ABSTRACT
Teacher quality and teacher qualifications are keys to improving student learning. Effective teacher preparation is a major component of teacher quality, along with ongoing opportunities for teacher development and effective induction and mentoring for new teachers (National Commission for Teaching & America’s Future [NCTAF], 1996). Effective teachers know their content, understand how their students learn, are able to develop and teach curriculum, and also know how to determine and support their students’ needs. Accordingly, effective teacher preparation includes:
• A coherent curriculum that tightly intertwines theory and practice;
• Fieldwork that is integrated with class work, coupled with support from carefully selected mentors;
• An extended clinical component, with a minimum of 30 weeks of student teaching;
• An emphasis on learning-theory and child development, with extensive training in the ability to address the diverse needs of students. (California Education Policy Seminar, 1998, p. 10)
These characteristics of effective teacher preparation describe the Developmental Teacher Education (DTE) program at the University of California at Berkeley, a postbaccalaureate master’s degree program that began in the early 1980s and continues today to prepare elementary school teacher The four teachers who are the focus of this book are 1987 graduates of the DTE program. Three of them are still teaching today. Their stories are the heart of this longitudinal study, which chronicles the development of the pedagogical understanding across 15 years. In this book, I offer longitud nal case studies of their lives as teachers in the hope of providing insight about how teacher thinking develops over time and how it is influenced by personal and professional factors, including their preparation for teaching in the DTE program.
