Professional Growth Among Preservice and Beginning Teachers

TLDR

The review aims to assess the coherence of recent learning‑to‑teach studies, develop a professional‑growth model for novice teachers from common themes, and infer how preservice programs can foster growth by leveraging natural processes and stages. The authors examined 40 naturalistic, qualitative learning‑to‑teach studies (27 preservice, 13 first‑year) published 1987‑1991, clustering them by emergent themes. The inferred model confirms and integrates Fuller’s and Berliner’s developmental frameworks, showing that preservice and first‑year teachers share a single stage involving knowledge acquisition, self‑image reconstruction, and procedural routine development, yet preservice programs generally fail to support these tasks.

Abstract

I began this review with three objectives: (a) to determine whether recent learning-to-teach studies form a coherent body of literature, (b) to use any common themes that emerged from these studies to construct a model of professional growth for novice and beginning teachers, and (c) to draw inferences from the model concerning the nature of preservice teacher education programs likely to promote growth by capitalizing on naturally occurring processes and stages. I review 40 learning-to-teach studies published or presented between 1987 and 1991: 27 deal with preservice teachers, 13 with first-year or beginning teachers. All were naturalistic and qualitative in methodology. Studies within each of those divisions are clustered and summarized according to major themes that emerged from findings. The model I ultimately infer from the 40 studies confirms, explicates, and integrates Fuller’s ( Fuller & Bown, 1975 ) developmental model of teacher concerns and Berliner’s (1988) model of teacher development based on cognitive studies of expertise. Preservice and first-year teaching appears to constitute a single developmental stage during which novices accomplish three primary tasks: (a) acquire knowledge of pupils; (b) use that knowledge to modify and reconstruct their personal images of self as teacher; and (c) develop standard procedural routines that integrate classroom management and instruction. In general, preservice programs fail to address these tasks adequately.