Proactive Images for Pre-Service Teachers: Identity, Expectations, and Avoiding Practice Shock

215 Pages·2019·2.433 MB·English

by  Jeremy Delamarter

Proactive Images for
Pre-Service Teachers
Identity, Expectations, and
Avoiding Practice Shock
Jeremy Delamarter
Proactive Images for Pre-Service Teachers
Jeremy Delamarter
Proactive Images
for Pre-Service
Teachers
Identity, Expectations, and Avoiding
Practice Shock
Jeremy Delamarter
Northwest University
Kirkland, WA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-13490-7 ISBN 978-3-030-13491-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13491-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932938
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This book is dedicated to the soon-to-be teachers who are knee-deep in the
essential work of becoming and to the teacher educators who are walking
alongside them.
P
reface
Becoming a teacher is hard. Staying a teacher is even harder. Every day, it
seems, the news tells us of failed education levies, of dedicated educators
working two or three jobs to put food on the table, of massive student
loan debt, and of crushing workloads. In Washington State, where I live
and work, we are facing a massive teacher shortage. The combination
of baby-boomer retirement, a rapidly growing student population, and
a high teacher turnover rate means that we can barely find teachers for
core courses, much less electives. Every fall, I get phone calls from des-
perate administrators, hoping against hope that I know of a math teacher
or a science teacher or an elementary special education teacher or some-
one who can fill these much-needed positions. There’s a perfect storm
of demographic shifts, financial pressures, and cultural mistrust working
against us. Like I said, becoming a teacher is hard, but staying a teacher
is harder. And, unfortunately, we teacher educators have made it even
harder than it has to be.
In addition to the external pressures listed above, teachers also leave
the profession for a much simpler and much more powerful reason: they
didn’t know what they were getting into. More specifically, they were
never prepared for the realities of being a teacher. Yes, they were taught
how to design lessons. Yes, they learned management techniques. Yes,
they were grilled in the fundamentals of differentiation and literacy strat-
egies and authentic assessment and all the things that preparation pro-
grams pride themselves in. But, in all that mix, they were never taught
to be a teacher. They were never taught to make the internal shift from
vii
viii PrEfACE
one part of the classroom to the other. In fact, they were never taught
that such a shift even needs to take place. Instead of helping pre-service
teachers confront their expectations of teaching and develop realistic
and healthy teacher identities, teacher preparation programs have main-
tained a profound and sustained silence. It’s not that pre-service teachers
have been taught wrong, per se; when it comes to issues of expectation
management and identity development, they just haven’t been taught
anything.
This book was born out of a desire to give teacher educators and
pre-service teachers the framework and language to talk about expec-
tations of teaching, about concerns and hopes for future classrooms,
about coming to grips with being wrong and learning to grow because
of it, about the people we used to be and the teachers we’re becoming.
This book is unabashedly optimistic, and it’s grounded in the belief that
learning is transformational. It will always be difficult to become and stay
a teacher. Hopefully, however, this book will help make it just a little bit
easier.
Of course, no book comes into being through the efforts of the
author alone, and this book is no exception. I owe an enormous debt
of gratitude to the insights and critical eyes of Jeremiah Webster, Will
Mari, Joe McQueen, Elisabeth Kraus, and Abby Stovall. I am par-
ticularly grateful to Clint Bryan, whose pro-bono editorial advice
proved invaluable; to my dean, Molly Quick, and my colleagues in the
College of Education Mary Ewart, Tom Alsbury, Paul Kress, and Suzan
Kobashigawa, whose patience allowed me to write; to my provost Jim
Heugel and the Clark Grant committee, who underwrote some of the
research that led to this manuscript; to the editorial team at Palgrave
Macmillan for their tireless efforts to bring this book to life; to my stu-
dents at Northwest University, who let me test some of this material on
them, and who were unfailingly kind and supportive along the way; to
rosy, Lucas, and Max, who never let me forget what was most impor-
tant; and, finally, to my wife, Tracey, who has done more to help me fin-
ish this project than she will ever know.
Kirkland, USA Jeremy Delamarter
c
ontents
Part I The Nature of the Problem
1 Beginnings 3
The Goals of This Book 8
Who This Book Is for 9
The Way This Book Is Organized 11
References 13
2 Why Expectations Matter 15
Expectations as Shadows 17
Expectations as Representations 21
Simulacra: Effects and Impacts 28
Simulacra and Expectations of Teaching 31
References 35
3 One Step Removed 37
Firsthand Experiences 40
Secondhand Experiences 50
Wrapping It Up 58
References 61
4 Concern, Control, and Change 63
Fuller’s Framework of Concerns 64
ix
x CONTENTS
Rotter’s Framework of Control 74
Wrapping It Up 80
References 82
5 The Heart vs. The Head 85
The Inspiration/Content Dichotomy in Hollywood Films 92
The Inspiration/Content Dichotomy in Cultural Discourse 97
The Inspiration/Content Dichotomy in Pre-Service Teachers’
Expectations of Teaching 101
Looking at the Numbers 107
Looking at Ourselves 110
References 115
Part II Where Do We Go from Here?
6 Losing Your Illusions 119
The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance 126
Cognitive Dissonance and Pre-Service Teachers 133
Moving Forward 138
Wrapping It Up 146
References 147
7 Becoming Something New 149
Identity: A Brief Overview 151
Teacher Identity: Negotiating Among Self, Students,
and Subject 158
Transformative Learning 172
Wrapping It Up 179
References 182
8 So Much Left to Learn 189
The Known Unknowns 190
The Unknown Unknowns 200
Wrapping It Up 201
References 203
Index 207
PArT I
The Nature of the Problem