Recently, CSUB Department of Teacher Education faculty members Dr. Brittney Beck, Jesus Esquibel and Dr. Alice Hays, of the Teacher Education Department, were selected to participate in the TeachingWorks-CSU Methods Course Fellowship.
In addition to the fellowship, the CSUB faculty members also received $22,000 to advance their teaching in coursework and field experiences for teacher candidates and the students they serve.
The Teacher Education Department operates from a Critical Theoretical perspective, which acknowledges that society is classified by race, class, sexuality, ability, immigration status, as well as the intersections of those identities.
That’s where TeachingWorks comes in.
The fellowship assists in the identification and disruptions of those injustices in the classroom by providing language and a framework to help teachers and teacher educators better analyze teaching in the classroom.
Department of Teacher Education Assistant Professor, Dr. Brittney Beck explained that the TeachingWorks methodology allows close analysis of how teachers interact with students, through video clips. Some of the areas studied include the types of questions posed, verbal and non-verbal responses to students, who is called on and who is not, creation and reinforcement of dialogue norms, how students are physically positioned in relation to the teacher and to each other.
“With this knowledge of how race may play out in the classroom, we’re able to use it as a lens for analyzing the moves a teacher makes to either empower or disempower students of color in classroom discussions. The same is true for women and girls in math and science,” Dr. Beck said.
The study has the potential to help or hinder the injustice in classrooms, as teachers face these decisions and dilemmas daily.
“The TeachingWorks fellowship has enabled me, as an individual, and us, as a department, to begin to develop common ways of thinking, discussing, practicing and mapping the complex work of just and equitable teaching,” Dr. Beck said.
“With this common ground, we are better able to make visible, for both novice and expert teachers, how every move they make in the classroom has the potential to either advance justice or disrupt inequity.”
The Department of Teacher Education at CSU Bakersfield professors are working to prepare teachers with the same rigor used to prepare doctors “because the quality of education that a child receives has significant implications for their learning and life chances within and beyond their K-12 years,” Dr. Beck added.
TeachingWorks has been transformative for CSUB Teacher Education lecturer Jesus Esquibel. Esquibel said he is now able to use practice-based education to help his candidates gain the confidence and competence needed to engage students in productive and engaging conversations.
“I have been a TeachingWorks fellow for the past three years. During this time, I have had the opportunity to examine my own practices and push my own thinking about how I can redesign the way teacher candidates are trained in my math and science methods courses,” he said.
Receiving funding from the Bechtel Foundation has allowed the faculty to continue working with TeachingWorks. Eventually, the entire Education Department will receive training.
Dr. Alice Hayes said TeachingWorks has changed her approach to teacher education in significant ways.
“While I was always trying to implement practice-based teaching, learning how to coach students through that work, and having the approach modeled in multiple ways over time helped me understand how better to implement this work in my own classes,” Dr. Hays said.
The faculty members learned how to provide opportunities to their students to practice the work of teaching before ever teaching children. Instead of practicing with students, which could eventually cause more harm than good, the fellowship assists in ensuring the novice teachers that they have initial competences prior to working directly with children.
Dr. Beck has enjoyed the ability to introduce “lab classes,” which are spaces that allow diverse stakeholders in teacher education to watch someone teach a class of novice teachers or K-12 students, and then use the text for further learning in education and teacher education overall.
“After having my students practice their discussion leading for a second time yesterday, through full class rehearsal and peer run-throughs, I had much stronger buy-in from my teachers about implementing this work in their own classroom,” Dr. Hays said.
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