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KEEP Case Studies: Going Public

Going Public with Teacher Education Practice

Goldman-Carnegie Quest Project

Over the course of a two-year initiative, the Goldman-Carnegie Quest Project for Signature Pedagogies in Teacher Education worked with 20 teacher educators who used multimedia websites of teaching practice in their pre-service classrooms. The websites, created by accomplished K-12 teachers, became texts intended to help pre-service teachers connect theory and practice. Using the KEEP Toolkit, project leaders guided teacher educators in capturing their innovative uses of websites as alternative texts in teacher education classrooms.

Some of the Quest participants focused on mathematics pedagogy, some on the teaching of literacy, and others on foundational ideas such as building classroom community and teaching second language learners. Sixteen participants teach in public and private California Universities and Colleges and the others in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. The teacher educators prepare teachers for diverse classroom settings all over the United States. Although each educator teaches in a distinct context, they all experimented with the same websites.

Over the course of the project, Quest convened participants every six months in order to discuss plans, developments, and revelations concerning the use of multimedia websites as texts in the classroom. We introduced the KEEP Toolkit after one year, allowing participants to focus first on their experimentation with websites and later on their documentation.

Working with the KEEP Toolkit

The Quest Project team developed a model to base its use of the KEEP Toolkit from the work of three teacher education faculty, Anna Richert, Pamela Grossman, and Katherine Schultz. These three educators used multimedia websites in their pre-service classrooms over the course of a year and then worked with Quest personnel, Rebecca Akin and Desiree Pointer Mace, to build websites that documented their use. Their documentation recorded the problems of practice illuminated by multimedia websites, processes of using such sites in a classroom, and their reflections.

The process of handcrafting websites was time consuming, making it difficult to replicate the process among many teacher educators. Using the KEEP Toolkit allowed the Quest Project to work with a national cohort of teacher educators, the first of its kind to "go public" with teacher education practice on such a scale. By encouraging the use of the Toolkit and developing templates for the Quest fellows' use, several teacher educators who had never previously used multimedia-authoring tools of any kind were able to create multimedia records of their teaching practice.

We thus incorporated the KEEP Toolkit in this project, hoping to enable many educators to build their own representations of their uses multimedia texts. The premise of interrogating multimedia websites to share teaching practice was already a new concept and we did not want to cloud this experimentation with the daunting task of building a website.

New Tool: Cross-Stitch Tool

We structured our use of the Toolkit specifically around the examples provided by the pilot group. Based on Richert, Grossman, and Schultz’s work, Quest project co-director Desiree Pointer Mace developed a stitched-template to guide the documentation of new Quest participants. The template required participants to record their classroom teaching plans, work within the classroom, and reflections such that others could learn from and build upon their use of multimedia documentation in teacher education.

Pointer Mace used the stitching function to create the layering effect found in the prototype websites. She designed a first page that functions as a “home” page and then designed a set of pages that explained the context of the participant’s work. She also added a set of blank pages for participants to explain their broad ideas and intentions behind their website use.

Working with the KML, she "stitched" all of these pages together with a new tool, called the "cross-stitch" tool. The tool allowed users to create a menu bar on the left and another on the top of the page, a model used by our initial teacher educators.

New Tools: Video Tool

The work of the three initial teacher educators included extensive use of video documentation and annotation. They videotaped classroom discussions of and students’ responses to multimedia teaching websites. One teacher educator, Pam Grossman, also videotaped practices that novice teachers learned from the websites. The next set of participants followed this example of using video to show what their students learned in the classroom and did in their teaching placements. KML thus worked closely with Quest to extend the Toolkit’s ability to upload and display video in a format that provided information about the context of the video.

The extended format for displaying video supports playback with annotation, timing, and source information.

As the tools further develop, we look forward to the ability to support a wide variety of multimedia formats (like flash, or media files hosted elsewhere, such as YouTube), the potential for robust search and remixing of scholarly artifacts, and increased aesthetic customizability, such as the "themes" available in tools like iWeb and blogging tools.

Sharing our Work

Many of the teacher educator records of practice are housed at InsideTeaching.org, a "living archive" of teaching practice in K-12, higher education, and professional development. Inside Teaching builds on some of the strengths of the KEEP Toolkit to support a community of learning around multimedia records of practice. The website shows the work of Quest participants, provides websites that can be used in teacher educator classrooms, and it introduces viewers to our process and to the KEEP Toolkit.