Contents

Teacher Education
CoT
CEC
ILF (NSF Project)

Teacher Education: Community of Teachers

URL: http://education.indiana.edu/~comteach/

CoT is a professional development program for pre-service teachers working toward secondary teacher certification in which they join an on-going community and remain a part of that community for the duration of their study. The entire process of learning as a member of CoT occurs fluidly through the reflexive relations among secondary school participation and university seminar participation, as well as through the active and reflective practices requisite for building one's portfolio of Program Expectations.

Context	In the spring of 1999, I joined a research team examining the Community of Teachers (CoT) program. The CoT is a unique teacher education program whereby students participate in a community of pre-service teachers and do extensive fieldwork rather than attending typical pre-service teacher courses. I attended each class in the seminar, attended extra-curricular events, and conducted interviews with participants.
Conditions	I entered the research project in its first semester, and participated in the project for two years. The first semester, I attended each class session and met with the research team to debrief field notes. The following summer, I spent three weeks examining the data with the research team. This work resulted in the Community of Teachers paper included here. The following semesters, I participated in more focused data gathering, and conducted follow-up interviews with members of the CoT program.
Scope	The paper included here has been accepted for publication in The Journal of the Learning Sciences. This paper attempts to give a grounded account of community life. Currently, we are exploring other issues more deeply, including how well does the program prepare transformative teachers, how does the portfolio process contribute to students' learning, and what role does the mentor process have in teacher development.
Role	My role in this project has been to observe one CoT seminar, and then study themes in more depth in subsequent semesters. I have attended several CoT meetings (formal and informal) over the past year as well as interviewed program participants. In this particular paper, I wrote parts of the teacher education literature section, specific portions of the data descriptions, and portions of the conclusions and implications. My strongest contribution has been my understanding of the teacher education literature.

Project Papers:

Barab, S. A., Barnett, M., & Squire, K. (in press). Building a community of teachers: Navigating the essential tensions in practice. To appear in The Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Conference Presentations

Squire, K., Barnett, M., Thomas, M., & Barab, S. (2000). Fostering against-the grain teaching in a community of teachers. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association, Seattle, WA.

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