Teacher Education Curriculum, Preservice

Teacher Education Curriculum Reform

Reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s in teacher education proceeded along two very different lines, representing contrasting conceptions of teaching and learning. Generally, additional credit hours were not available, so changes took place within established institutional boundaries. Seeking to change school teaching practices, one group of teacher educators embraced humanistic psychology, which found a place alongside established behaviorist practices. Inquiry and various approaches to group work and human relations gained prominent places in methods courses. In time, open or informal education practices imported from England swept into early childhood and elementary teacher education. Experimentation with different patterns of student teaching, including team teaching, took place. Echoing the values of forgotten progressive education practices, student needs and interests were given an elevated place in curriculum decision making where intrinsic was preferred to extrinsic student motivation and active learning emphasized. Beginning teachers increasingly were urged to become agents of social change. The spirit of the 1960s and 1970s is [Page 850]evident in the titles of Association for Supervision Curriculum Development yearbooks: Perceiving, Behaving, Becoming: A New Focus For Education; Education for an Open Society; Schools in Search of Meaning; Feeling, Valuing, and the Art of Growing: Insights Into the Affective.

Paralleling these developments, a second group of teacher educators drew inspiration from the findings of process-product research, and embraced instructional technology and various models of individualized instruction, partially in response to charges reminiscent of the 1950s, that students were not performing academically as well as they could or should, but also to charges of irrelevancy. Competency-based teacher education emphasizing mastery of specific skills associated with effective teaching grew in influence, and greater emphasis was placed on the assessment of learning. Researchers identified skills associated with effective teaching, classroom discipline, and group management. Jacob Kounin's list included withit-ness, overlapping, smoothness, momentum, group focus, and positive group alerting cues. Earlier, publication of the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain, edited by Benjamin Bloom and published in 1956, and the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Affective Domain, edited by David Krathwohl and published in 1964, transformed the curriculum of teacher education, becoming part of the teaching of unit and lesson planning across the nation for both groups. The taxonomies provided a means for thinking systematically about educational aims and, when formed as behavioral objectivesstatements of what students are to be able to do and under what conditions they are to do it as proof of learningprovided means for assessing learning outcomes and individualizing instruction. For a time, microteaching, which involved teaching discrete instructional skills to peers, videotaping the performance, and then receiving criticism on that performance, enjoyed a prominent place in methods courses.

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