conflict between the public assessment and the private self-evaluation and reflection purposes. As such, the ePortfolio should not be treated as a fixed reality that needs no modifications or improvement. Instead, as a pedagogical tool, it needs constant revisions and modifications to suit the needs of prospective teachers and teacher educators. This theoretical design works in tandem with ongoing technological innovations that hold greater promise to serve prospective teachers and teacher educators’ needs. By doing this, grounded action is taken to meet the needs of prospective teachers and teacher educators, rather than forcing them to modify their needs in order to fit with the design. Make It Easy to Work on the ePortfolio This generation of prospective teachers grew up in a digital society. They blog, they use Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter, they like and are used to synchronous electronic communication. Although these instant communication tools focus more on information sharing than on deep thoughts, it is one way that they prefer to communicate. In contrast, prospective teachers were expected to use the ePortfolio as a tool for their reflection as an ongoing process, but were not able to work on it anytime, anywhere, whenever they had the impulse to reflect on their teaching. Teacher educators should be aware of digital inequity (Howard, Thomas, & Schaffer, 2018; Reich, 2019), not assuming every prospective teacher has access to computers and internet away from campus, or that they feel comfortable and confident to construct internet-based text. As prospective teachers in this book stated, it was a major challenge for them to get help from the ePortfolio Center, especially when student teaching in a school, as the Center closed at 4:00, and they only finished teaching at 3:30. ePortfolio designers should provide ongoing support for prospective teachers to develop and submit their reflections. Focus on Quality of Analysis Instead of Quantity of Artifacts One pattern that became clear in the research for this book is that, when the teacher education program required work to be uploaded to the ePortfolio, many prospective teachers put a lot of information on the system; when it was not required, they tended not to use it at all. This is visible in Chap. 5, for example, with the different amounts of work Karla put into her ePortfolio during the fourth and fifth semesters.

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This behavior comes ultimately from the lack of consensus of the purpose of the ePortfolio among teacher educators, which was transmitted to the prospective teachers: not knowing how the material would be used, they felt the more the better when required, but not worth doing when not required. In addition to clarifying the purpose of the ePortfolio, designers and teacher educators should carefully scaffold reflection assignments and comments to encourage deeper analysis of fewer artifacts, and more consistent usage from semester to semester. Clarify the Purpose of Standards Three prospective teachers in this study (Ella, Judy, and Doug) admitted they did not think about standards on a daily basis except when the supervisors were going to observe their teaching and needed a lesson plan beforehand. Sometimes prospective teachers failed to understand the meaning of the standards, which were written in an overly general and “listlike” format that invites “fragmentation of the ideas contained within them” (Delandshere & Arens, 2004, p. 71). Only one prospective teacher mentioned that she thought about standards during her teaching, and she did so because her supervisor asked her to do it and provided feedback on her reflections with reference to the standards. Some researchers cautioned us agaist the problematic practice of using the standards as a template; instead, standards should be used to spark dialogs about teaching and learning (Delandshere & Arens, 2004; Diez & Blackwell, 1999). Therefore, there is a need to clarify the purpose of standards when prospective teachers enter the program and hold dialogs for them to interpret the standards in their own language in terms of what constitute good teaching. There should be ongoing opportunities for prospective teachers to revisit and revise their interpretations as their knowledge of teaching and learning expands throughout their teacher education program.  Design Online Spaces for Collaborative Reflection and Dialog Some researchers argue that when the ePortfolio creates a space for collaborative reflection and dialog involving prospective teachers, teacher educators, and cooperating teachers, the system is more likely to foster critical reflection (Liu, 2017; Oner & Adadan, 2011). The online space used for prospective teachers to upload reflections should be arranged to elicit responses to specific questions regarding their teaching experiences in an ongoing manner and a nonevaluative atmosphere. For example, prospective teachers could be asked to list specific incidents that occurred in a given week and then rate them according to difficulty. This would allow the prospective teachers to compare and contrast these incidents and their responses to them. They could then retrospectively discuss the appropriateness of their responses with their peers as well as with teacher educators and cooperating teachers. Developing lines of communication within the ePortfolio in this way will encourage greater and better use of the resource, stimulate prospective teachers to move beyond

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generic description into critical reflection, and provide teacher educators with regular feedback on their own teaching and the teacher education program as a whole.

Creative Activities and Assignments Although reflection is a powerful tool for self-development and group growth, it is not uncommon that individuals or group members feel uncomfortable to reflect critically on their own teaching practice or the social–cultural context in which their teaching is situated. Creative activities and assignments can foster strength and critical perspectives among group members. The following provides an example of using video-recorded lessons as an alternative tool to nurture critical reflection for transformative learning. Video-Recorded Lessons as a Pedagogical Tool I have argued repeatedly in this book that the factor missing most in teacher educators’ assessment of prospective teacher reflection is triangulation of what they say in their ePortfolio reflections with data on what they actually do in the classroom. However, prospective teachers themselves may not be aware of the discrepancies. Shulman’s (1998) question, “what are these folks like back in their classroom?” is therefore relevant not just for teacher educators but for the prospective teachers themselves. Ella and Doug’s experiences with video reflection (Chaps. 4 and 5) suggest that video-based assignments need theoretical design to bridge the gap between ePortfolio reflection and classroom actions. With appropriate design, sufficient support, and ongoing feedback, this method could be a powerful approach to overcome the limitation of only evaluating prospective teachers’ self-selected ePortfolio content. Calandra, Gurvitch, and Lund’s (2008) study on digital video to examine teacher candidates’ perspectives on successful teaching suggests how to triangulate prospective teachers’ self-reported reflections in their ePortfolio for assessment purposes. Other scholars note that video-recorded lessons could be a good pedagogical tool to support prospective teachers’ learning through reflection (Hennessy & Deaney, 2009; Kersting, Givvin, Sotelo, & Stigler, 2010; Welsch & Devlin, 2006; Yadav & Koehler, 2007). Nevertheless, video-based reflective tools can also result in cognitive dissonance (Chan & Harris, 2005) unless accompanied by “supportive direction of a knowledgeable instructor” (Baecher & Connor, 2010, p. 7). Otherwise, as Yadav and Koehler (2007) caution, “preservice teachers are likely to continue viewing classroom episodes with their prior lenses” (p. 358). This is certainly true in my own research. As shown in Chap. 5, prospective teachers were required to use video as a tool for reflection during their fourth-semester practicum. However, simply asking prospective teachers to videotape lessons and watch the videos together in a seminar did not promote significant learning because of a lack of g­ uidance. Ella

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commented that that peer comments were positive phrases such “well-­crafted paragraphs, well-written sentences, and well-articulated ideas,” demonstrating a technical and overtly descriptive nature (Wopereis, Sloep, & Poortman, 2010) and a lack of integration of theory (Postholm, 2008). The experience of Ella and her peers should further remind teacher educators of the importance of a transformative framework to guide video-based reflection. The current prospective teacher accountability system, the edTPA, also requires video-recorded lessons as artifacts in the ePortfolio and prospective teachers are supposed to reflect on the lesson they recorded. However, we should ask how the tool can help prospective teachers grow, rather than function solely as a tool for high stakes assessment? A comment from Ella sheds some light on the typical use video recorded lessons in ePortfolios and how they should be used: The process should be, they say, hey you feel like you really learned a lot from this five-­ minute clip, why don’t you put it onto your portfolio and talk about it, rather than you are required to put a video clip and reflect on it. I think we are presented as you’ll need a video clip to put onto your portfolio and I think that should be an afterthought like hey we need you guys to take yourself teaching, and you come in and we are going to watch it and critique it, and why don’t you spend a minute with your partner reflecting what you learned from that, and at that point you tell them, by now, we are going to use this in your portfolio now that you’ve reflected on it. Then the reflection comes before the assignment rather than the assignment coming before the reflection, I am the queen of putting up my video and then reflecting on it, and getting all what is required and it looks pretty, because I am a writer, but I don’t sit and think about oh, this really means a lot to me, I want it in my ePortfolio. (Ella Interview #4)

Ella’s comment encourages teacher educators to reflect on how to better use video-­ based reflection in their programs. According to Ella, the process should start as a collaborative conversation and reflection. After the reflection is done in a nonevaluative environment and prospective teachers realize they have learned something from this process, then and only then let them put it in their ePortfolio. This way, the means of video watching and reflecting supports the ends of learning and transformed understanding, avoiding the summative assessment (the written “reflection” on the videotaped lesson) which will likely fall into self-praise. In order to achieve this learning, an explicit framework for video watching and commenting is essential to provide common ground for prospective teachers to reflect collaborative and provide critical and constructive feedback. What should effective guidance for video reflection look like? In other words, how can prospective teachers use video-recorded lessons as a catalyst for change in their teaching practice? There is not an easy, quickly implemented answer for this question. As with written or oral reflection, the key is that teacher educators need to first explain what critical reflection is, how to reflect critically, model their practice to support prospective teachers’ capacity to reflect critically, and then observe prospective teachers’ actions to see what changes they actually make, instead of what changes they claim they would make. For several years, I have integrated video-based reflection in my student teacher supervision and used the framework of critical reflection for transformative learning to guide the process. Bearing in mind my research findings, I make this a process of

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theoretically informed, nonevaluative, and ongoing collaborative reflection throughout the semester. At the beginning of the semester, I share with my student teachers the concept of critical reflection and the guiding questions for how to reflect critically on a daily basis based on the theoretical framework. I then ask each prospective teacher to arrange a triad meeting with me and the cooperating teacher in order to get familiar with each other prior to the formal observations. During this meeting, the three of us converse about our individual goals, expected outcomes, and evaluations. I take this opportunity to communicate with the cooperating teacher about the framework of critical reflection for transformative learning, the goal of preparing the student teacher to reflect critically, and the role of the cooperating teacher in supporting the prospective teacher in accomplishing that goal. My prospective teacher explained to the cooperating teacher that they will be video recorded several times, and the cooperating teacher is welcome to join them to view and reflect on the lesson together. I make it clear that I do not expect them to videotape their teaching until they are comfortable to do so. This meeting is always beneficial for community building. As the semester went on, my prospective teachers video record some of their lessons without editing them. They sometimes ask me to bring cameras to help video their teaching. Then two prospective teachers as a pair and I and sometimes their cooperating teachers watch the videos together. I make this process non-­ stressful and nonevaluative by clarifying at the very beginning that what they record and reflect on will not be part of their evaluation. Instead, this process aims to help them see as an “outsider” what they did not usually see during their teaching and make adjustments based on what they newly find. Grounded in literature that recommends starting a collaborative reflection with open discussions (Kim & Silver, 2016) and then gradually moving to more directed and dialogic process can promote deeper thinking (Liu, 2017). I designed a two-step facilitation. First, after viewing the videos, I ask each prospective teacher to find one positive aspect in their teaching. Also, each of them provides one positive comment when they view the other’s video. This open-ended viewing process makes my prospective teachers feel easy and supported. After the first round of positive comments, I start to use the critical reflection for transformative learning framework to guide our discussion for more in-depth analysis. For example, I have used the basic questions in Table  7.1 to prompt the post-viewing conversation, modifying them with each prospective teacher pair based on their specific context. The questions are designed to prompt the prospective teachers through the stages of critical reflection in a scaffolded fashion. The first round of collaborative reflection ends with specific plans the prospective teachers will bring back to their classroom for implementation. They then video-record the reflection-based action they implement and bring that back for the next stage of collaborative reflection—reflection on reflection-based action—sometimes triggering another round of critical reflection starting from analyzing the assumptions behind those reflection-based actions. Depending on the sophistication prospective teachers and their growth in critical reflection, I may skip some stages, or do them in another order, or repeat them—it is neither necessary nor advisable to rigidly follow the sequence in the table. Rather, thinking of the stages as a general

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Table 7.1  Prompting questions drawn from the stages of critical reflection for transformative learning Critical reflection stages Assumption analyses

Contextual awareness

Imaginative speculation

Reflective skepticism

Reflection-based actions Reflection on the effects of reflection-based actions

Questions for collaborative reflection and dialog • Before you planned this lesson, tell us what have you learned about your individual students’ interests, prior knowledge, and racial, ethnic, and language backgrounds. • How did you integrate this knowledge into your teaching? • What assumptions did you have about your students? • What teaching strategies and instructional procedures did you adopt? • Based on what assumption did you use these strategies and procedures? • Now that you have taught this lesson, what prior assumptions do you find to be wrong? • What might be the social and personal reasons for your misassumptions? • Have you observed these misassumptions when you were a K–12 student? • How did these misassumptions impact me negatively? • How did your students’ respond to your teaching in this lesson? • What action by your students in this lesson did you find most puzzling or confusing? • What alternative solutions would you implement for future improvement? • Did your students learn what you expected them to learn? • Why or why not? • Why is your teaching based on your prior assumptions problematic? • What are the assumptions behind the alternative solution(s)? • When and how are you going to implement the alternatives? • How did you integrate the alternative solutions? • How have the alternative solutions impacted your students’ learning? • Are there any misassumptions in your alternative solutions? • Are there any changes you will make in the future?

framework and tailoring them to the prospective teachers’ specific needs and context provides the best results. The following story is an example of how I use video-based reflection framed with the theoretical framework to foster critical reflection for transformative learning among my prospective teachers. Anne was one of my prospective teachers in an elementary teacher education program at a state university in the Midwest. During her student teaching, she stated in her educational philosophy that she valued different cultures and therefore strove to build a classroom culture that embraces differences. Anne believed it important for students from different backgrounds to have opportunities to relate to their own lives at home. Anne was conducting her student teaching in a second-grade classroom in which there were a few Latinx students and a couple of African American students. A few weeks into the student teaching semester, Anne commented to me that an African American student, Ruby, “just

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didn’t want to concentrate in classes these days.” From Anne’s choice of the verb “didn’t want to concentrate,” I noticed she made the assumption that Ruby was deliberately disengaged from class, imputing a lack of desire on Ruby’s part, when all that was certain was that the second-grade student was not concentrating on her study. In order to help  Anne to analyze this assumption about Ruby, I prompted Anne for more information on the causes of Ruby’s lack of concentration, saying “That’s a good observation! Did you talk to her? Maybe there’s something happening in her life? Maybe you can ask Virginia [the cooperating teacher] first and then find a way to communicate with Rebecca’s parents?” Anne agreed to talk to her cooperating teacher to learn more about Ruby and her family; in a later conversation with me, Anne shared that she learned from her cooperating teacher that Ruby was battling brain cancer and the side effects of treatment. With the help of her cooperating teacher, Anne was able to communicate with Ruby’s parents and further learned that Ruby’s younger brother also had health issues and that was worrying Ruby. With all this new information, Anne changed her prior assumption about Ruby and reflected that “It makes a lot of sense now! She has actually been battling with brain cancer and her younger brother has just diagnosed some severe illness too. This really brought a lot of pressure on her!” I further prompted Anne to think how her prior assumptions of Ruby might have impacted her interaction with Ruby: “Now that you have learned much more about Ruby, how would you change the way you work with Ruby in the future?” After this revelation, Anne said she would pay more careful attention to engage Ruby in class. My further step was helping Anne further reflect on how she implemented this reflection-based action—paying more careful attention to engage Ruby—in her teaching and on what impact that changed action would have on Ruby. In the subsequent week, Anne videotaped a lesson in which she was teaching about estimation by asking each student to estimate the number of animal crackers in a jar and write down their estimate of the number. After the class counted the crackers together, it turned out that Ruby’s estimate (148) was the closest to the actual number (156). In the video, Ruby was visibly excited. Anne did not ignore Ruby but praised her in front of the whole class. However, Anne moved on to asking the whole class what strategies they used to make their estimates. Ruby held her hand high to answer, but Anne did not ask her to talk about her strategy. As a rule of this activity, the student who had the best estimate would have the opportunity to bring the estimation jar home and bring it back with their favorite objects in it for the next round of the activity. Ruby won this opportunity. After we watched the video together, I prompt Anne to think future changes to further include Ruby’s voices to engage her: “It looked like Rebecca was eager to share her strategies.” Anne agreed: I should have asked Rebecca to explain how she made the estimation! Rebecca would be very excited and proud to share her strategies and this would be such a great experience for the other students to learn from her!

Anne told me that, since Ruby would bring back the jar for the next estimation activity, she would start that lesson by asking Ruby to explain what strategies she

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used to make her estimation the previous time. I observed this subsequent lesson and as Anne planned, she started the activity by reminding the class that the winner was Ruby last time and then asked Ruby to talk about her estimation strategies. Ruby told the class that she used the strategy to count 10 and estimated the possible number of 10s in the jar. After she shared her strategy, Ruby was very excited to present the jar that she filled with cheese crackers for the new round of estimate activity. She was very engaged, actively participating in class and helping Anne facilitating the activity. In an interview at the end of Anne’s student teaching, she commented the benefit of videotaped lesson in general: You have a lot of kids in a classroom; you might not hear what questions, or what things they are talking about in the back. Or you might not see what they are doing, what they thinking by watching them. But when you would play it back, you might realize, Oh my god, I didn’t even realize she asked that. You are so focused on teaching the lesson and delivering it. But watching myself and how was delivering the message or the lesson and seeing it definitely helps a lot. (Anne Interview)

However, the true value of video-based reflection, according to Anne, lies in watching and reflecting with me and her peer in a trusting and secure environment: And more so is talking about it with people; it is not just me watching it, it is me and somebody else. Somebody we can share our thoughts on it. And I really liked that a lot. I always felt like, O my gosh I am so lucky, I am so happy that you guys were willing to stay after and do this for me. I am one person but it really felt like a team. You and I working together, to help me be a better teacher. And it really felt nice to know that I wasn’t working on it alone. The questions you ask were so helpful for me to think things in a different way. You also made sure to help me focus on implementing changes. (Anne, Interview)

From the story above, Anne’s video-based reflection benefited from two important factors: First, the process of video-reflection was not done by Anne in isolation. She was companied by her peer and me as her supervisor. Second, the video-reflection was supported by the theoretical framework of critical reflection for transformative learning. I used the theoretical framework to guide my conversation with Anne to prompt her to analyze her assumptions, search for alternative solutions, and have follow-up actions to implement those solutions. Informed by the theory, one important emphasis I put during the video-based reflection was trying to avoid the pitfalls of no feedback from the supervisor’s part and no reflection-based action from the prospective teacher’s part that I observed from Ella’s experiences. This way, the theoretical framework was integrated as a pedagogical tool throughout the design and process of video-based reflection.

7.3  Conclusion The data-grounded approach I provided above demonstrates that it takes an entire teacher education community to prepare critically reflective practitioners able to implement transformative actions to support all students in the classrooms. This

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community should combine teacher educators, cooperating teachers, and the larger community in which the schools are situated. Although the ePortfolio under study did not specifically design an affordance for synchronous conversations within it, the ePortfolio design could accommodate an online space to host the exchange of ideas and daily experiences. Teacher educators could collect classroom management problems and challenges from cooperating teachers and previous students, then create scenarios for prospective teachers to discuss and think about solutions for. There should be a stronger connection between the university and the schools, one which would enable cooperating teachers to “feel like they are included and equal partners” (A supervisor interview#1). Inviting in-service teachers as guest instructors in methods courses, structuring supervision seminars to be school-based, and working more closely with parents—all of these improvements could make use of ePortfolio as the hub to better prepare critically reflective teachers for the community as a whole. Although this research did not pay close attention to the interaction of prospective teachers with the local community such as parents, it did show that sometimes prospective teachers felt a big challenge to interact with parents. Teacher educators and researchers have been advocating the importance of better connecting university-based teacher education programs with local communities (Guillen & Zeichner, 2018; Zeichner, Bowman, Guillen, & Napolitan, 2016; Zygmunt, Clark, Clausen, Mucherah, & Tancock, 2016) and schools (Boyle-Baise & McIntyre, 2008; Jeffery & Polleck, 2013; Klein, Taylor, Onore, Strom, & Abrams, 2013; Zeichner, Payne, & Brayko, 2015). Chapter 9 concludes this book with a conceptualization of a transformative teacher education community with a shared theoretical framework of critical reflection for transformative learning.

References Anderson, L., & Stillman, J. (2013). Student teaching’s contribution to preservice teacher development: A review of research focused on the preparation of teachers for urban and high-needs contexts. Review of Educational Research, 83(1), 3–69. Baecher, L., & Connor, D. (2010). “What do you see?” Using video analysis of classroom practice in a preparation program for teachers of students with learning disabilities. Insights on Learning Disabilities, 7(2), 5–18. Bailey, F., Hawkins, M., Irujo, S., Larsen-Freeman, D., Rintell, E., & Willett, J. (1998). Language teacher educators collaborative conversation. TESOL Quarterly, 32(3), 536–546. Boud, D. (2001). Using journal writing to enhance reflective practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 90, 9–18. Boyle-Baise, M., & McIntyre, D. J. (2008). What kind of experience? Preparing teachers in PDS or community settings. In M.  Cochran-Smith, S.  Feiman-Nemser, & D.  J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 307–330). New York: Routledge. Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Calandra, B., Gurvitch, R., & Lund, A. (2008). An exploratory study of digital video editing as a tool for teacher preparation. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 16(2), 137–153. Chan, P. Y. K., & Harris, R. C. (2005). Video ethnography and teachers’ cognitive activities. In J. Brophy & S. Pinnegar (Eds.), Learning from research on teaching: Perspective, methodology, and representation (pp. 337–375). Emerald Group Publishing Limited: Bingley.

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Cochran-Smith, M., Villegas, A. M., Abrams, L., Chavez-Moreno, L., Mills, T., & Stern, R. (2015). Critiquing teacher preparation research: An overview of the field, part II. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(2), 109–121. Darling-Hammond, L., & Snyder, J. (2000). Authentic assessment of teaching in context. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(5-6), 523–545. Delandshere, G., & Arens, S.  A. (2004). Examining the quality of the evidence in preservice teacher portfolios. Journal of Teacher Education, 54(1), 57–73. https://doi. org/10.1177/0022487102238658 Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery. Diez, M. E., & Blackwell, P. (1999). Improving master’s education for practicing teachers: The impact of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Teaching and Change, 6(4), 350–363. Dyke, M. (2006). The role of the ‘other’ in reflection, knowledge formation and action in late modernity. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 25(2), 105–123. Guillen, L., & Zeichner, K. (2018). A university-community partnership in teacher education from the perspective of community-based teacher educators. Journal of Teacher Education, 69(2), 140–153. Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and human interests (J.  J. Shapiro, trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1968). Hennessy, S., & Deaney, R. (2009). The impact of collaborative video analysis by practitioners and researchers upon pedagogical thinking and practice: A follow-up study. Teachers and Teaching, 15(5), 617–638. Howard, N. R., Thomas, S., & Schaffer, R. (2018). Closing the gap: Digital equity strategies for teacher prep programs. International Society for Technology in Education. Jeffery, J. V., & Polleck, J. (2013). Transformations in site-based teacher preparation courses: The benefits and challenges. In J. Noel (Ed.), Moving teacher education into urban schools and communities (pp. 105–119). New York, NY: Routledge. Kersting, N. B., Givvin, K. B., Sotelo, F. L., & Stigler, J. W. (2010). Teachers’ analyses of classroom video predict student learning of mathematics: Further explorations of a novel measure of teacher knowledge. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1–2), 172–181. Kim, Y., & Silver, R. E. (2016). Provoking reflective thinking in post observation conversations. Journal of Teacher Education, 67(3), 203–219. Klein, E., Taylor, M., Onore, C., Strom, K., & Abrams, L. (2013). Finding a third space in teacher education: Creating an urban teacher residency. Teaching Education, 24(1), 27–57. Liu, K. (2015). Critical reflection as a framework for transformative learning in teacher education. Educational Review, 67(2), 135–157. Liu, K. (2017). Creating a dialogic space for prospective teacher critical reflection and transformative learning. Reflective Practice, 18(6), 805–820. Liu, K., & Ball, A. (2019). Critical reflection and generativity: Toward a framework of transformative teacher education for diverse learners. Review of Research in Education, 43(1), 68–105. Mezirow, J. (Ed.). (1990). Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A guide to transformative and emancipatory learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Oner, D., & Adadan, E. (2011). Use of web-based portfolios as tools for reflection in preservice teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(5), 477–492. https://doi. org/10.1177/0022487111416123 Postholm, M. B. (2008). Teachers developing practice: Reflection as key activity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(7), 717–1728. Ross, J. (2014). Performing the reflective self: Audience awareness in high-stakes reflection. Studies in Higher Education, 39(2), 219–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.651450. Reich, J. (2019, February 2019). Teaching our way to digital equity. Educational Leadership, 76(5), 30–35.

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Russell, T., & Korthagen, F. (1995). Teachers who teach teachers: Reflections on teacher education. Bristol, PA: The Falmer Press,  Shulman, L. (1998). Teacher portfolios: A theoretical activity. In N.  Lyons (Ed.), With portfolio in hand: Validating the new teacher professionalism (pp.  23–37). New  York: Teachers College Press. Siebert, S., & Walsh, A. (2013). Reflection in work-based learning: Self-regulation or self-­ liberation? Teaching in Higher Education, 18(2), 167–178. Simmons, O. (2006). Some professional and personal notes on research methods, systems theory, and grounded action. World Futures, 62, 481–490. Slepcevic-Zach, P., & Stock, M. (2018). ePortfolio as a tool for reflection and self-reflection. Reflective Practice, 19(3), 291–307. Thomas, M. K., & Liu, K. (2012). The performance of reflection: A grounded analysis of prospective teachers’ ePortfolios. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 20(3), 305–330. Welsch, R. G., & Devlin, P. A. (2006). Developing preservice teachers’ reflection: Examining the use of video. Action in Teacher Education, 28(4), 53–61. Wopereis, I., Sloep, P.  B., & Poortman, S.  H. (2010). Weblogs as instruments for reflection on action in teacher education. Interactive Learning Environments, 18(3), 245–261. Yadav, A., & Koehler, M. (2007). The role of epistemological beliefs in preservice teachers’ interpretation of video cases of early-grade literacy instruction. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 15, 335–361. Zeichner, K., Bowman, M., Guillen, L., & Napolitan, K. (2016). Engaging and working in solidarity with local communities in preparing the teachers of their children. Journal of Teacher Education, 67(41), 277–290. Zeichner, K., Payne, K., & Brayko, K. (2015). Democratizing teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(2), 122–135. Zygmunt, E., Clark, P., Clausen, J., Mucherah, W., & Tancock, S. (2016). Transforming teacher education for social justice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Chapter 8

Coding and Analyzing Narratives to Foster Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning

8.1  Narrative Analysis in Teacher Education Narratives, whether constructed (ePortfolio reflection assignments) or elicited (interviews and free journaling) are privileged in both qualitative research and teacher education practice for many reasons. For teacher educators, they are potentially rich in detail, supporting anthropological approaches such as thick description (Geertz, 1973) and life history (Lewis, 1961); they require introspection to produce but assume some kind of audience, encouraging certain levels of reflection on the writer or interviewee; and they can be guided through prompts and interview protocols to address specific questions or areas of prospective teacher learning in the program. For researchers, narratives can provide deep insights into individual perceptions, experiences, and decisions in a way that quantitative survey method cannot reach. The dilemma of narrative analysis, however, is posed precisely by the detail and individual depth: How do we make sense of the mass of details in the narratives and how do we move from the perceptions, experiences, and decisions from the depiction or statement of an individual prospective teacher toward a broader understanding applicable to groups of teacher educators and prospective teachers in similar situations without overstressing the details peculiar to the individual cases? The solution developed within the social sciences to the dilemma of narrative analysis is coding, a process of marking and categorizing portions of a narrative in support of the analysis of that narrative. Coding and analyzing narratives, such as those found in prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflection assignments, are typically done as part of a paradigm of qualitative research; the research presented in this book is an example of qualitative research involving coding and analyzing narratives. The basic philosophy and technical processes of coding and analysis are well discussed in several guides to qualitative research (e.g., Gibbs, 2007; Saldana, 2009, 2012, 2015); this chapter summarizes this material as much of it applies to the work of teacher educators. However, we must recognize that the goals of teaching and © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. Liu, Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01955-0_8

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supervising prospective teachers on daily basis are not fully congruent with those of education researchers. Although the discovery of new knowledge can be an important outcome of narrative analysis in teacher education practice and certainly should not be avoided, the primary goal is to stimulate critical reflection for transformative learning on the part of prospective teachers and teacher educators themselves. Instead of presenting the coding process for the sole purpose of research, this chapter therefore first clarifies the goals of narrative analysis in support of critical reflection for transformative learning, then explains the process with reference to a priori and grounded theory approaches to thematic coding, providing examples keyed to the previous chapters to demonstrate how teacher educators can use coding to gain a deep understanding of prospective teachers’ experiences, based on which provide appropriate support to enhance their critical reflection for transformative learning.

8.2  T  hematic Coding: A Priori and Grounded Theory Approaches The purpose of thematic coding is to identify patterns in the narrative that can be recognized with (or developed into) broad themes that can then be the basis for comparison with other narratives. When working with reflective assignments by prospective teachers to stimulate critical reflection, it is most useful to compare themes across assignments for a given prospective teacher—ePortfolio assignments, interviews with the prospective teacher, their mentor teacher, and supervisor (if the institution uses the triad approach), and narratives captured through classroom observation by the teacher educator. However, comparing themes from narratives across multiple prospective teachers can also be useful, particularly if the teacher educator wishes to assess the effectiveness of different aspects of the teacher education program in inculcating or constraining critical reflection. Coding to identify or develop themes is a matter of marking sections of the narrative with a label that can be used to support thematic development. This can be done by hand on printed versions of reflective assignments and transcripts of interviews and observation notes or electronically with a word processor’s markup tools (such as the Comment command on the Review menu in Microsoft Word (Fig. 8.1) or a dedicated qualitative research tool such as NVivo (Fig. 8.2). The research that forms the basis for this book employed two types of coding, each of which functioned differently in the process of developing thematic codes: • A priori coding, which applies existing codes to categorize sections of the narrative • Open coding based on the principles of Grounded Theory, which develops codes from the content of the narrative itself

8.2  Thematic Coding: A Priori and Grounded Theory Approaches

Fig. 8.1  Coding using Microsoft word’s review > Comment feature

Fig. 8.2  Coding in NVivo

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Table 8.1  A priori coding used in this book Theoretical foundations van Manen (1977)

Brookfield (1995) and Liu (2015)

Codes for a priori coding Technical reflection Practical reflection Critical reflection Assumption analysis Contextual awareness Imaginative speculation Reflective skepticism Reflection-based actions Reflection on reflection-based actions

A Priori Coding In the research for this book, A Priori coding (Table 8.1) helped identify the kinds of reflection represented in a given section of a narrative and was based on two theoretical foundations: the “levels” of reflection proposed by van Manen (1977) and the “stages” of reflection that I (Liu, 2015) modified based on the work of Brookfield (1995): This priori coding allowed me to categorize the type of reflection a prospective teacher was engaging in (technical, practical, critical) as well as where they were in the hermeneutic cycle of critical reflection (from assumption analysis through reflection on reflection-based actions). For example, in describing her geometric shapes game (discussed in Chap. 2) Ella commented that “When one of my students clicked a shape and heard the sound, he was excited and said, ‘It’s my dad!’ I could tell that they felt a genuine connection in the classroom.” This was coded as Technical Reflection (focusing on how to deliver the lesson to the student) and reflection-based action (actions as an outcome of the insights gained from previous reflection). As a teacher educator, having a theoretical sensitivity of the level and stage of a prospective teachers’ reflection enables the analysis of the prospective teachers’ development of reflective abilities and, more importantly, provides the basis for follow-up questions and support to strengthen and deepen those abilities. For example, based on Ella’s rationale of this action—language spoken at home is a comfort helpful for students to learn English in the classroom, a teacher educator could prompt her to investigate the English-centric practices of schooling, moving her away from her technical reflection and toward critical reflection on how to counteract the dominance of English in the official curriculum, or ask her to consider how she could further expand on her efforts and what institutional barriers she might encounter. In other words, the teacher educator could support her to analyze her assumptions behind this reflection-based action to further stimulate imaginative speculation and reflective skepticism. Brookfield (1995), Liu (2015), and van Manen’s (1977) conceptions of reflection are not the only potential theoretical foundation of a priori codes, but they do line up well with the reflective goals of the teacher education program under

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examination. The selection of theoretical frameworks for a priori codes should comport with the goals of the teacher education program, as examining these will enable simultaneous analysis of the program as well as stimulus for critical reflection on the part of teacher educators. Whatever theoretical frameworks are used, a coding table is an invaluable first step, particularly if it is expected to include more than one person to code the narratives—that will limit the possibility of disagreement between coders and improve inter-rater reliability of the analysis. The coding table I developed my study consists of codes, an explanation, and indicators of evidence. Table 8.2 is an expanded version of Table 8.1 into a full coding table.

Open Coding Open Coding is in many ways the opposite of A Priori coding. Rather than a set of already-developed codes that are applied to a narrative, Open Coding is a process of conceptualization and categorization, developing codes from the content of the narrative itself. Since each narrative may produce a different set of codes from the other narratives, the initial Open Codes must then be abstracted through comparison with the codes from other narratives to support the development of categories and then from categories to themes and eventually theory (Saldana, 2015). It is a process of moving from the particular (a specific narrative) to the general (shared patterns across multiple narratives). The codes can be either descriptive, summarizing the major idea in a given chunk of prospective teachers’ narrative or in  vivo, taking phrases directly from a prospective teacher’s narrative. Open Coding is thus more time-consuming than A Priori coding as it requires close reading of the narrative text and a certain sensitivity to intertextual references. However, the resulting rich description revealing the individuality of each narrative is vital to capture the different types of voices of prospective teachers that would otherwise not possible. In the research for this book, Open Coding provided insight into prospective teachers’ struggles to learn critical reflection, their metacognitive attitudes toward reflection both as a technological tool and as a program requirement, their attitudes of and teaching practices toward students of color, and the ways in which they attempted to navigate the dilemma of a system they saw functioning both as a reflective tool and as an assessment instrument. For example, Chap. 4 includes quotes from numerous research participants—teacher educators as well as prospective teachers—characterizing ePortfolio reflection assignments as “hoops to jump through.” This phrase, which encapsulates the attitude that those assignments were of limited value for learning purposes, became an in vivo code. Doug, also as documented in Chap. 4, didn’t use this exact phrase, but did describe the process as “me doing work for someone else.” Doug’s wording became another in  vivo code because it includes an awareness of audience missing from the “hoops” code; using this as a code preserves his individual take in a way that applying an A Priori coding label might erase.

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Table 8.2  A priori coding table for this book Codes Technical reflection

Practical reflection

Critical reflection

Assumption analysis

Explanation The technical application of educational knowledge and of basic curriculum principles for the purpose of attaining a given end An interpretive understanding both of the nature and quality of educational experience, and of making practical choices A reflective rationality of the social, moral, and political dimension of schooling and questions about which educational goals, experiences, and activities lead toward just and equitable forms of life Analysis of taken for granted and distorted assumptions and assessment of their accuracy and validity

Contextual awareness

An awareness that assumptions are socially and personally created and that reflect the culture and time in which they happen

Imaginative speculation

An exploration of alternative solutions to replace previous actions that are supported by distorted assumptions

Reflective skepticism

Teachers develop a critical cast of mind to doubt the claims made for the universal validity or truth of an idea, practice, or institution

Evidence To achieve certain objectives, prospective teachers look at the effectiveness and efficiency of application of knowledge, i.e., easy to adapt, time-efficient Prospective teachers interpret individual and cultural experiences, seeing curriculum and teaching–learning as processes of establishing communication and common understandings Prospective teachers pay attention to the worth of knowledge and their reflections involve constant critique of domination, institutions, repressive forms of authority, and asymmetry or inequality among students and teachers

Prospective teachers identify the assumptions about schooling and the society that underlie the ideas, beliefs, values, and actions that they (and others) take for granted, and then assess the accuracy and validity of these assumptions against lived experiences Prospective teachers realize that their assumptions are socially and personally created in a specific historical and cultural context, that what they regard as appropriate ways of organizing the workplace, behaving toward intimates, or acting politically reflect the culture and time in which they live Teachers explore alternative ways to current ways of thinking and living in order to provide an opportunity to challenge prevailing ways of knowing. This is the realization that they can replace obsolete, irrational, or oppressive social arrangements with more contemporary, rational, or just alternatives. It can be both liberating and threatening Prospective teachers imagine and explore alternatives, leading to reflective skepticism, developing a critical cast of mind to doubt the claims made for the universal validity or truth of an idea, practice, or institution. They call into question the belief that simply because some idea or social structure has existed unchanged for a period of time that it must be right and the best possible arrangement (continued)

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Table 8.2 (continued) Codes Reflection-­ based actions

Reflection on reflection-­ based actions

Explanation Implementation of the alternative solutions as a result of previous steps

Evidence Based on the previous steps of reflection, prospective teachers take actions to implement the alternative solutions in order to change or improve their teaching practice Further reflection on the action Prospective teachers analyze the effect of the reflection-based actions on student learning, developed and taken in the previous step, both in terms of upon which to make further decisions for future teaching. This may trigger another cycle of efficacy for student learning critical reflection and in relation to the social–political context of schooling

When guiding prospective teachers toward critical reflection and, especially, transformative learning, Open Coding is thus an invaluable companion to A Priori coding, as it is closely tailored to the individual prospective teachers’ growth in the content and quality of their reflection as well as in the ability to reflect. To draw broader lessons about a given cohort, or about prospective teachers in general, requires abstracting Open Codes through the process of thematic coding (Glaser, 1978). The simplest way to do this is to build a table of Open Codes, abstracting them through a comparison of shared features into broad categories, then doing the same procedure with the Abstract Codes to develop critical themes. Table 8.3 demonstrates this process for some of the themes found in the research for Chap. 2 of this book. Once themes have been established, they can function as a new set of A Priori codes for future cohorts of prospective teachers, tailoring the fundamental A Priori codes related to the process of reflection to the unique qualities of a given teacher education program and cohort of prospective teachers.

8.3  Transformative Protocols Through Data Triangulation Coding prospective teachers’ narratives provide important information about their perceptions, attitudes, concerns, and in general their dispositions as budding teachers. However, as should be clear from the previous chapters of this book, such narratives cannot be relied upon in uncovering what they do in the classroom, and most importantly if any insight apparent in the narratives is being employed in the classroom. After all, transformative learning for both the prospective teacher and their students is the ultimate goal—critical reflection is a necessary step to achieve that goal, but it is not the goal itself. Classroom observation of what prospective teachers actually do is key to making the link between the “habits of mind” (Mezirow, 1997) revealed in the narratives and the “patterns of acting” in the classroom (Mezirow, 2000). Readers may be familiar with the use of an observation protocol to guide observation when the goal is assessment, often constructed as a rubric with

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Table 8.3  Sample open coding used in Chap. 2 Open code Languages spoken at home are comforts (Ella on the shapes game)

Category Bringing students’ home lives into the classroom

I wanted to base my unit on the students’ lives and also give them an opportunity to learn about “lesser known” celebrations (Judy on her celebrations of light unit)

Bringing students’ home lives into the classroom

Even Johnny, who shouldn’t be included, did well (Ella comment on bullying skit)

Diversity and inclusion

I think that’s her culture. So she feels Diversity and like she can move her body because inclusion she wants to move her body (Judy on Rebecca’s behavior)

Theme Multicultural gestures to make student learning more efficient Failure to question how education reinforces the hegemonic language at the expense of student learning Failure to question implicit assumption about which celebrations are normal (Christmas) and which are “lesser known” (Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Chinese solstice) Flags and festivals use of nonwhite culture to enrich the experience of White students Failure to question implicit assumptions about an organic linkage between problematic behavior and certain groups of students Pathologizing difference and attempting to exclude it Failure to question implicit assumption of “culture” and “disruptive behavior” Use of “culture” to camouflage statements about race

categories such as “student engagement” and technical aspects of teaching such as “provides opportunities for students to ask questions,” “calls upon every student,” and so forth. As demonstrated in Chap. 6, from the standpoint of critical reflection for transformative learning, an assessment-oriented observation protocol is of limited value. It can point to technical issues or even equity issues, but it does not provide enough guidance to prompt further conversations that lead to critical reflection. As such, teacher educators need to develop a transformative protocol. What should a transformative protocol look like? Stimulating transformative learning depends upon the teacher educator understanding the current state of the prospective teacher and their professional context—the school, the students, the mentor teacher, the surrounding community—as well as their personal and professional goals. Therefore, the transformative protocol must be tailored to each prospective teacher. Furthermore, the issues to be followed with each prospective teacher should come in part from their written reflections, such as ePortfolio reflection assignments and interview narratives. In other words, the narratives they produce will help the teacher educator understand how they reflect and what they reflect about, but also what they need to work harder on. For example, Ella’s reflections on her shape game discussed in Chap. 2 show an admirable attempt to bring community resources into the classroom; the same is true of Judy’s unit on light  celebrations. In both cases, however, classroom

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observation of their teaching revealed that the technical and practical nature of their reflections and the emphasis on how well they have met the standards prevented them from achieving transformative learning, At the same time, they could open multiple avenues for critical reflection leading to transformative learning and those avenues should shape any transformative protocol by a teacher educator. Data triangulation from classroom observations demonstrated that Judy did not achieve transformative learning about diversity and equity even though she invited parents and community members to share their cultural practices at home. Judy could be guided to analyze personal and institutional assumptions about students of color and how those assumptions led her and her cooperating teacher to label Rebecca as a problematic child and their subsequent actions of disciplining and segregating her from the rest of the class. For another example, classroom observation helped me see that Doug implemented multiple strategies to support students of color in his teaching such as having one-to-one conversations with them during lunchtime and inviting his African American friend to volunteer in his classroom as a role model. However, these actions were never discussed in his ePortfolio reflections. Therefore, Doug could be guided to understand the value in articulating his transformative actions to institutions and their authorities, which would strengthen his ability to help his students counteract the racism they encounter in school on a daily basis. In other words, Judy’s transformation protocol should center on her continuing need to realize the complexity of the social context within which her curricular choices occur and to critically analyze personal and social distortions about students of color that could lead to search for and implement alternative solutions to support those students Doug’s transformative protocol should focus on the need to move institutions toward transformation, and not be content with what he accomplished at the individual level.

8.4  Conclusion This chapter has introduced the basic concepts and processes behind coding and analyzing prospective teachers’ reflective narratives—including ePortfolio assignments, interviews, and classroom observation notes—in order to encourage their development of critical reflection for transformative learning. By working at both the level of process through reflection-oriented A Priori codes and the level of content through individually tailored Open Codes, teacher educators can guide the prospective teachers they supervise through the personal and professional growth necessary to become reflective professionals able to effect transformation in their classrooms and schools. As such, the concepts and procedures in this chapter provide a path to put into operation the theoretical and pedagogical framework that animates this book. The final chapter of this book brings the research, data, and procedures underpinning critical reflection for transformative learning in teacher education together and considers where to go from there in using this knowledge to reach for a transformative community of teacher education in pursuit of educational equity.

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References Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of culture. New York: Basic Books. Gibbs, G. R. (2007). Analyzing qualitative data. London: Sage Publications. Glaser, B. G. (1978). Theoretical sensitivity: Advances in the methodology of grounded theory. Mill Valley: Sociology Press. Lewis, O. (1961). The children of Sánchez: The autobiography of a Mexican family. New York: Random House. Liu, K. (2015). Critical reflection as a framework for transformative learning in teacher education. Educational Review, 67(2), 135–157. Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. In P.  Cranston (Ed.), Transformative learning in action: Insights from practice (pp.  5–12). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Saldana, J. (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Saldana, J. (2012). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Saldana, J. (2015). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. van Manen, M. (1977). Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical. Curriculum Inquiry, 6(3), 205–228.

Chapter 9

Toward a Transformative Teacher Education Community

The student population in U.S. public schools has been getting increasingly diverse; in response, many teacher education programs, including the one at Midwest University where Ella, Judy, Karla, and Doug received their preparation, have established goals to prepare future teachers to teach in diverse schools. At the same time, the prevailing power of external requirements and high stakes assessments demanded by corporations and government policy makers interfere with teachers’ ability to see the diversity among their students as an asset, rather than a deficit. English Language learners, marginalized students with unstable living situations, racial, cultural, and ethnic minorities, all these groups bear the brunt of high-stakes testing and its effects on curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher morale. Yet there are increasing efforts to apply the values and practices of high-stakes assessment to teacher education programs as well as their graduates. In the face of these difficult circumstances, teacher educators must ask each other serious questions. What spaces and structures do we need to develop to support prospective teachers to reflect critically and take actions to set high expectations and foster high achievement in all students, especially those who with diverse backgrounds from nondominant and marginalized local communities? How can we avoid the pitfalls, as Zeichner (2020) cautions, that goals are articulated but not practiced? We must also question the presumption that the quality of teacher preparation can be evaluated and improved through assessments that are decontextualized from the life and experience of teachers and students in real classrooms and that are insensitive to the vulnerability of students and teachers from the nondominant and marginalized communities. The stories of Ella, Judy, Karla, and Doug shared in this book reveal that future teachers need appropriate support to internalize programmatic goals of teaching for equity and implement transformative actions to achieve those goals. How can we provide the type of support to make the transformation to happen? Kretchmar and Zeichner (2016) provide a vision of Teacher Preparation 3.0 that will prepare community teachers, linking education reform to broader movements for social justice in the context of the specific communities of which the schools are a part. In Teacher

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Preparation 3.0, teacher education is grounded not only in the expertise of teacher educators but also that of schools and communities. These types of programs “value community expertise, [emphasize] place-based learning, and prepare community teachers who are knowledgeable of the communities in which they teach” (p. 428). Murrell (2000) defines community teachers as those who “typically live and work in the same under resourced urban neighborhoods and communities where students from diverse backgrounds live and go to school” and a community teacher “develops the contextualized knowledge of culture, community, and identity of children and their familiesas the core of their teaching practice” (p. 340). Positive outcomes of community-based learning in teacher education programs (e.g., Guillen & Zeichner, 2018; Zeichner et  al., 2016;  Zygmunt et  al., 2016) provides evidence that  Teacher Preparation 3.0 visions a new and more democratic “architecture” (Zeichner, 2016) in which schools, universities, and local communities work in equitable ways to prepare future teachers.

9.1  A  Framework for a Transformative Teacher Education Community Building on Teacher Preparation 3.0, I propose a transformative teacher education community that includes cooperating teachers in schools, university-based teacher educators, parents and community members, and prospective teachers. I argue that in such a community, prospective teachers should be considered as active participants and change agents, bringing their unique perspectives, struggles, voices, and wisdom that can contribute to the co-construction of teacher education knowledge and practice. However, uniting the four parties together by itself will not automatically make it a transformative community. Ella, Judy, Karla, and Doug’s experiences demonstrate that they were more or less part of the four parties—mentored and supervised by the cooperating teachers and university supervisors and to a certain extent, included parents and community members in their teaching as well. Yet they did not achieve transformative learning about diversity and equity. Thus, uniting the four groups together presents both promise and challenge. The promise— developing educational and social equity in tandem—is clear; the challenge is how to fulfill that promise. In the previous chapters, I laid out how the efforts to prepare critically reflective teachers did not achieve full potential was a direct result of two problems: (1) a failure to use prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflection as a springboard for collaborative and critical reflection on real teaching practices and (2) a failure to focus efforts for transformative actions both on the level of the individual prospective teacher and at a broader institutional and community level. The first problem results in prospective teachers talking the talk but not walking the walk; the second problem leaves even successful individuals isolated in an unresponsive institution as well as insulated from the communities that nurture their students. The root of both problems is a lack of a shared theoretical framework as a common

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ground among the four parties that could allow them to mobilize their unique experiences and struggles toward effective transformation. In order to overcome these challenges, I propose to adopt critical reflection for transformative learning as a theoretical and pedagogical framework that unites the four parties to successfully accomplish transformative learning (Fig. 9.1). In the final pages of this book, I will articulate how the four parties in the transformative community can work in solidarity toward transformative learning for educational equity. I would like to reemphasize that critical reflection is a hermeneutic approach that involves repeated reexamination of one’s assumptions about knowledge and understanding, particularly those that are socially, politically, or culturally based. Important as critical reflection in learning, no matter how critical it is, reflection itself cannot lead to transformative learning—it is the emancipatory action that leads to transformation. Key to this framework is the systematic movement from analyzing basic assumptions to taking action to transform learning by both teachers and students. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, the full hermeneutic model of critical reflection for transformative learning, including a cycle of six steps from assumption analysis to reflection on reflection-based action, has the power to equip teacher educators a theoretical sensitivity to conduct research on the content and quality of prospective teacher reflection, based on which to better design their teaching and supervision to nurture prospective teachers’ critical reflection. Implemented in the transformative teacher education community, it can offer a structure for collaborative reflection among the four parties to achieve transformative learning.

Universitybased Teacher Educators

Cooperating Teachers

Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning

Parents and Community Members

Prospective Teachers

Fig. 9.1  A transformative teacher education community for educational equity

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The framework provides clear guidance for the four parties to engage in a process of intellectual exploration starting with analyzing and critiquing prior assumptions about teaching and learning, especially those grounded on longstanding, taken-for-granted deficit models related to teaching and learning of diverse learners. Members can then work together to recognize how those assumptions are socially constructed in specific historical and cultural contexts, then actively search for alternative solutions to the ways in which diverse learners are failed by our current educational systems. These steps form the basis for members to call into question the current assumptions and institutional structures that have guided current practices of teaching diverse students. At this point, they do not stop—they continue to implement alternative actions in their classrooms, the school, and the community, and further analyze the effect of the reflection-based actions on student learning, upon which they may make further decisions on whether the reflection-based actions better support diverse students and families. This process will trigger further cycles of critical reflection for transformative learning. During this process, counternarratives from members in the transformative community who have lived experiences of inequity can be used as resources for the critical analysis of distorted assumptions and their experiences can be funds of knowledge that contribute to the development of alternative solutions for transformation (Miller, Liu, & Ball, 2020). The framework, when adopted by cooperating teachers as well as prospective teachers, can help them grow into transformative intellectuals who “develop a discourse that unites the language of critique with the language of possibility, so that social educators recognize they can make changes” (Giroux, 1988, p. 196) and generate new knowledge based on the experiences and expertise from the community (Ball, 2009, 2012; Brito & Ball, 2020). As transformative intellectuals, they take an active role in reshaping curriculum and pedagogy for learners through their own reflection-­ based actions and working with the larger community on the basis of shared knowledge as well as a shared commitment to social and educational equity. As revealed in this book, one problem in the work of preparing reflective teachers is the focus of facilitating reflection by individual prospective teachers. Little attention is paid to collaborative reflection among the community of prospective teachers, teacher educators, cooperating teachers, and community members (Zeichner & Liu, 2010). I argue that integrating critical reflection for transformative learning in the teacher education community will enable university-based teacher education programs, schools, and the local community to work together on a more democratic basis to prepare the next generation of teachers—as the former prospective teachers become in-service teachers, they work with the community to further support colleagues and future prospective teachers to become transformative intellectuals.

9.2  A Potential to Achieve Taking the case of Judy as an example, in the transformative teacher education community, Judy wrote down in her ePortfolio reflection her puzzle about why the African American bus coordinator commented that the African American students

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would end up in jail if they were not under control. This puzzle, instead of being ignored, as in reality, would be brought up as an opportunity by her supervisor or cooperating teacher in a mentoring meeting including community mentors, perhaps some parents of color and the bus coordinator herself, and some teachers of color including the African American teacher who guest taught in Judy’s equity unit. The parents would share counternarratives that it is true that they had friends or family members in jail but the truth behind the numbers is that they were not supported starting day one at school and that they were failed by the system—they were over disciplined in schools, they were given lower expectations, they lived in food deserts, and they had few role models in schools. They would continue sharing that as parents, they received calls frequently from schools reporting behavior issues of their kids with subjective phrases such as “defiance” or “disrespect.” The African American teacher would contribute counternarratives that students of color have intellectual talents—they can do math, science, and they can read and write, just like her and her colleagues of color. The bus coordinator would  add that she did not personally believe the kids in her bus would end up in jail because they were fundamentally bad, but she did believe that these kids need to go through more obstacles and work harder to prove themselves against the odds of one out of three African American males ends up in jail. She might continue with the story of her younger brother who was always treated as a troublemaker by his teachers and spent 6 months in jail after high school without committing any crime. The police caught him, claiming he was a robber, and did not release him even though the real thief was already in jail. Therefore, the “control” she told Judy was actually a coping strategic response to a society with a history of catastrophically policing African American bodies. During the mentoring meeting, parents and community members offered opportunities for Judy and her peers to visit their homes and local community centers to see their daily life. Equipped with a new lens, what Judy and her peers could see were strengths and resources they have and efforts they make in educating their children, a paradigm shift from a deficit lens. With these counternarratives, Judy’s supervisor would share some thoughts from Mezirow’s work about social and cultural distortions involving taken-for-granted assumptions that pertain to power, which in return legitimize and enforce those assumptions. Mezirow points to a common social–cultural distortion, failing to recognize self-fulfilling and self-validating beliefs and acting as if they were objective reality. Therefore it is important to recognize and question those so-called universal truth about students with diverse backgrounds. As a consequence, Judy’s ePortfolio reflection on this incidence would be shared with members in the meeting rather than being left unread: I had a conversation with my mentors, including the bus coordinator, about my interaction with [the coordinator]. We talked about the fact that the society contributes to the inequalities. [The coordinator] had personally experienced black children ending up in jail. Her experience told me that black children ending up in jail is because the system failed them. We should stop labeling children from day one when  they enter the school system. Otherwise, what we do is only going to perpetuating the system.

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Judy’s supervisor would prompt Judy to use the bus coordinator experience to reflect critically on her assumptions about Rebecca. Judy would realize that just like the society always label African American males as criminals, she and her cooperating teacher had labeled Rebecca as a difficult child soon after she joined their class in the middle of the semester, not so much because she behaved so differently, but because she looked so different from the other children and because their colleagues constantly shared at the faculty lounge their stories of how students of color made trouble. This realization could help Judy and her cooperating teacher explore alternative ways to work with Rebecca. For example, one way would be to listen to the expertise of parents and their African American colleagues. One parent might say, “Don’t label my child. Treat her as the other kids. Give her high expectation and support her to read and write. Simple as it is.” Some teachers of color might suggest an asset-based alternative, “What is Rebeca good at? Find it out and build from there.” Judy and her cooperating teacher would recall that Rebecca was good at painting, she was an artist; Rebecca was a leader, always encouraging her peers to adventure new experiences in learning; she knew how to do Kwanzaa celebration. So she would be a helper in the lesson of Kwanzaa celebration along with the African American guest teacher, maybe even with her parents, sharing stories of her family values and practices related to Kwanzaa—she became a narrator of her lived experiences, no longer just a listener who was placed at the far corner of the classroom while her history and people being narrated. With this transformation of Judy’s teaching, how might Rebecca’s experience of learning also be transformed? During the free choice  time, Rebecca might well forget to put on the artist T-shirt in her excitement to paint, but because her enthusiasm was recognized by her teachers she would not be taken out of the classroom. Instead, she would be encouraged to show her artwork to the class. Rebecca would not be disciplined and segregated based on behavioral issues due to her unfamiliarity with classroom routines; instead, she would be included as a member of her class, thriving based on her strengths and interests, as all children deserve in an equitable and democratic educational system. This kind of transformative teacher education that has the potential to change the lives of our children—especially our children of color—should be the goal of teacher educators and teacher education programs. We know it is possible; through the course of this book, I have provided some stories and methods to work toward the goal. Now our task is to put it into effect, to move our country and our society toward a more just and equitable place for everyone.

References Ball, A. F. (2009). Toward a theory of generative change in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms. American Educational Research Journal, 46(1), 45–72. Ball, A. F. (2012). Presidential address: To know is not enough: Knowledge, power, and the zone of generativity. Educational Researcher Journal, 41(8), 283–293.

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Brito, E., & Ball, A. F. (2020). Realizing the theory of generative change using a Freirean Lens: Situating the zone of generativity within a liberatory framework. Action in Teacher Education, 42(1), 19–30. Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Guillen, L., & Zeichner, K. (2018). A university-community partnership in teacher education from the perspective of community-based teacher educators. Journal of Teacher Education, 69(2), 140–153. Kretchmar, K., & Zeichner, K. (2016). Teacher Prep 3.0: A vision for teacher education to impact social transformation. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(4), 417–433. Miller, R., Liu, K., Ball, A. (2020). Critical counter-narrative as transformative methodology for educational equity. Review of Research in Education, 44(1), 269–300. Murrell, P. C., Jr. (2000). Community teachers: A conceptual framework for preparing exemplary urban teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 69(4), 338–348. Zeichner, K. (2016). Advancing social justice and democracy in teacher education: Teacher preparation 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 52(4), 150–155. Zeichner, K. (2020). Preparing teachers as democratic professionals. Action in Teacher Education, 42(1), 38–48. Zeichner, K., & Liu, K. (2010). A critical analysis of reflection as the goal of teacher education. In N. Lyons (Ed.), Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry (pp. 67–84). New York, NY: Springer. Zeichner, K., Bowman, M., Guillen, L., & Napolitan, K. (2016). Engaging and working in solidarity with local communities in preparing the teachers of their Children. Journal of Teacher Education, 67(4), 277–290. Zygmunt, E., Clark, P., Clausen, J., Mucherah, W., & Tancock, S. (2016). Transforming teacher education for social justice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Appendix: Multiple Sources of Data

ePortfolio Reflection Artifacts I collected the four prospective teachers’ ePortfolio reflection artifacts from their third semester to their fifth semester  (three semesters altogether), coding them according to the six stages of critical reflection discussed in Chap. 1. This helped me understand the nature and quality of prospective teacher critical reflections in their ePortfolios. Three coders coded the data using the same categories to ensure interrater reliability, a research method for triangulation commonly employed to improve the validity of the coding procedure. A comparison of the coding decisions of the three coders resulted in inter-rater reliability of 0.85; I also conducted “member checks” to improve the validity of the findings. This analysis of the prospective teacher reflections in the ePortfolio led to questions that guided my interviews with prospective teachers.

Interviews with the Four Prospective Teachers I conducted multiple interviews with the prospective teachers to develop an understanding of why they reflected as they did in their ePortfolios. I interviewed each prospective teacher four times, once at the beginning of their fourth-semester practicum, again at the end of the fourth semester, a third time at the beginning of the fifth semester (student teaching), and once at the end of the fifth semester. Each interivew lasted at least an hour. The first interview was guided by the analysis of prospective teachers’ third-semester reflection artifacts and focused on gaining an overall understanding of their teacher education experience in general and their experiences in their ePortfolio reflection. I also asked them about perceptions of reflection and critical reflection. At the end of the fourth semester, I conducted the second interview asking for their overall experiences in the fourth semester and what they reflected in their ePortfolio that semester. At the beginning of the fifth semester, I interviewed the prospective teachers © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. Liu, Critical Reflection for Transformative Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01955-0

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about what they wanted to achieve by the end of the student teaching semester for their ePortfolios andreflections. Then, at the end of the fifth semester, I interviewed them again, asking them to summarize their student teaching experiences and reflect if they achieved the goals they set at the beginning of the semester. Once again, I asked them their perceptions of reflection and critical reflection. In addition, I asked relevant questions related to the classroom observations during each interview.  

Interviews with Teacher Educators and Staff Teacher educators include faculty as well as TAs and supervisors (who are mostly graduate students). I conducted interviews with them during the fourth and the fifth semesters to understand the goals of the ePortfolio program in terms of prospective teacher reflection and the ways in which the program has worked toward achieving the stated goals in prospective teacher reflection. I paid specific attention to the four cases’ fourth- and fifth-semester supervisors because they had considerable knowledge about prospective teachers’ teaching and reflections through seminars, classroom teaching observations, and post-teaching debriefings. Each interview lasted about an hour. These interviews illuminated the ways the teacher education program supports (or impedes) critical reflection at different stages for different reasons.

Interviews with Cooperating Teachers The cooperating teachers’ influences on the prospective teachers were significant because prospective teachers spent longer time with them than campus-based university teacher educators. I interviewed the four cases’ fourth- and fifth-semester cooperating teachers, except for Karla’s fourth semester cooperating teacher because of a time conflict. During the interviews, cooperating teachers talked about their understanding of the concepts of reflection and critical reflection and their preferred styles of reflection. They also talked about the kind of reflections they saw from the prospective teachers they worked with and whether these reflections were integrated or shown in their teaching or not. Each interview lasted about an hour. The interview data were very insightful for understanding the four prospective teachers’ daily reflections and reflection-based teaching not necessarily shown in their ePortfolios.

 bservation of Prospective Teachers’ Teaching O and Post-Teaching Conferences In addition to interviewing the prospective teachers and teacher educators, I also observed the four prospective teachers’ classroom teaching twice in their fourth-­ semester practicum and twice in their student teaching semester. Each observation lasted a different amount of time, depending on the length of an entire lesson or activity I observed. During the student teaching semester, an observation lasted

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much longer, sometimes a whole morning or the entire afternoon, because I wanted to see how prospective teachers teach on their own in a relative long period of time. After their teaching, I observed their post teaching conference, usually between the prospective teacher and the supervisor, but sometimes the cooperating teacher joined in a “triad” conference as well. This observation helped me understand the classroom environment that they frequently reflected about and showed how supervisors and cooperating teachers give comments to prospective teachers’ teaching. Table A.1 summarizes the different types of data sources that I used in this study. Table A.1  Multiple data sources Types of data/ Prospective participants teachers

Interview

Observation 

Documents

Supervisors

Methods instructors

Cooperating teacher

Faculty members and ePortfolio designers Once each Once each: Once each: 4 Times each: Once each: Interviewed Interviewed the Interviewed Interviewed Beginning of third-­semester once for each five faculty once each the fourth members math methods cases’ prospective semester and one fourth- and instructor teachers’ End of the fifth-semester ePortfolio fourth semester supervisors in Fourth-­ designer; the fourth and semester social cooperating Beginning of Interviewed fifth semester studies and PE teachers the fifth John twice (except instructors, semester music methods Karla’s fourth End of fifth semester CT) instructor for semester MCEA N/a  No direct  4 Times Each: Twice Each:  Once Each: observation Observed each Observed each Observed the third semester of the supervisor’s prospective math methods cooperating teachers twice seminars at instructor and teachers’ least twice in the fourth teaching, but the fourth during the semester and fourth and fifth semester social observation twice in the of their studies semesters; fifth semester interactions observed each methods with their instructors supervisor’s students post teaching during my conferences at observation least twice.  of prospective teachers’ teaching and post-teaching conferences Syllabi Syllabi N/a N/a ePortfolio Assignments Assignments reflection Other reflective journals Video-­recorded lessons

Index

A Actions, reflection-based coding for, 122, 125 definition of, 49, 50 Assessment edTPA as an example of, 12 ePortfolios and, 70 reflection and, 63, 74, 79, 98, 100, 110 Assumptions, analysis of coding for, 122, 124 definition of, 7, 8, 47, 100, 122, 124, 131 Audience for reflection awareness of, effect on reflection, 123 Awareness, contextual coding for, 122, 124 definition of, 7, 8, 133, 122, 124 B Brookfield, 3, 6, 8, 43, 51, 80, 100, 122 C Classroom teaching discrepancies from reflection in, 21, 110 focus on technical aspects of, 42, 43, 86, 126 need to observe actions in, 138 role of cooperating teacher in, 72, 75 spectrum of, 22, 39 Coding a priori, 120, 122–125, 127 example of, 119, 120, 122, 126, 127 open, 120, 123, 125–127

process of, 119, 123, 125 tools for, 120 Community funds of knowledge, 35, 40, 132 learning, 9, 16, 33, 40, 62, 102, 111, 116, 127, 130, 132 teacher education, 2, 9, 11, 16, 46, 76, 81, 102, 115, 127, 130–132 Contextual awareness coding for, 122, 124 definition of, 7, 8, 113, 122, 124 Cooperating teachers, 8, 10, 14–16, 72, 75, 79, 83–88, 92, 95, 97, 99, 101–103, 106, 109, 112, 114, 116, 130, 132–134, 138, 139 Critical race theory, 51 Critical reflection coding for, 119–127 conceptions of prospective teachers, 4, 6, 29, 77, 100, 107, 112, 115, 122, 131, 138 definition of Brookfield, S.D., 3, 6, 8, 42, 51, 80, 100, 122 Liu, 6, 8, 41, 45, 47, 49, 51, 76, 100, 109, 112, 122, 132 Mezirow, J., 3, 5, 6, 22, 34, 41, 44, 46, 50, 51, 100, 117, 125, 133 Zeichner, 5, 16, 45, 47, 50, 52, 116, 132 diagram of, 30, 33, 41 framework for, 15, 41, 98, 100, 104, 112, 116, 123, 127 prompting questions for, 81, 113 stages of, 6, 8, 100, 113, 122, 137

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Index

142 Critical reflection (cont.) teacher educatrs, 4–6, 8, 14–16, 29, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50–52, 56, 64, 74, 76, 77, 83, 98–100, 102–105, 107, 109, 111, 116, 119, 122, 123, 126, 127, 130–132, 138 transformative learning, and, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 21–43, 74, 77, 79, 97–116, 119–127, 132 D Demographic imperative, 1 Discipline of students, 39, 40 Distortions, social and political definition of, 6 examples of, 40, 49, 52, 100 Diversity, student implications for teacher education, 2 E Eportfolios affordances of, for collaboration, 76 reflections, 9, 10, 45, 57, 58, 60, 64, 68–70, 75, 83, 90, 97, 108, 137, 138 assessment and, 108 audience for, 68, 71, 105, 106 collaborative affordances of, 8 employment and, 63 reflection and, 11, 15, 75, 97, 137 standards and, 64, 67 teacher education programs’ use of, 9, 10, 15, 64, 76 Equity, educational conception of prospective teachers, 6, 46, 56, 74, 76, 100, 104, 127, 130–132 teacher educators, 104, 127, 131 as focus of critical reflection, 76, 100, 104 as goal of teacher education, 6, 46, 56, 64, 74, 76 Exclusion (disciplinary practice), 37, 39, 80, 81, 99 F Funds of knowledge, community, 27, 35, 40, 132 G Grounded theory coding and, 119

I Imaginative speculation coding for, 122, 124 definition of, 7, 8, 28, 49, 133, 122, 124 examples of, 28, 49, 113, 122 L Learning communities, 6, 9, 10, 16, 33, 36, 62, 102, 112, 126, 127, 130–132 transformative, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 15, 16, 22, 28, 36, 39, 41, 43, 48, 51, 62, 74, 79, 83, 88–91, 95, 98, 100, 102, 104, 111–113, 120, 125–127, 130–132 M Mezirow, 3, 5, 6, 21, 34, 41, 46, 50, 51, 100, 125, 133 Multicultural education critical reflection and, 2 need for, 2, 94 O Observation, classroom for data triangulation examples of, 75, 126 necessity of conducting, 22, 114 P Prospective teachers conceptions of reflection, 15 classroom teaching vs.written, 15, 63, 138 demographics of, 11 ePortfolios and assessment of, 76, 77, 105, 110 attitude toward work in, 60, 61 understanding of goals of, 45–53, 81 reflection, 9, 10, 21, 31, 35, 46, 53, 67–77, 90, 97–101, 109, 122 video-based reflection and, 62, 110–112, 114, 116 Protocol assessments, 125 transformative, 125–127 R Races, 11, 21, 22, 33–35, 38–40, 51, 83, 88, 98, 126 Reflection actions based on, 49

Index assessment and edTPA as an example of, 2, 12, 64, 111 Brookfield on, 3, 6, 8, 42, 51, 80, 100, 122 coding for, 15, 119–127, 137 conceptions of prospective teachers, 2–10, 13–16, 22, 29, 31, 39–41, 43, 45, 46, 49–53, 55–64, 67–77, 79, 81, 83, 84, 88, 91, 92, 95, 97–116, 119, 122, 123, 125–127, 130–132, 137, 138 teacher educators, 3, 9, 10, 25, 55–64, 67–77, 81, 99, 106, 108–111, 119, 123, 126 critical coding for, 119–127 definition of, 48, 50 diagram of, 30, 33, 41 framework for, 4, 15, 58, 111 stages of, 6–8, 13, 100, 112, 113, 137 transformative learning, and, 98, 127 Dewey on, 4, 10, 11, 25, 33, 74, 80, 88, 90, 103 edTPA, effect on, 2, 12, 64, 111 ePortfolios and, 15, 97, 138 goals of, 8, 64, 77, 98, 119, 122, 138 Hermeneutic of, 6, 7, 25, 79, 100, 122, 131 Mezirow on, 3, 5, 6, 21, 34, 41, 44, 46, 50, 51, 100, 117, 125, 133 model of, 100, 131 performance of, 22, 39 practical coding for, 122, 124, 127 definition of, 76, 122, 124 Schön on, 4 spectrum of, 22, 39 standards and, 64 video-based, 62, 110 Sunshining in, 10 technical coding for, 122, 124 definition of, 122, 124 transformative learning, and, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 21–43, 74, 77, 79, 97–116, 119–127, 132 van Manen on, 5, 40, 50, 64, 71, 122 Zeichner on, 2–7, 9, 15, 16, 25, 31, 45, 47, 52, 53, 71, 91, 93, 116, 129, 130, 132 S Skepticism, reflective coding for, 122, 124 Social distortions definition of, 127 examples of, 127

143 Speculation, imaginative coding for, 122, 124 definition of, 7, 8, 28, 49, 113, 122, 124 examples of, 28, 49, 113, 122 Stages of critical Reflection as a hermeneutic, 7, 122, 131 as a Priori codes, 122 Standards ePortfolios and assessment of, 10, 15, 68, 83, 99, 108 Students, K-12 diversity of, 15 exclusion, practices of, 39 Supervision triad model of, 15, 112 role of, in teacher education, 15, 76, 92, 100, 102, 103, 112, 116, 131 training for, 102, 103 Supervisors role of, in teacher education, 10, 15, 21, 79, 88, 92, 93, 102, 103, 105–107, 109, 130, 138 training of, 14, 74, 102, 103, 120 T Teacher education assessment in, 74 community-based, 16 educational equity as a goal of, 6, 46, 56, 64, 74, 76, 100, 104, 127, 130–132 ePortfolios in, 9, 10, 15, 45, 52, 55, 57, 64, 69, 79, 83, 97, 99, 108, 111, 137, 138 3.0 model, 16, 129, 130 transformative diagram of, 30, 33, 41 Teacher educators conceptions of reflection, 15, 112 ePortfolios and, 3, 56, 63, 64, 68, 74, 75, 83, 89, 99, 101 role of, in teacher education, 102 Teachers cooperating role in teacher education, 83, 97, 99, 101–103, 105, 106, 110, 112, 116, 130–132 prospective, 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 21, 35–37, 46, 51, 52, 55, 56, 69, 73, 81, 84–87, 89–94, 101–103, 105–107, 109, 111, 120, 123–125, 129, 138 Teacher socialization theory implications for role of cooperating teachers, 79

Index

144 Teaching, classroom discrepancies from reflection in, 21, 110 focus on technical aspects of, 43, 86, 126 need to observe actions in, 138 role of cooperating teacher in, 72, 75 video-based reflection on, 22, 39 Technical reflection definition, 122, 124 examples of, 122 Transformative learning missed opportunities for, 79–95

protocols, 125–127 teacher education diagram of, 41 V Van manen, 5, 40, 50, 64, 71, 122 Video-based reflection, 62, 101, 111, 113, 115 Z Zeichner, K.M., 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 15, 16, 25, 31, 45, 47, 52, 53, 71, 91, 93, 116, 129, 130, 132