A Welcome Message from Cheryl Rosaen

Teacher Preparation Team Two Leader

We offer a warm welcome to Teacher Preparation Team Two, a community of professionals who are dedicated to preparing teachers for diverse classrooms.  Collaborating teachers, faculty and graduate students have been working together closely to develop courses and experiences in schools that engage teacher candidates deeply in exploration of a key question that influences important choices about curriculum, teaching, and assessment on a daily basis: 

What does it mean to build an inclusive learning community?

Our vision of an inclusive community is one where "difference" among students is not viewed as deficiency, but as natural cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, and racial variability.  Put simply, difference is the inevitable range of abilities that one expects in today's classrooms (Au, 1993; Diamond & Moore, 1995; Garcia, 1996; Roller, 1996).  Moreover, such communities consider the question posed by Roland Barth: "How can we make conscious, deliberate use of differences in social class, gender, age, ability, race and interest as resources for learning?" (1990, p. 514).  

We hold our own professional community to the same standards by striving to create an inclusive professional learning community to assure that each participant plays an active part in providing high quality teacher preparation for all teacher candidates.

Within our professional community, we want to support and guide teacher candidates in working toward several key goals:

• New teachers prepared at MSU should achieve a deep understanding of subject matters and of methods for "teaching for understanding."

• They should form a democratic commitment to the education of all children and to classrooms and schools that embrace diversity.

• They should learn how to establish learning communities in classrooms and schools.

• They should learn how to participate in the improvement of teaching, of schools, and of the teaching profession, and in those ways help to make a better world.

• They should learn how to integrate theory with practice and teaching experience with reflection on that experience.

Teacher candidates will progress toward those goals in stages: 

• In TE 150 and TE 250 (or TE 240), teacher candidates begin to consider issues that are foundational to teaching diverse learners, working to understand how concepts such as equity vs. equality, the hidden curriculum, and cultural capital can help them make sense of schools as organizations, teaching and learning patterns, and classroom life. 

• In TE 301, teacher candidates begin to work on thinking like a teacher, in a careful study of classroom management, motivating students to learn, and lesson planning.

• In TE 401 and TE 402, they begin to work on knowing like a teacher, integrating subject matter knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogy.

• In the intern year, teacher candidates begin to work on acting like a teacher, putting it all together in actual supervised practice.

The program incorporates several fundamental, intertwined,  and recurring themes:

• Teachers should grow steadily over a lifetime of practice; in teacher preparation, they should learn the intellectual habits conducive to steady growth.

• People learn not from activity alone, but from activity combined with reflection on that activity.

• Good teachers work at learning about their students.

• Good teachers work at learning from their colleagues near and far.

• Learning communities are as important to teachers as to students.

• Effective teaching combines the sort of wisdom that comes from direct experience and practice and the sort of wisdom that comes from systematic study and inquiry.

In practical terms, this means teacher candidates and interns--with ongoing support from their professional learning community--will work to develop what we are calling Productive Habits of Practice--ways of habitually thinking and acting that are consistent with the four program standards:

• Planning for instruction/teaching (resources, pacing, big picture, integration, assessment)

• Making adaptations and accommodations for differences among students

• Establishing and maintaining collaboration and communication

• Building an inclusive learning community (management, equity, safety)

• Promoting community/parent connections

• Participating in ongoing inquiry

• Engaging in portfolio development processes (professionalism, ongoing learning, reflection)

Our professional community welcomes approximately 100 new juniors each year, as well as continuing our work with approximately 100 seniors and 100 interns.  It includes an instructional staff of over 20 faculty and graduate students.  It also includes over 130 collaborating teachers and their principals who work in at least five school districts in the greater Lansing area. Yes, the community is large and it is challenging to assure that we create and maintain an inclusive professional learning community that acknowledges and appreciates the diversity within it. 

This website was created as one tool for providing information and maintaining good communication.  We hope you will make extensive and frequent us of it, and that you will let us know how we can make it a more effective tool for you.

Cheryl Rosaen

Team Leader, Teacher Preparation Team Two

References

Au, K. (1993).  Literacy instruction in multicultural settings.  Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Barth, R. (1990). Improving schools from within.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Diamond, B. & Moore, M. (1995). Multicultural literacy: Mirroring the reality of the classroom. White Plains, NY: Longman.

Garcia, E. E. (1996).  Preparing instructional professionals for linguistically and culturally diverse students.   In J. Sikula (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education, 802-819.  New York: Macmillan.

Roller, C. (1996). Variability not disability: Struggling readers in a workshop classroom.  Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

College of Education | MSU | Department of Teacher Education | Team 2 |