This document discusses using simple technologies to support teacher candidates' learning from practicum experiences. It examines four technologies - daily entries in a table, a shared notebook, a poster, and a narrative - that students used to document experiences. The author realizes his responses to students focused more on the technologies than the professional learning or reflection-in-action. He concludes technologies have limits and opportunities, and identifying and supporting learning requires careful listening and responding from teacher educators.

1. Fostering Teacher Development
Using Simple Technologies to
Listen and Respond to Accounts of
Learning from Experience
Tom Russell
Faculty of Education,
Queen’s University
TEEM 2016--Salamanca

2. Using Technology in Teacher Education
• My focus is on the potential of several simple
technologies to support teacher candidates’
learning from practicum experiences.
• The content comes from my own students in a
course on teaching secondary school physics.
• The methodology is self-study of teacher
education practices.

3. Improving my Use of Technology
• My goal in this paper is to identify more
productive ways of responding to my
students’ accounts of their professional
learning, as gathered using various
technologies.
• I illustrate four different simple technologies
and critique the responses I gave to my
students.

4. Reflection & Professional Learning
• My view of REFLECTION is not the view that
appears to be common in teacher education
programs.
• I focus on REFLECTION-IN-ACTION, which can
only occur when someone is professionally
active—as in the education practicum.
• Schön (1987) characterized reflection-in-
action in the following ways:

5. • “Reflection gives rise to on-the-spot experiment. We think
up and try out new actions intended to explore the newly
observed phenomena, test out tentative understandings of
them, or affirm the moves we have invented to change
things for the better” (p. 28).
• “What distinguishes reflection-in-action from other kinds of
reflection is its immediate significance for action” (p. 29).
• “The rethinking of some part of our knowing-in-action
leads to on-the-spot experiment and further thinking that
affects what we do” (p. 29).
• “Like knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action is a process we
can deliver without being able to say what we are doing”
(p. 29).
• “It is one thing to be able to reflect-in-action and quite
another to be able to reflect on our reflection-in-action so
as to produce a good verbal description of it; and it is still
another thing to be able to reflect on the resulting
description” (p. 30).

6. Listening and Responding to
Professional Learning
• The process is metacognitive. Those learning
to teach must think about their own thinking.
• Technology can assist in documenting and
sharing professional learning.
• Technology allows me to listen to my students’
thinking about what they are learning in
practicum experiences.
• How well am I responding?

7. 1. Daily Entries in a Table

8. 2. Shared Notebook in Evernote
I had a great learning moment today and I was lucky to have my liaison, P, there
to observe so that he could regroup with me afterwards. I attempted to have my grade
10 students come up their own extension question to a lab activity we were
performing today. The hope was that they would create their own question, make a
prediction, then carry out their own procedure and observe the outcome. I noticed
immediately after trying that it was too much to ask of the students. They
were stumped on the idea of creating a question. Overall, my intention was to have
them explore something independently and not just lay out a procedure for them as I
had in the first part of the activity. P understood the intention of my attempt but
helped me recognize that the students may not be equipped to create a high-level
question yet. This led to great insight into the parallel battle between myself
as a learner (in teaching) and myself as a teacher. The conflict is that, as a
teacher in training, I want to try to accomplish as much as possible within my
practicum so I can learn from experiencing it, but as a teacher the student needs to
take precedent. Considering these two paths demonstrates the extensive care a new
teacher must take when structuring expectations, units and lessons. After all that, it
really does boil down to How I tried to implement the exploration into the lesson. It
could have been done, but perhaps with more support in the form of guided
questions. Such a small item but the lesson I learned from it has large implications.

9. 3. Poster prepared in PowerPoint
• I felt these tensions between what I wanted to do and what
I was able to do in my 6 weeks of teaching in October &
November:
• For me, one of the biggest challenges was thinking about
bigger ideas that I would like to see change in our education
system. I think there is a lot right with school as is, but I think
the structure and dynamic is still too heavily teacher-based. I
would love to try shifting towards activity based discovery to
help guide the students learning, in particular I want to do this
as a larger scale idea so the class as a whole for the semester is
adjusted. Unfortunately, especially as a guest in another
teachers classroom, this is simply not possible. The leg work
involved would also be tremendous. This meant I did try to do
more activities, labs, student lead segments of class where
possible. Not ideally what I would have liked but it was a good
step in the right direction. I think that’s exactly what it takes,
just keep moving in the right direction (or at least what we
think that is).

10. 4. Narrative of Professional Learning
prepared in Word
• I was supposed to be teaching them a lesson.
• The panic set in. As I said, I didn’t want to tell my mentor teacher. This was
a mistake which, one way or another, I would have to make up for myself. I
considered admitting my accident, telling my mentor that I completely
forgot that I was supposed to plan a lesson for that period. In the end I
decided to wing it [teach without a plan] and see how it went….
____________________
• Now, what I’ve written is a confession. It’s not something I’m proud of. I’m
pleased that the lesson went well, but I’m ashamed that I had to deceive
(or at least withhold the truth) from my mentor, with whom I’ve built a
good relationship. I feel a little more confident in my ability to teach
without a detailed plan (or as in this case, without any plan at all, so long
as it’s a topic I am knowledgeable on, which spans most of grade 11
physics), but I also now realize that I need to step up my professionalism.
That I forgot something as important as a full lesson is shameful and has
shown me that I might need to work on keeping an agenda and reviewing
my duties constantly.

11. Conclusions-1
• Providing students with a choice of four
possible technologies gives them some say in
how they will try to document their
professional learning.
• Moments of significant reflection-in-action
can be recorded using each of the four
technologies (and others).

12. Conclusions-2
WHAT DID I LEARN BY STUDYING MY RESPONSES
TO EACH OF THESE FOUR INSTANCES OF
REFLECTION-IN-ACTION?
• Most of my responses disappointed me,
largely because I failed to focus on moments
of reflection-in-action and significant
professional learning.

13. Conclusions-3
• Identifying moments of significant
professional learning requires me to develop
new habits for responding to my students’
documentation of their practicum
experiences.

14. Technologies have Limits
as well as Opportunities
• Technologies can provide a variety of
ways of documenting experiences and
quickly sharing them with others.
• Technologies alone cannot identify and
evaluate professional learning.
• Identifying and supporting learning from
experience requires careful listening and
responding by teacher educators.