Using Discourse Analysis to Understand the Relationships and Practices of Pre-service Co-teachers

Abstract

Early in 2016, the Council on Accreditation of Educator Providers (CAEP) (caepnet.org, 2016) published a new set of standards that called for increased collaboration of university-school partners by means of co-construction clinical experiences. In designing the new models, pre-service co-teaching, conducted by the teacher candidate and collaborating teacher, emerged as a promising practice in teacher education (Arshavskaya, 2014; Perry, 2016). However, even with the current enthusiasm for the establishing the new practices, a working definition of pre-service co-teaching remains elusive. Thus, the study of the voices of educators who are involved in co-teaching is essential as universities make the transition from single-taught to co-taught clinical experiences. This study presents a discourse analysis of the voices of 21 teacher candidates who were enrolled in a year-long, co-taught clinical experience, along with the voices of 29 mentor teachers. The findings of this study describe the terms and language used by our candidates and mentor teachers to describe their relationships and practices. The implications for these findings are discussed in terms of our new understandings of the nuances of co-teaching and how they may be used to shape a common definition of pre-service co-teaching.

Keywords

• Teacher Education Reform
• Clinical Practices
• Mentor Teacher
• Year-long Clinical Experiences
• Co-teaching
• Student Teaching