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Conceptual Orientations in Teacher Education

Concern about the quality of teaching has focused attention on the quality of teacher preparation. Spurred by legislative mandates, commission reports, research findings, and personal commitments, teacher educators around the country are considering a variety of programmatic changes. To help teacher educators locate their efforts within a larger universe of alternatives, I discuss five conceptual orientations. Drawn from a larger survey of structural and conceptual alternatives in teacher education, the orientations highlight some of the traditions of thought and practice that have characterized the field. By conceptual orientation, I mean a cluster of ideas about the goals of teacher preparation and the means for achieving them. Conceptual orientations are not tied to particular programmatic structures. They can shape a single component or an entire professional sequence, apply to undergraduate as well as graduate-level programs. Nor are conceptual orientations mutually exclusive. By design and default, they can and indeed do exist side by side in the same program. Ideally, a conceptual orientation reflects a coherent perspective on teaching, learning, and learning to teach that gives direction to the practical activities of educating teachers. In reality, conceptual orientations in teacher education do not have uniform or explicit positions or well-developed practices. Still it is possible to summarize what supporters have to say about the teacher's role, teaching and learning, knowledge for teaching and learning to teach and to illustrate how these ideas have been expressed in programs and components. Although most of the descriptions reflect the espoused rather than the enacted curriculum, they reveal some of the variations within and among the various orientations. The orientations themselves emerged from a comparison of previous efforts to identify theoretical perspectives, models, and paradigms in teacher education (e.g. Joyce, 1975; Zeichner, 1983; Zimpher and Howey, 1987). While there is considerable overlap between this formulation and the earlier ones, there are also important differences. First, I give serious attention to the academic orientation, which is generally ignored by teacher educators. Second, I link the practical orientation with a renewed respect for the "wisdom of practice." Third, I eliminate what others call an inquiry orientation on the grounds that reflection is a generic professional disposition, not a distinct programmatic orientation. The fact that teacher educators of various persuasions adopt reflective teaching as a goal lends further support to this position.