Week 5: Clinically-Rich Experiences..
According to Glickman, Gordon, and Ross-Gordon (2014), “If schools are to be successful, supervision must respond to teachers as changing adults” (p. 49). I completely agree with this quote and I believe that many supervisors, administrators, and/or anyone who deals with teachers agree on this as well. However, it’s not the agreement that matters, it’s the act that reflects this belief. If I think about our teachers in Kuwait, I see the image of teachers as “changing tools”. What does it mean? Well, it means that teachers are usually forced to follow instructions told by their supervisors/evaluators as orders with the claim of “good change”. From this perspective, teachers should be thankful and grateful for having “valuable suggestions” from the best expert who knows everything about everything in their classroom. When I read the theories of adults learning discussed in chapter four, I wondered about the extent to which Kuwaiti teachers are viewed as learners. If the change is not the product of intrinsic or self-directed learning, can we still call it change? A true change?
Speaking of learning theories, it was interesting for me as an early childhood educator to be able to read about adults learning and how it is viewed in the field. I honestly found myself using the same critical lens with which I view the child learning and development theories. I firmly believe that there is no universal truth and “knowledge is multifaceted and truths shift according to the experience and context of the knower” (Glickman, Gordon, & Ross-Gordon, 2014, p. 57). Thus, I myself as a university supervisor act differently in the two distinct contexts, Kuwait and United States, depending on the setting, culture, language, and some other situational variables. Moreover, even within one context, like now in the US, I found myself using a differentiated supervision with my interns. I am trying to identify the uniqueness of each preservice teacher, to discover their strengths and weaknesses, so I can use these findings as the basis of the approach I follow with each of them. Howard Gardener is one of my favorite theorists and I usually find myself going back to his theory of multiple intelligences when dealing with both adults and children. Again, this theory and the other discussed ones are good ways of looking at adults’ learning and development; however, they shouldn’t be treated as absolutes.
Fuller (1969) reminds me of myself few years ago while in my undergraduate experience. I exactly lived the pain of studying the boring and nonsense making educational courses. This is how I felt and I bet many current students in Kuwait still feel the same. This indeed what happens when things are not coming from the interest of the learners and thus disconnected and unrelated to their needs. What did I know about the field while sitting in a university classroom for more than three years? How would I value the university educational content if I weren’t aware of the real teaching context and its demands? What Fuller (1969) discussed in the article about almost 45 years ago is not far from today’s Kuwaiti reality. What to do then? I believe it’s time for our programs to move forward toward a more clinical rich teaching and learning experiences within our teacher preparation programs. As Burns, Jacobs, and Yendol-Hoppey (under review) discuss in their article, teacher preparation must be responsive to the needs of preservice teachers, teacher education programs, and schools. Their comprehensive overview and their discussed framework made me re-think about our Kuwaiti programs and what type of change are we looking for. Reading their work has added a lot to my knowledge base as they provided a great review of the related litrature.
Last week, I was listening carefully to the conversation my colleague Aaron initiated in class about our role as university supervisors and the systems, which somehow seem forcing us to enact certain approaches of supervision. It’s more challenging now to me as a Kuwaiti teacher educator and an advocate who calls for university-school partnerships and who is demanding more clinical-rich programs in Kuwait, to consider these issues. I believe that many of our problems in Kuwait are because of the “blind applications”, when we try to copy some of the “dominant” practices which we call “globally accepted practices”. The program I am part of today here at University of South Florida is a dream program. I keep wishing for having similar programs back home. Now, the concern is not having them, but “contextualizing” them. This requires a collective effort and demands true exploration to the social and cultural values held by all stakeholders in Kuwait: teachers, students, parents, and all those related in a way or another to the educational systems. Without this component, their voice, success won’t be achieved and we will get lost in the process. Based on this, the first step shouldn’t be offering a new program or a new structure. The step should be listening to the voices of those stakeholders and critically view our current programs to see how they serve, or don’t serve, the context in which they are situated and what do they need to fulfill their perceived mission. I guess if this is the start, then we will end in a better place, probably more practical experiences and more “authentic” learning opportunities for our future teachers.
References
Burns, R., Jacobs, J., &Yendoll-Hoppey, D. (Unpublished). In search of a framework for
clinically-rich preservice teacher supervision: A meta-analysis of
the empiricalliterature from 2001-2013.
Fuller, F. F. (1969). Concerns of Teachers: A Developmental Conceptualization. American Educational Research Association, 6 (2), 207-226. Glickman, C. D., Gordon, S. P., & Ross-Gordon, J. M. (2014). Supervision and Instructional Leadership. A Developmental Approach (9th ed). Pearson Education, Inc.
