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Article Excerpt
Since the early 1990s, scholars have advocated for beginning teacher support (Darling-Hammond, 1995; Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1992; Huling-Austin, 1992). The establishment of national curriculum standards and federal legislation--namely, No Child Left Behind--created pressure to focus on beginning teachers' learning and the improvement of teaching quality. In response, states and school districts are moving the focus of teacher induction as socialization and emotional support (Feiman-Nemser, Schwille, Carver, & Yusko, 1998; Gold, 1996) to supporting learning consistent with national curriculum standards (Sweeny & DeBolt, 2000).
Underlying these responses is an assumption that a link exists among induction, beginning teachers' conceptions, teaching practice, and students' learning. In this review, we explore whether such a link is supported by the literature, and we suggest implications for research, policy, and practice.
CONCEPTIONS OF TEACHER INDUCTION AND LEARNING TO TEACH
Although learning to teach occurs in multiple stages of a teacher's career (Feiman-Nemser, 1983, 2001a), we focus on the teachers' first year because it is a crucial and problematic period for teachers. In fact, it has been found to shape teaching patterns and influence teacher retention (Ingersoll & Smith, 2004) and the influences of school context on teacher retention (Johnson & the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, 2004). First-year teachers assume responsibilities similar to those of experienced teachers while learning their job with limited experience and preparation (Wildman, Niles, Magliaro, & McLaughlin, 1989), which results in attending to classroom management and procedures instead of learning how to teach well and improve student learning (Dewey, 1964; Kagan, 1992; Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998). First-year teachers are encouraged to contextualize their subject and pedagogical preparation and concomitantly be members of a school community and adjust to its organization and culture (Griffin & Millers, 1987). How they are prepared to teach, which is often consistent with curriculum standards, is not always supported by their existing school cultures (Puk & Haines, 1999; Sykes & Bird, 1992).
In our review, we focus on the effects that teacher induction programs have on beginning teachers' teaching, instead of on how comfortable beginning teachers feel about and how well they are adjusting to their local contexts. Teacher induction programs have historically focused on the personal comfort levels of novices (Feiman-Nemser et al., 1998; Gold, 1996). Feeling comfortable does not necessarily lead to effective teaching and student learning (Anyon, 1981).
We recognize that a focus of many induction programs is that of helping novices adjust to the cultures of their schools (Huling-Austin, 1992), but simply adjusting to the existing context does not automatically lead one to be an effective teacher (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). As Wang and Odell (2003) showed, two interns developed strikingly different ways to adjust to a context, which led to different teaching and different consequences for students' learning even when offered opportunities to follow their own agendas in the same classroom, working with the same mentors.
We also examined the effects of formally structured components of teacher induction on beginning teachers given that conceptually based induction programs that focus on support for learning to teach are rare (Feiman-Nemser, 2001a), as are studies on program effects. These components include teacher mentoring relationships, which are a major supporting structure for beginning teachers in induction programs (Odell & Huling, 2000); different kinds of collaboration among beginning teachers and colleagues; and professional development activities designed to affect teaching and student achievement (Moir & Gless, 2001).
We assumed that any analysis of the effects of induction on beginning teachers' learning to teach is not adequate without a proper theorization of teaching. In this review, we examine the effects of teacher induction on beginning teachers' thinking about teaching, their teaching practice, and their students' learning. Teaching here means a professional practice that involves conceptions of knowledge, learning, and teaching (Richardson, 1996); relevant pedagogical reflections that move teachers through various contexts of teaching (Lampert & Clark, 1990); and the development of student knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
Specifically, we focus on the effects of induction on beginning teachers' learning to teach the kind of teaching envisioned by national curriculum and teaching standards (Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Teaching Consortium, 1992; National Council for the Social Studies, 1994; National Council of Teachers of English & the International Reading Association, 1996; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2000; National Research Council, 1996). Although varied in their objectives, foci, and content, these standards project learner-centered instruction where knowledge is seen as being constructed individually and collaboratively (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989); where learning is viewed as active sense making (Cobb, 1994) through collaborative inquiry (E. G. Cohen, 1984); and where teacher is regarded as organizer, challenger, and facilitator of student learning (Bigelow, 1990). Its goal is to meaningfully connect student learning with personal experiences (Resnick, 1987), challenge students' misconceptions, and nurture their deep understanding of concepts and conceptual relationships within and across different subjects (D. K. Cohen, McLaughlin, & Talbert, 1993). In addition, it urges students to discover, share, and examine their ideas (Bruner, 1960; Leinhardt, 1992), and it helps all students reach excellence regardless of their gender, race, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds (Kennedy, 1991a). We recognize that current standardized tests may not represent the visions and goals of the national curriculum and teaching standards, which clearly complicates the examination of the connections among teacher induction, teaching practice, and student achievement.
LITERATURE SELECTION AND REVIEW PROCESS
Literature was selected in three steps. First, we completed three ERIC (1) searches using keywords teacher induction and beginning teacher from 1960 to 2003 and teacher mentoring since 1997, given that the literature on mentoring before 1997 was reviewed and published by the first and second authors in 2002 (Wang & Odell, 2002b). Second, we selected relevant articles, books, and book chapters referenced in the studies from our initial ERIC searches. Third, we included articles, book chapters, and conference presentations from our personal collections.
We divided the literature into empirical and case studies, program and personal descriptions, and literature reviews and position papers. We selected the literature for further review on the basis of (a) whether it addressed issues of first-year teachers' learning to teach and induction program components that promote beginning teachers' learning and (b) whether it presented evidence of teachers' conceptual and practice changes or students' learning as influenced by the induction components.
Empirical and case studies fell into three categories based on how the influences of induction program components on beginning teachers' conceptions and practice were determined in each study. The first group of studies assumed the effects of induction components based on theoretical assumptions of effective learning, teaching, and mentoring. The second group identified the effects of induction components based on novice teachers' reports. The third group directly captured the relationship between particular program components and novice teachers' beliefs and teaching practice.
We used these three categories to organize the body of our review because they represent popular approaches to identifying the effects of induction on beginning teachers and because they illustrate the complexity of this work. We read the program and personal descriptions and the position and review papers, and we used all of these as a basis to develop conceptions, identify assumptions, make comments, offer implications, and point to future directions for research.
ASSUMED EFFECTS OF TEACHER MENTORING IN TEACHER INDUCTION
One approach to identifying effects of teacher induction on novices' teaching is to analyze what mentors do and to identify impacts on novices' practices based on theoretical assumptions of effective mentoring. Studies in this category included case analysis, discourse analysis, surveys, and interviews.
Assumed Effects of Mentors' Beliefs and Practice
Three studies examined exemplary mentor teacher beliefs and practices and discussed the effects of mentoring on beginning teachers. Feiman-Nemser (2001b) analyzed 20 hours of observations and 10 hours of interviews collected over 2 years from a mentor teacher with 30 years of teaching experience who was reassigned from classroom teaching to work with 14 beginning teachers in an induction program. She identified the mentor's dispositions and skills that were consistent with assumptions of educative mentoring from Dewey's concept of experience (1938), where the educator is responsible for arranging conditions so that learners have growth-producing experiences. These conceptions and skills included the following: co-thinking with beginning teachers about teaching, instead of being an expert who imposes ideas; focusing beginning teachers' on basic instructional issues that they may not have recognized, such as how children think, and connections between theory and practice; helping beginning teachers' frame their self-identified teaching problems and articulate reasons for them; and modeling teaching that demonstrates principles of good teaching. The author argued that these mentoring conceptions and skills are crucial in effecting beginning teachers' teaching and that learning to teach is an inquiry process contextualized in beginning teachers' practice that needs to be assisted by an experienced other.
Drawing on surveys of 37 teacher induction program coordinators, Athanases and Achinstein (2003) stated that beliefs about children's thinking was important to developing effective teaching. They also affirmed that mentors should help novices focus their attention on children's thinking. Observations of mentor--novice conversations and interviews with two mentor-novice pairs over 1 year demonstrated how the mentors in these cases were able to focus beginning teachers' attention on student learning, especially, that of low performers. The authors identified skills for mentors that included analyzing and assessing students by using rhetorical questions, follow-up probes, and suggestions as a co-thinker during conversations. The assumption was that if it is crucial for novices to understand children's learning to develop student-centered instruction, then a substantial focus on student learning in mentor-novice discussions is necessary.
Drawing on data from 23 mentor teachers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, Wang (2001) explored the relationship between mentoring contexts and mentoring practice and learning opportunities for novices. Through comparative analysis, he found that mentors in different countries hold different beliefs about what novices need to learn. U.S. mentors, influenced by the decentralized curriculum and individualistic culture of teaching,
tended to believe that learning about individual students and establishing purposes for teaching were important. Chinese counterparts believed that novices should develop a deep understanding of subject matter, curriculum, and professional ethics, as suggested by their centralized curriculum and subject-based teaching. U.S. mentors spent less time talking with novices, and when they did interact, they focused on issues of curriculum materials, whereas Chinese mentors spent more time interacting with their novices, with a focus on pedagogical issues. Even though mentors developed reform-minded teaching practices, they did not necessarily provide mentoring that supported beginning teachers' learning in ways expected by the reformers. The study argued that good teaching practice is not automatically transferred into good mentoring practice.
The first two studies help to conceptualize effective mentoring practice by specifying mentors' beliefs and skills that are consistent with theories of learning and teaching, and they offer a framework for mentoring practices that focuses on teacher learning and teaching practice. The last study points out that being able to teach in reform-minded ways does not necessarily enable mentors to guide beginning teachers to teach in the same ways. The study suggests that mentoring is a contextualized practice shaped by culture, curriculum, and teaching organization (Hiebert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002). The three studies paid little attention to the role of beginning teachers' ideas and behaviors in the mentor-novice relationship. Following a constructivist view of learning (Von Glasersfeld, 1995), beginning teachers, like all learners, have ideas and dispositions of what and how to learn that influence their learning and classroom instruction. The above studies limit their focus on the identification of mentors' beliefs and practice without attention to the influences of novices' beliefs on the mentor-novice relationship. This could lead to mentor-centered practice that inappropriately assumes that effective mentoring conceptions and practices can be identified and developed for all beginning teachers....
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