From Coherence in Theory to Coherence in Practice

By Karen Hammerness. Teachers College Record, 2006

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Historically, one of the central concerns that has plagued the field of teacher education is the observation that fragmentation characterizes the experience of learning to teach. Too often, university-based teacher education programs consist of a set of disconnected individual courses; separate clinical work from coursework; and lack a vision of teaching and learning. Therefore, some teacher educators have argued that creating structurally and conceptually coherent programs will result in more powerful learning for prospective teachers. Yet, although empirical work on such programs is growing, there is little research on the nature of coherence and on how it might develop. To that end, this article documents one teacher education program's efforts to become more coherent, focusing on the ways in which the program tries to become more coherent and on the challenges of coherence. The article concludes with implications for teacher education program design and evaluation, with a focus on the power, complexity, and problems of coherence.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5823f2accd540d1a380e926b3f7ed623728eb41

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In Education

Citations in the corpus

The practicum in preservice teacher education: a review of empirical studies (2013, background): “The articles which conveyed this rationale argued that this is achieved in four ways: (1) The practicum experiences are to be designed, monitored, and structured by the teacher education programs, which also aligns with and integrates them into its courses, or adapts the preservice teachers’ mentori”
Conceptualizing the Roles of Mentor Teachers During Student Teaching (2012, background): “A common critique of learning to teach is the disconnected learning experience found in university and field-based teacher education environments (Hammerness, 2006; Zeichner, 2010).”
Coherence and the development of professional knowledge and skills (2014, background): “Hammerness ( 2006 , 1242) built on Tatto’s definition in her work on teacher education but differentiates between the conceptual and structural parts of coherence, even if the borders between them could be indistinct.”
Coherent teacher education programmes: taking a student perspective (2017, background): “Based on the work of Feinam-nemser (1990), Hammerness (2006) makes a distinction between structural and conceptual coherence.”