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LearningFromTeachingExperience.docxLearning From Teaching Experience: Dewey’s Theory and Preservice Teachers’ Learning.
John Dewey, learning from experience, teacher education
Teachers often assert that "experience is the best teacher" (Goodlad, 1984). Inservice music teachers consistently rate actual teaching experience as the most valuable aspect of their teacher education programs (Bauer & Berg, 2001; Teachout, 1997). While a field-based "apprenticeship model to teacher training is certainly highly valued by those who complete the program," there is little research to support this claim of effectiveness (Nierman, Zeichner, & Hobbel, 2002, p. 827; see also Verrastro & Leglar, 1992). Some researchers have found that student teaching experience had little effect on preservice teachers' beliefs and practices (Brand, 1982; Snyder, 1996) or may even have had a detrimental effect by encouraging them to adapt to the status quo in classrooms rather than foster change or employ methods learned in university course work (Krueger, 1985; Tabachnick, 1980). Conway (2002), in a survey of beginning teachers, their mentors, and administrators, found that field experience was cited as both the most and least valuable aspect of preparation for teaching. Together, these studies suggest reasons to question the value that many teachers attribute to learning from teaching experience.
In the past 30 years, authors have identified complex interactions between individual preservice teachers and their experiences that influence what they learn from their experiences in a teacher education program. One robust line of research demonstrates that preservice teachers often use their own student experiences to guide their interaction with and evaluation of ideas presented in course- and field-based experiences, causing them to accept, modify, or discount those ideas (e.g., Harwood & Wiggins, 2001; Knowles & Holt-Reynolds, 1991; Leglar & Collay, 2002; Rideout & Feldman, 2002; Snyder, 1996). Therefore, it is difficult to determine direct relationships between course- and field-based experiences in a teacher preparation program and the practices that novices learn from those experiences (Clift & Brady, 2005). A more refined understanding of the processes by which individual preservice teachers construct learning from their course- and field-based experiences might help teacher educators design program experiences that lead to better correspondence between what teacher educators believe they teach and what preservice teachers actually learn.
John Dewey (1934, 1938/1963) grounded both his aesthetic and his educational philosophies in a theory of experience, with implications for illuminating some of the processes that individual students employ in learning from their experiences. Dewey (1938/1963) recognized that, while all students unquestionably have experiences in classrooms and schools, "everything depends upon the quality of the experience which is had" (p. 27). He assessed this quality based on two principles. The principle of interaction proposes that individuals create meaning from an experience as they interact with its physical and social settings. The principle of continuity states that the effect of experience is cumulative, with each experience shaped by prior experiences and in turn shaping future experiences. Thus, each experience changes the person undergoing it in ways that influence what may be learned from subsequent experiences. Non-educative (Dewey, 1933/1998) or non-esthetic (Dewey, 1934) experiences are disconnected from the learner's other experiences and leave the learner unaffected, while mis-educative (1933/1998) experiences are misdirected and thus impede further learning. In contrast, educative (1933/1998) or esthetic (1934) experiences "live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences" (1938/1963, p. 28). Dewey (1934, 1944/2005) also emphasized the social nature of learning experienced in community, suggesting that educative experiences include opportunities to apply new learning and test one's ideas against the experiences of others, in addition to one's own experiences.
Dewey (1938/1963) decried the traditional education of his day, where students memorized "predigested materials" dealing with subjects in which they had no interest, so that many became physically truant or "engaged in the mental truancy of mind-wandering and finally built up an emotional revulsion against the subject" (p. 46). Dewey (1933/1998) called this "collateral learning"; others have called it the "hidden curriculum" (Eisner, 1994; Krueger, 1985). Such collateral learning can be educative or mis-educative, but it appears to be a constant in education (Erickson, 1986):
The basic issue is not that some students learn and others do not. We can assume that all students are learning something. The basic issue is that many students, for a variety of different reasons, do not appear to be learning what the teacher and the school claim to be teaching. (p. 138)
Dewey's theory of experience seemed to me to hold promise for augmenting teacher educators' understandings of preservice teachers' learning. As researchers in teacher education have found, Dewey proposed that what individuals learn from a given experience is influenced by both their current and prior experiences. The principles of continuity and interaction suggest that different individuals may attribute different value to and learn different things from the same educational experiences (Dewey, 1938/1963); therefore, teachers (and by extension, teacher educators) cannot completely control what students learn (Fenstermacher, 1986). However, teachers may increase the likelihood that their students will have educative experiences by knowing "how to utilize the surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute" to learning (Dewey, 1938/1963, p. 40).
The purpose of this study was to explore what a cohort of six recently graduated teachers valued about their teaching experiences while they were enrolled in a music teacher education program. The guiding research questions were as follows:
* During their undergraduate program, what did six preservice teachers claim to learn from their teaching experiences in a variety of settings?
* What aspects of these teaching experiences seemed most valuable to them?
* Does Dewey's theory of experience provide a meaningful framework for interpreting the value they placed on their teaching experiences?
All six student teachers in instrumental music at the university during the spring semester participated in this study. Mike and David were traditional-age students, Doug and Todd were a few years older, having taken extra time to earn their college degrees, and Laura and Catherine were completing their education after more than 20 years away to raise their families (all names are pseudonyms). Data were collected over 2 years, beginning junior year, when all six were students in the instrumental methods class (Practicum), which I team-taught with a colleague, through completion of their student teaching. Each also participated in state-mandated field experience of 4 to 6 hours per week in local schools, two semesters concurrent with Practicum, and a third semester the following fall, preceding student teaching.
To create a record of the participants' learning, I collected videos, written self-assessments, and instructor assessments of their in-class peer teaching, and other written assignments, such as short essays, during the year of the Practicum class. In their student teaching semester, the participants attended four 90-minute seminars coordinated by my colleague, which included time for each to share successes and challenges experienced in the past few weeks, as well as discussion of specific topics. I attended the seminars as a contributing member of the group and recorded and transcribed those discussions, focusing on specific references to learning from teaching experiences. Following Institutional Review Board recommendations, at the conclusion of their student teaching semester, after I no longer was in a position to evaluate their work, I interviewed each of the participants to further explore their thoughts about their teaching experiences and recorded and transcribed those 1-hour interviews verbatim.
I began data analysis by reading the transcripts and written materials for categories of learning that the teachers mentioned frequently, such as lesson planning, classroom management, relationships with students, or relationships with other teachers (Creswell, 2007). I then coded the data using those categories, combining, dividing, or refining them until primary topics describing the teachers' learning emerged (Research Question 1). Next, I reread and coded the data for aspects of teaching experiences to which they assigned value (Research Question 2), developing and refining categories to identify important ideas. Finally, I compared qualities of experience that these teachers deemed valuable with Dewey's criteria for evaluating experiences: continuity, interaction, and community (Research Question 3).
I attempted to report this study from the participants' perspective -- their own interpretations of the value of their teaching experiences -- and did not compare their cooperating teachers' or others' perceptions of those experiences. I recognize that my role as an instructor undoubtedly affected the data collection and analysis, yet that role also permitted a depth of analysis possible only because of the opportunities for extended involvement that it provided (Jansen & Peshkin, 1992). To challenge my interpretations of the participants' learning, I invited them to amend their interview transcripts and comment on this article (Stake, 1995). I also invited critiques from three experienced peer researchers (Merriam, 1988), who on two separate occasions read earlier drafts of this article. They evaluated my data analysis and application of Dewey's theory, and I incorporated their suggestions in my revisions. The study's purpose was not to evaluate the effectiveness of the university program; I provide information about the program simply to help the reader understand the connections I have made between the participants' experiences and the value they placed on them (Stake, 1995). The study focuses on the teachers' reflections upon graduation, so I refer to them as teachers or participants throughout, even though most of the data were collected while they were still technically preservice teachers.
Findings and Discussion: Interaction, Continuity, and Community
The six participants mentioned four types of teaching experiences that provided valuable learning in the university program: peer teaching, university-mandated field experiences, student teaching, and self-arranged teaching experiences, such as giving private lessons, assisting with an area marching band, or teaching in the university's String Project. The data revealed that they each attributed value to different experiences. In the sections below, I use Dewey's (1934, 1938/1963) theory of experience to examine these differences, discussing the six participants' interaction with peer teaching, required early field experiences, and other teaching experiences. I then discuss how they themselves created continuity among their experiences as preservice teachers, and the role that community played in their learning.
Interaction With Teaching Experiences
Interaction with peer teaching. At the conclusion of the university program, these teachers identified some value in the peer teaching experiences that we required in the Practicum course. For example, all six referenced skills for lesson sequencing and planning as the most important thing they learned from peer teaching experiences in class. Yet they each interacted with the planning processes presented in the course in individualized ways to make that learning meaningful for themselves. Doug found that "learning all those steps really got it into our head how our students are going to be learning this music. And it's very different from how I would learn music at this point." Mike commented that Practicum helped him become
much, much, much more process-oriented in how I teach and how I think about it, when I'm putting a plan together. And while I still stink about writing it down, I can put together a plan that will work, every single time. Without fail. And it's pretty cool. And if I run into a speed bump, then I know enough about the process that I can go maybe in a different direction, and still get that result at the end.
As Mike's comment demonstrates, nearly all of these teachers made a distinction between writing lesson plans and planning and teaching step-by-step instruction. Doug said that "writing lesson plans over and over and over was really helpful" because it would "come in handy some day" when an administrator came to observe his teaching. However, in his experience, "it really didn't work" when he wrote a plan and tried to follow it. David found it "taxing" to try to teach from a written plan, wishing he could "just do it." In contrast, both Catherine and Laura found comfort in having a written plan, so they "wouldn't forget to cover things that [they] thought of" (Catherine). Laura found it helpful to "write lesson plans word for word" and then reduce it to "just an outline," so she "wasn't fumbling" and "knew exactly what the next step of [her] lesson plan was."
Others have identified the value of peer teaching for preservice teachers' learning. Butler (2001) found that even one peer microteaching experience offered the potential to change preservice teachers' conceptions of teaching, and Paul et al. (2001) found that the number of peer teaching experiences was significantly correlated with high scores in initial teaching performance as student teachers. Similarly, the teachers in my study appeared to value aspects of peer teaching; each specifically described the lesson planning processes that they used in their self-arranged teaching experiences and student teaching as a testing, refinement, or elaboration of concepts from peer teaching in Practicum.
Interaction with other teaching experiences. Like the inservice music teachers studied by Bauer and Berg (2001) and Conway (2002), this study's participants identified actual teaching experience as a critical and valuable element of their preparation for student teaching and beyond. In this section, I discuss ways these teachers interacted with their three semesters of required early field experiences and other self-arranged teaching experiences to attach greater value to some experiences than others.
Laura found great value in her assigned field experiences and was the most proactive in learning from them. She asked frequent questions and learned what her cooperating teacher "would do to get ready for the next day" and "the other duties that teachers have," such as cafeteria and recess supervision. She met with the principal and counselors and discovered that "you can rely on these people, you don't have to do everything by yourself." All the other participants found their self-arranged teaching experiences to be more valuable for learning about teaching than their university-mandated early field experiences. Several factors, beyond getting paid for that work or the obvious differences among supervising teachers and placement sites, may have contributed to these beliefs.
Perhaps these teachers viewed their self-arranged experiences as more valuable because they actually did provide more opportunities for "hands-on" experimentation and practice. Working on their own or with more experienced teachers, they probably had greater contact time with students and more autonomy for making decisions, thus providing more opportunities to experience the effects of their own teaching than in their mandated placements. Mike acknowledged that all of his marching band teaching experiences helped prepare him for student teaching; he had spent "years of waking up before dawn to go and do that, [and] had made all those mistakes at West High, all those mistakes at Central High and Washington High, and just gotten them out of the way." David found it valuable to experiment with the high school marching band that he was co-directing while enrolled in Practicum:
Every time I would learn something in Practicum I would take it down to [the high school]. Like when we learned sequencing. I did it [with those kids] one day, and I was like, "This moves a whole lot better. Those instructors know what they're talking about at [the university]!" [He laughs.] … So it was like, as soon as I learned something, I could practice, come back to Practicum, learn something new, practice, come back to Practicum. So it was like a huge benefit, because it was like my own set of guinea pigs.
One other possible reason that some of these participants appeared to devalue some of the field placements may have been their prior teaching experience. As an older returning student, Todd believed that he was approaching his learning differently from his peers. He thought he "was understanding more stuff, or applying it a different way, than they were," and attributed that to his greater range of prior experiences, recognizing that "it's what you bring to it that makes the difference." Catherine felt similarly: "Coming from my station in life, I think I would have been fine with student teaching without those field experiences." She had worked as a volunteer in her own children's schools, helping out and being "the go-fer" for music classes or "grading papers in just regular classes," and both she and Todd felt ready for more responsibility in the semesters preceding student teaching. Fredrickson and Pembroke (2002) similarly found that students in field experience "were frustrated … when they only observed after having taught in previous situations" (p. 10, italics added).
Prior experience alone, however, did not account for the value that these teachers assigned to different teaching experiences. The two teachers in this study with years of experience as parents viewed their field experiences in different ways. Like Catherine, Laura had been actively involved in her own children's classrooms, but she still found that the field experiences opened her eyes to "understand how a school is run" from a teacher's perspective. However, Catherine's Practicum materials document that she often brought ideas from her self-arranged teaching experiences to her peer teaching and field experiences but, unlike the others, seldom appeared to do the reverse. Such firm beliefs may actually have prevented her from approaching her field experiences as opportunities for learning new things (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985; Hollingsworth, 1989; Holt-Reynolds, 1991). Her frustration may have been, in part, because her extensive experience teaching private lessons and observing in her children's classrooms created the illusion that she already "knew" enough (Lortie, 1975) and that "just watching" was not a good use of her time.
Creating Continuity Among Teaching Experiences
In this section, I discuss how these teachers interacted with and made sense of their teaching experiences to connect prior and present experiences in meaningful ways to "learn" particular ideas or, as Dewey (1938/1963) described it, to create continuity in their learning. These participants experienced application of concepts of teaching as both students and teachers, through class instruction, peer teaching, and other teaching. Particularly in their self-arranged teaching settings, they could experiment as they saw fit, creating continuity between ideas presented in the university program and ideas grounded in their own experience. For example, Doug thought that teaching private lessons and classes in the university's String Project was "absolutely the most valuable" part of his learning at the university because it offered opportunities to try out ideas:
I got a chance every step of the way, when I learned something new in one of the methods courses, anything that I saw there I could immediately put into action [in my String Project teaching] -- if I chose to. Which a lot of times I did, I think.
Such experiences appeared to validate, through these teachers' own experience, ideas presented by others and to contribute to the value they assigned to some teaching experiences over others.
David's experiences over 4 years provide an example of how interaction and continuity functioned holistically as he learned how to teach, as he carried learning from each different high school band experience into the others. In his second season as an assistant with the marching band at the first high school, David was able to use his prior year's experience to make improvements because he "knew more of the kids … and a lot of the teaching headaches were gone." This experience also kept him from being "totally shell-shocked" when he later worked in one of his field experiences with a top high school concert band program. In the semester preceding student teaching, when David was hired to work with yet a different marching band, he was able to alert the parents' committee to potential problems with their plan for students' sleeping arrangements at band camp. David reported that the parents were amazed at the appropriateness of his suggestion. "That's what [the other school] kind of trained me for. It was cool because whatever skill I had then was kind of reinforced." And, as David finished his student teaching, he used the knowledge he had gained working with these high school bands and with junior high ensembles as a student teacher to determine that, although he still hoped to teach high school in the future, he would prefer a junior high position for his first job.
Such connections did not occur automatically for all the teachers, and interference could come from a variety of places. They could be distracted by any of a number of classroom events. Doug described what "was going through his head" when he knew that his cooperating teachers or instructors were observing his teaching:
"Oh, they think I'm so bad. They think that was the worst -- that wasn't very good. I know that they didn't think that was good. Oh, I must've missed some intonation there. They probably are thinking I'm an idiot." [We laugh.] So that's going through my head. And that's taking away from my concentration, of actually listening to hear if someone is in tune or not.
At other times, the teachers would simply forget to apply what they learned. Mike's cooperating teacher at the junior high took a maternity leave during his student teaching semester, and the substitute teacher provided little feedback about his teaching. Mike felt like he was "teach[ing] in a vacuum, when there was no one there to just keep things in perspective." He "fell into some old habits" from his prior teaching experiences and, when his university supervisor pointed them out several weeks later, he "was like, 'Oh, I should know better,' and fixed a lot of those things." Mike was disappointed with himself for forgetting things he "should have" known from having learned them before, yet this apparent forgetting of known ideas, and remembering upon being reminded, seems to be a normal part of the development of high-level skills, particularly skills as complex as playing an instrument or teaching (Berliner, 1992/2008; Duke, 2005; Paul, 1994).
As instructors, we could only facilitate, not mandate, how these teachers each interacted with their experiences and created their own continuity and learning from them. For example, I was surprised that these teachers did not mention learning in Practicum about elements of classroom management that I thought we emphasized, such as fast pacing and engaging instruction. Instead, they vividly described eye-opening experiences as student teachers as the times when they first discovered these principles. Dewey (1938/1963) suggested that, for meaningful learning, new information must be related to students' own experiences, or it will not really be learned. An obvious limitation of peer teaching is that it is nearly impossible for preservice teachers to simulate the musical and behavioral responses of children; therefore, it is likely that the university classroom did not provide opportunities for meaningful learning about classroom management. After completing student teaching, David wanted to warn future students that peer teaching would not prepare them for what he experienced in student teaching. With the benefit of hindsight, he described what he saw as the limitations of peer teaching:
Like, this is not real. … It's kind of cheating, to you, for your benefit. Because you're teaching to smart "kids." And those smart kids are trying not to be bad. They're trying to play the instruments, as opposed to some junior high kid who hates being there. It's just a false sense of reality.
Dewey (1933/1998, 1938/1963) wrote that opportunities for learners to reflect on their experiences can assist them in creating continuity and meaning from those experiences and are therefore an essential element of all educative experiences. Perhaps this is another reason that the required field experiences generally lacked value for these participants. The data convinced me that Catherine was justified in her view that the field experiences, although a concurrent course requirement, were "not coordinated with" Practicum. Beyond occasional in-class discussions, we instructors had provided inadequate guidance for these teachers to create continuity among their experiences. Following others (e.g., Grossman & Richert, 1988; Richert, 1990; Robbins, 1993), we now try to provide more consistent opportunities in class to encourage preservice teachers to reflect in depth and create continuity among their prior experiences, course experiences, and field experiences and to identify and address both agreements and conflicts between their own ideas and the ideas they encounter in university classes and teaching experiences.
Creating Community From Teaching Experiences
Contrasting with a long-held image of teachers working in isolation in their own classrooms (Lortie, 1975; Sindberg & Lipscomb, 2005), most of these teachers appeared to be predisposed to viewing other teachers as resources. Although the experience of teaching independently in authentic situations seemed to be important for them to develop instructional skills and confidence, to make sense of their experiences, and to get new ideas to try in subsequent teaching, they also appeared to value readily available support systems and opportunities for discussion with others. They each described other music teachers as significant mentors in their decisions to become teachers and made use of available informal mentors in the teaching situations they arranged for themselves. Even in teaching private lessons, these participants usually sought advice from others and then "kind of made it [their] own" (Todd).
Dewey likewise believed that sharing ideas with others in the community was a crucial component of making sense of and learning from experience (Dewey, 1944/2005; Rodgers, 2002). Because of tight university schedules, in the required placements the teachers often arrived just as a class was beginning or had to leave in the middle of a class, offering little opportunity to establish relationships with students or the cooperating teacher or to discuss anything they had observed. The experiences they themselves arranged, as well as student teaching, provided a more authentic and contextualized teaching situation and thus a greater sense of community. These settings provided opportunities to interact with students and teachers and feel part of an entire music program, and they felt a greater sense of personal investment and belonging. In contrast, they probably felt less a part of their required field experience "communities" and consequently viewed them as less valuable. To support this assertion, the data suggest that, despite the fact that as student teachers, they all "just watched" or assisted for at least several hours per day while their cooperating teachers taught classes, they only complained about too much observing in their required early field placements.
In our music teacher education program, we promote a view of learning to teach as a lifelong process and encourage students to engage in informal discussions of teaching with peers outside of class, as well as attendance at professional development workshops. My faculty colleagues and I make a conscious effort to develop an "educative community" (Bullough & Gitlin, 1989) throughout our program. We encourage preservice teachers to critique each other's teaching with both supportive comments and specific suggestions for improvement, and we point out our efforts to critique and improve our own teaching. At first, Laura was nervous that her peers would be critical of her in-class teaching:
But, at the end of Practicum, you just come to realize that they're working as hard as you are. And so everybody's just really nice to each other. I think we had a great class in Practicum, a beautiful class. Everybody was helpful and not judgmental.
The participants in this study all actively sought such educative communities throughout their time in the program. The data suggest that it is likely that their experiences at the university either did not contradict or actively encouraged and reinforced those community-seeking behaviors as important "collateral learning" from the program (Dewey, 1933/1998).
Implications for Practice: Interaction, Continuity, Community, and Learning From Experience
Others have documented the improbability that preservice teachers will have identical experiences and learn identical things in any program (e.g., Erickson, 1986; Fenstermacher, 1986; Schmidt, 1998; Snyder, 1996). Complicating the process is that much of prospective teachers' experience with and thinking about teaching is outside of our direct control as teacher educators (Conway, 2002). While this study's data document common elements in what these six teachers ultimately "learned" from their experiences in our program, there were also both subtle and major differences in the ways they shaped and applied their knowledge.
Dewey's theory of experience (1934, 1938/1963, 1944/2005) suggests possible reasons for such differences in learning outcomes. The value that these six beginning teachers attributed to various teaching experiences, and the teaching beliefs and skills they developed through those experiences, appeared to result from the continuity of learning that they each created through the interaction of their own interpretation and analysis of their experiences, scaffolded by a community of colleagues and mentors. Through these active meaning-making processes, as they themselves selected the aspects of each experience that they considered valuable learning, they each "learned" an individualized version of principles, understandings, and attitudes toward teaching and learning from their teaching experiences and course work.
My findings support the practice of "incorporating more and earlier field experiences" in teacher education programs (Nierman et al., 2002). In contrast to preservice teachers who find that methods courses have little to do with the real world of teaching (Richards, 1999; Snyder, 1996), these participants valued many aspects of their course-based learning. Their teaching experiences over time, both within and beyond the university program, helped them view many aspects of their course work as applicable and meaningful. However, as both Dewey and the data suggested, the perceived quality of these teaching experiences mattered; these participants found less value in situations where they had limited autonomy, contextual knowledge, or sense of community.
Dewey articulated a further quality of experience with implications for teacher educators that, in combination with this study's data, suggests that preservice teachers may benefit from a balance between having teaching experiences and reflecting on their experiences. In Art as Experience, Dewey (1934) described an "organic unity" that is common to both ordinary and esthetic experiences. This unity results from a balance of "doing" and "undergoing." Too much emphasis on mechanical "doing" may result in an experience of "almost incredible paucity, all on the surface," while with too much emphasis on "undergoing" or receptivity, without genuine perception and meaning-making, "nothing takes root in the mind" (p. 45). Applying this theory of experience to education in How We Think (1933/1998) and Experience and Education (1938/1963), Dewey claimed that all genuinely educative experiences involve a similar undergoing, or reconstruction of prior learning, and he emphasized the importance of reflection for creating meaning from experience in a way that fosters continued learning. In all these works, as well as Democracy and Education (1944/2005), Dewey also highlighted the value of community in providing a safe place for the sometimes difficult and painful task of that reconstruction.
Whether these preservice teachers had an experience (for example, the "Aha!" moment in teaching), or a sustained experience over time made up of many smaller doings and undergoings (for example, a semester-long course or teaching placement), Dewey's theory has provided some important clues for me in understanding differences in what my students appear to learn in our program. Although this study's findings may not apply in all settings, I suggest that teacher educators recognize the roles that may be played by Dewey's principles of interaction, continuity, and learning within community in shaping preservice teachers' learning and consider ways to help preservice teachers balance experiences of doing and undergoing as they progress through a teacher education program. Insight into the qualities of teaching and learning experiences identified in Dewey's writings (1933/1998, 1934, 1938/1963, 1944/2005) ultimately may help teacher educators foster a better correspondence between a program's stated goals and individual preservice teachers' learning.
Recommendations for Further Research
Considerable research has shown that, while teachers continue to value teaching experience as a way to learn, experience alone does not guarantee the preparation of more expert teachers (e.g., Berliner, 1992/2008; Zeichner & Tabachnick, 1981). This study highlights some of the complexities of untangling the interactions among course-based and teaching experiences in learning to teach (Dewey, 1938/1963):
It is not enough that certain materials and methods have proved effective with other individuals at other times. There must be a reason for thinking that they will function in generating an experience that has educative quality with particular individuals at a particular time. (p. 44)
Further study is needed to clarify the processes by which preservice teachers learn from different types of experiences, in particular to better understand why different individuals view certain experiences as more valuable than others. Researchers might study qualities of experience that help create a better correspondence between what teacher educators teach and what preservice teachers learn, both intentionally and collaterally. For purposes of researching these issues, the content and philosophical approach of the particular program may be less important than documenting the correspondence between program goals and preservice teachers' learning. It is quite possible that similar learning processes occur in a teacher education curriculum with a completely different approach or schedule from this university's program.
Dewey (1933/1998, 1938/1963) suggested that, either intentionally or collaterally, all "educative" experiences foster the development of attitudes, concepts, and skills that facilitate further learning in new situations. Given the impossibility that any teacher education program can prepare teachers for every situation they will encounter, an important area for further exploration seems to be the processes by which collateral and intentional learning of transferable skills occurs. Contextualized studies of factors that individually or in combination contribute to the educative value of particular teaching experiences provide a large area for continued research. Qualitative studies are particularly well suited to uncovering such uniquely contextualized relationships. Other research could examine experiences in a preservice program that facilitate sustained growth into the first years of teaching.
Studies investigating the functioning of the principles of interaction, continuity, and community in individual preservice teachers' experiences may ultimately suggest some guiding principles for those charged with designing teacher education curricula in varied settings. Better understanding of why "good and poor teachers seem to exit from the same curriculum" (Colwell, 1985/2003, p. 21) may assist teacher educators and preservice teachers in their mutual quest for better prepared beginning teachers.
