Action Inquiry

Action Inquiry Buford Manion Grand Canyon University EDA 555 Shawn Feaster Johnson, Ed. D. April 19, 2010

Learning To Teach By being Learner’s First

Introduction
Nationally, there appears to be a growing recognition that teacher education programs do not fully prepare beginning teachers for the rigors of school teaching. However, rather than attempt to defend the need for universities to be able to meet this demand, I believe that it is more important to realistically appraise what is possible in teacher preparation - and what is not. Hence, it is more than reasonable to assert that teacher preparation programs are, by nature, inadequate and incomplete.
Dissatisfaction with teacher preparation programs may then be unduly exacerbated by attempting to achieve that which is not possible (fully preparing a beginning teacher to ‘cope’ with the demands of teaching) by responding to the multitude of requirements/expectations/competencies for beginning teachers (for example, such skills as those outlined by Reynolds, 1992; 1995). In so doing, it appears that an overarching understanding of what teacher preparation can be, and how it might be enacted, is pushed aside by the perceived need to pack the curriculum with all the knowledge, skills, attributes and practices necessary to address the multitude of demands that are perceived as needing to be addressed. Sadly, this approach to teacher preparation often means that there is a substantial lack of common understanding as to what could/should be done.
Therefore, in order to begin to seriously question how to prepare teachers in such a way that they might cope with the realities and demands of teaching and to be equipped with a theoretical background to translate into their teaching, we need, as Ashton (1996) has pointed out, a shift in the approaches to teacher education.
This questioning of what we do and why in teacher preparation has become increasingly

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