Pitfalls of Experience in Teacher Preparation

Abstract

There is a common belief in the educative value of firsthand experience. We say things like “that was a real learning experience,” “practice makes perfect ,” “ experience is the best teacher,” and “let experience be your guide.” Common sense casts experience as both the means and content of important learnings. This implicit trust in firsthand experience is particularly evident in discussions about learning to teach. Teachers claim that most of what they know about teaching came from firsthand experience. In short, they learned to teach by teaching. When teachers look back on their formal preparation, they generally say that student teaching was the most valuable part. In deference to this belief, teacher preparation programs give more and more time to classroom experience, while in-service programs stress teachers’ sharing their experiences with one another. Increasingly, states are proposing alternative routes to teacher certification whereby college graduates can replace formal preparation with a yearlong internship. But is experience as good a teacher of teachers as most people are inclined to think? To answer this question, we must take into account commonly used informal strategies of inference and judgment, the immediate impact of personal memories and classroom realities, the instructional purposes of teacher educators, and the normative context of schools as institutions. This article focuses on the contribution of firsthand experience in the preservice phase of learning to teach. The discussion rests on a broad view of learning to teach as a process that begins before formal teacher preparation and continues afterward. Thus preservice field experiences are part of a continuum that includes powerful early experiences with parents and teachers as well as the learning that inevitably occurs on the job.