iSean

our college of education was successful in our recent bid for accreditation from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). this accreditation process occurs every 6 years, so we are now safe until 2012 or so. that being said, one of the items we were told to focus on in the future is the concept of student dispositions. NCATE provides their own definition for dispositions as, “the values, commitments, and professional ethics that influence behaviors towards students, families, colleagues, and communities and affect student learning, motivation, and development as well as the educator’s own professional growth” (NCATE 2000 Standards: March 31, 2000, p. 31).

so, the question for a preservice education program is how you assess and improve student dispositions. and, are some students more predisposed to becoming teachers? this is an issue that our college of education will be tackling in the future. on a more personal level,  i am curios to explore ways that individual instructors can assess and change student dispositions. further, i want to explore how technology can be used to facilitate this process. i have to admit, i haven’t made dispositions a very prominent part of my teaching previously . . . maybe a bit indirectly, but certainly not overtly. i think it’s important when teaching preservice educators that we not only teach, but get our students thinking about our teaching.

delving more into this issue of dispositions . . . i want to provide my students with knowledge and skills that they can take with them and hopefully use in the future when they have their own classroom. of course, this is probably a common goal for most teachers. but, we all know that there is a huge difference between having this knowledge  and then actually using it. i can have assessments in my class that force students to demonstrate their understanding of a concept or skill, etc., but can i really know that the student is changing his/her disposition towards the future and not just quickly fulfilling my requirement? i am stuck at this point.

i recently saw some research by Katz (1991 or 92) that explained how kids who receive early formal reading instruction and are required to do drill and practice to help become successful readers actually end up not being as disposed to be readers. in other words, this research indicated that trying to change a learners dispositions can actually be counterintuitive. you want to teach kids the skills they need to read, but there is a fine line between using those skills to actually read early and between having that instruction undermine the process. this is quickly becoming a heady-type discussion and i can lose track of where i am going with it quite easily. i’ll focus the rest of this entry on a specific example and how i see technology being used.

i want to help bridge the gap between research and practice. i haven’t searched the literature, but i am sure folks have various strategies with most not being very successful given the status quo, which is a large gap still existing. anyway, i want my students to learn to investigate hypotheses and search through literature. i want my students use summative and formative evaluation in their own teaching. how does this happen you ask? i think i need to demonstrate that i am doing this when i teach — i want to be a role model. everyone has heard the old saying that people tend to teach the way they were taught. if true, then i need to be much more overt in how i am teaching; i need to continue to teach well, but i have to be more in tune with how i am teaching and share that. when i make an online session, i need to start demonstrating how i developed that lesson and each component in it. i can use technology to provide screen shots of various stages in the development of the content. maybe instead of a screen shot i just briefly provide a snippet in a sidebar that helps to explain why i picked this external article. or, i can use technology to help demonstrate how i searched Google to find supplementary resources and how i searched the literature in my field to find research on any given topic to get a better grasp of the subject. perhaps every lesson i teach should have a follow up podcast where i talk about teaching that lesson? if a lesson is not going well, i need to help my students understand why i am making changes midstream (formative evaluation) and how i might teach this lesson differently in the future (using summative evaluation). this is going to take a lot of effort to provide my instruction but to also provide a look into the behind the scenes of my instruction, but i think it will be worth it. i think i owe it to my students (preservice teachers) to provide a model of what i hope they can become. i don’t know that this will change dispositions, but don’t i owe it to my students to make this effort? if you teach preservice educators, how are you assessing student dispositions and what do you do to make positive changes?

Tags: student dispositions, NCATE, accreditation, teaching, learning