Using Case Studies
The use of case studies is an important strategy that merits further discussion. If new teachers are pleasantly surprised that their students are bright, courteous, and cooperative, that is one thing; if they expect respect, admiration, and tangible success but encounter resentment, apathy, and doubt, they will experience frustration. It would be worthwhile, as part of the teacher training Omega Speedmaster Replica program, for the prospective teachers to grapple together with some of the difficulties they might encounter on the job, such as censorship challenges, curricular inconsistencies, literacy lapses, assessment dilemmas, and classroom management difficulties.
An obvious answer to the problems of not having defined for themselves an adequate teaching persona or of having unrealistic expectations about teaching is to get prospective teachers into schools and into classrooms. For a variety of reasons, for many new teachers, their first time alone in front of a class during student teaching is the first time they have assumed the role of teacher in any form. Someone needs to walk in the teacher’s shoes to know when a supervisor’s visit is dismaying or when a student’s failure is frustrating. It is hard to re-create the environment the classroom teacher experiences from day to day. To a certain extent, the use of case studies simulates the experience of working through some of the troublesome episodes new teachers might encounter. Consulting with peers about measuring the benefits and harms that may result from each choice one makes as a teacher gives some insight into daily classroom life. Case studies have been used to much advantage in many university programs, and there are some good casebooks available to use with prospective English teachers; two examples are Larry R. Johann Essen and Thomas M. McCann’s In Case You Teach English: An Interactive Casebook for Prospective and Practicing Teachers and Betty Jane Wagner and Mark Larson’s Situations: A Casebook of Virtual Realities for the English Teacher. The following case is one that we used in our study as one way to examine how new and experienced teachers approach solving typical teaching problems:
The teacher arrives at his/her class-room ten minutes before 1st period class is to begin. The teacher opens his/her briefcase to discover that all the lesson materials are still at home on the kitchen table. The materials include the papers the teacher had stayed up until 1:00 a.m. grading in order to fulfill a promise Breitling Replica Watches to return the papers today. The teacher does not have the transparency and the handouts that he/she was going to rely on to introduce a novel that the class would begin reading together. (Johann Essen and McCann 188)
Having prospective teachers read and discuss with their peers possible courses of action for cases such as this one helps new teachers gain insight into the daily challenges teachers face, develop problem-solving skills to better tackle these challenges, and begin to construct an effective teacher persona.
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