Teacher educators have long struggled with how to create learning experiences powerful enough to transform teachers' classroom practice. Teachers, both experienced and novice, often complain that learning experiences outside the classroom are too removed from the day-to-day work of teaching to have a meaningful impact. At first glance, the idea that teachers' knowledge is situated in classroom practice lends support to this complaint, seeming to imply that most or all learning experiences for teachers should take place in actual classrooms. But the situative perspective holds that all knowledge is (by definition) situated. The question is not whether knowledge and learning are situated, but in what contexts they are situated. For some purposes, in fact, situating learning experiences for teachers outside of the classroom may be important-indeed essential for powerful learning. The situative perspective thus focuses researchers' attention
on how various settings for teachers' learning give rise to different kinds of knowing. We examine here some of the approaches that researchers and teacher educators have taken to help teachers learn and change in powerful ways, focusing on the kinds of knowing each approach addresses. We begin by considering professional development experiences for practicing teachers.
Learning Experience For Practicing Teachers
One approach to staff development is to ground teachers' learning experiences in their own practice by conducting activities at school sites, with a large component taking place in individual teachers' classrooms. The University of Colorado Assessment Project (Borko, Mayfield, Marion, Flexer, & Cumbo, 1997; Shepard et al., 1996) provides an example of this approach. The project's purpose was to help teachers design and implement classroom-based performance assessments compatible with their instructional goals in mathematics and literacy. As one component, a member of the research/staff development team worked with children in the classrooms of some participating teachers, observed their mathematical activities, and then shared her insights about their mathematical understandings with the teachers. Teachers reported that these conversations helped them to understand what to look for when observing students and to incorporate classroom-based observations of student performances into their assessment practices (Borko et al., 1997).
Another approach is to have teachers bring experiences from their classrooms to staff development activities, for example through ongoing workshops focused on instructional practices. In the UC Assessment Project (Borko et al., 1997), one particularly effective approach to situating learning occurred when members of the staff development/research team introduced materials and activities in a workshop session, the teachers attempted to enact these ideas in their classrooms, and the group discussed their experiences in a subsequent workshop session. Richardson and Anders's (1994) practical argument approach to staff development provides another example. These researchers structured discussions with participating elementary teachers to examine their practical arguments-the rationales, empirical support, and situational contexts that served as the basis for their instructional actions-often using videotapes of the teachers' classrooms as springboards for discussion. These approaches offer some obvious strengths when viewed from a situative perspective. The learning of teachers is intertwined with their ongoing practice, making it likely that what they learn will indeed influence and support their teaching practice in meaningful ways. But there are also some problems. One is the issue of scalability: Having researchers or staff developers spend significant amounts of time working alongside teachers is not practical on a widespread basis-at least not given the current social and economic structure of our schools. A second problem is that, even if it were possible in a practical sense to ground much of teachers' learning in their ongoing classroom practice, there are arguments for not always doing so.
If the goal is to help teachers think in new ways, for example, it may be important to have them experience learning in different settings. The situative perspective helps us see that much of what we do and think is intertwined with the particular contexts in which we act. The classroom is a powerful environment for shaping and constraining how practicing teachers think and act. Many of their patterns of thought and action have become automatic-resistant to reflection or change. Engaging in learning experiences away from this setting may be necessary to help teachers "break set"-to experience things in new ways. For example, pervading many current educational reform documents is the argument that "school" versions of mathematics, science, literature, and other subject matters are limited-that they overemphasize routine, rote aspects of the subject over the more powerful and generative aspects of the discipline. Students and teachers, reformers argue, need opportunities to think of mathematics or science or writing in new ways. It may be difficult, however, for teachers to experience these disciplines in new ways in the context of their own classrooms-the pull of the existing classroom environment and culture is simply too strong. Teachers may need the opportunity to experience these and other content domains in a new and different context.
Some professional development projects have addressed this concern by providing intensive learning experiences through summer workshops housed in sites other than school buildings. Such workshops free teachers from the constraints of their own classroom situations and afford them the luxury of exploring ideas without worrying about what they are going to do tomorrow. A key goal of the training was for teachers to experience the learning of mathematics in new ways. The Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) project (Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, Chiang, & Loef, 1989) also included a summer institute, during which teachers were introduced to research based ideas about children's learning of addition and subtraction through a variety of experiences situated primarily in children's mathematics activities. In both projects, participants' beliefs and knowledge about teaching and learning mathematics shifted toward a perspective grounded in children's mathematical thinking.
Although settings away from the classroom can provide valuable opportunities for teachers to learn to think in new ways, the process of integrating ideas and practices learned outside the classroom into one's ongoing instructional program is rarely simple or straightforward. Thus we must consider whether and under what conditions teachers' out-of-classroom learning however powerful will be incorporated into their classroom practice. There is some evidence that staff development programs can successfully address this issue by systematically incorporating multiple contexts for teacher learning. One promising model for the use of multiple contexts combines summer workshops that introduce theoretical and research-based ideas with ongoing support during the year as teachers attempt to integrate these ideas into their instructional programs. The intensive program, in addition to providing opportunities for teachers to participate in mathematics learning activities, engaged them in creating similar instructional sequences for their own students. Throughout
the following school year, staff members provided feedback, demonstration teaching, and opportunities for reflection during weekly visits to the teachers' classrooms, as well as workshops for further exploring issues related to mathematics, learning, and teaching. This combination of experiences helped the teachers to develop different conceptions of mathematics and deeper understandings of mathematical learning and teaching, and to incorporate strategies such as group problem solving, use of manipulatives, and non-routine problems into their mathematics instruction.
The CGI project provided a similar combination of experiences for some of its participants (Fennema et al., 1996; Franke, Carpenter, Fennema, Ansell, & Behrend, 1998). In addition to the summer workshops, these participants received support during the school year from a CGI staff member and a mentor teacher that included observing in the teacher's classroom and discussing the children's mathematical thinking, planning lessons together, and assessing children together. At the end of a 4-year period, most teachers had shifted from a view of teaching as demonstrating procedures and telling children how to think to one that stresses helping children develop their mathematical knowledge through creating learning environments, posing problems, questioning children about their problem solutions, and using children's thinking to guide instructional decisions. These two projects thus used a series of settings to introduce teachers to new ideas and practices and to support the integration of these learnings into classroom practice.
We have described in this section a variety of ways to situate experienced teachers' learning, ranging from staff developers working alongside teachers in their own classrooms; to teachers bringing problems, issues, and examples from their classrooms to group discussions; to summer workshops focused on the teachers' own learning of subject matter. Research on these projects suggests that the most appropriate staff development site depends on the specific goals for teachers' learning. For example, summer workshops appear to be particularly powerful settings for teachers to develop new relationships to subject matter and new insights about individual students' learning. Experiences situated in the teachers' own classrooms may be better suited to facilitating teachers' enactment of specific instructional practices. And, it may be that a combination of approaches, situated in a variety of contexts, holds the best promise for fostering powerful, multidimensional changes in teachers' thinking and practices. Further research is needed to better understand the complex dynamics of these multifaceted approaches to teacher learning.
Learning Experience For Prospective Teachers
The argument for providing in-service teachers with multiple learning settings in and out of classrooms has its counterpart in pre-service teacher education. In this case, the recommendation is to situate experiences in both the university and K-12 classrooms. Unlike experienced teachers, however, pre-service teachers do not have their own classrooms in which to situate learning activities and have limited teaching experiences from which to draw in discussions of pedagogical issues. Traditionally, teacher educators have relied upon student teaching and field experiences in K-12 classrooms as sites for learning.
In some situations, these classroom experiences are carefully combined with university course experiences to provide coordinated opportunities for pre-service teachers to learn new ideas and practices, as well as to reflect and receive feedback on their teaching. Wolf, for example, required pre-service teachers enrolled in her children's literature course to conduct a "reader response case study" with a young child (Wolf, Carey, & Mieras, 1996; Wolf, Mieras, & Carey, 1996). Each teacher read with a child on a weekly basis, kept detailed field notes of the reading sessions, and wrote a final paper on the child's response to literature and her or his own growth as a teacher of children's literature. The pre-service teachers' conceptions of literary response shifted toward an increased emphasis on interpretation over comprehension. They also came to hold higher expectations for children's capacity to interpret text and richer understandings of their roles as teachers of literature. Wolf and colleagues concluded that situating the pre-service teachers' learning simultaneously in university and field based experiences was crucial to the success of the course.
As they explained, Much of the necessary work to guide and support pre-service teachers' growing understandings of literary response can be accomplished in university class settings that emphasize subject matter knowledge.... Still, subject matter knowledge is only a part of the necessary training for pre-service teachers. To arrive at a more complete understanding of children's literary response, pre-service teachers must be involved with children-moving from the more distanced study of children in articles and books to the here and now of working with real children .... Thus, a university course infusion of new research ideas with multiple, though sometimes hypothetical, examples must be balanced with authentic, literary interaction with children, if we expect to see pre-service teachers shift from limited comprehension-based expectationst broader interpretive possibilities for literary discussion. (Wolf et al., 1996, p. 134)
Thus, thoughtfully combining university- and field-based experiences can lead to learning that can be difficult to accomplish in either setting alone. These approaches draw, at least implicitly, on an assumption of apprenticeship in an existing environment that important learning to teach takes place as novices experience actual classrooms alongside experienced teachers. A concern, however, is that K-12 classrooms embodying the kinds of teaching advocated by university teacher education programs may not be available. Without such classrooms, the apprenticeship model breaks down. As Sykes and Bird (1992) cautioned, Finally, the situated cognition perspective draws on the image of apprenticeship in a guild or a professional community as a powerful form of learning. But this image requires a stable, satisfactory practice that the novice can join. If the aim of teacher education is a reformed practice that is not readily available, and if there is no reinforcing culture to support such practice, then the basic imagery of apprenticeship seems to break down. Teachers' knowledge is situated, but this truism creates a puzzle for reform.
Through what activities and situations do teachers learn new practices that may not be routinely reinforced in the work setting? (p. 501) An important question facing researchers and teacher educators is whether experiences can be designed that maintain the situatedness of practical and student teaching while avoiding the "pull" of the traditional school culture. To address this question, we will need to understand better the influence of school-based experiences on prospective teachers' ideas and practices.
Case-Based Learning Experience For Teachers
Teachers' learning experiences in university classrooms typically entail reading about and discussing ideas; their learning experiences in K-12 classrooms usually involve actually engaging in the activities of teaching. Case-based teaching provides another approach for creating meaningful settings for teacher learning (Doyle, 1990; Leinhardt, 1990; Merseth, 1996; Sykes & Bird, 1992). Rather than putting teachers in particular classroom settings, cases provide vicarious encounters with those settings. This experience of the setting may afford reflection and critical analysis that is not possible when acting in the setting.
Some proponents suggest that cases have several advantages over other activities used in pre-service and in-service teacher education. As with actual classroom experiences, they allow teachers to explore the richness and complexity of genuine pedagogical problems. Cases, however, provide shared experiences for teachers to examine together, using multiple perspectives and frameworks (Feltovich, Spiro, & Coulson, 1997; Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1988).
They also afford the teacher educator more control over the situations and issues that teachers encounter, and the opportunity to prepare in advance for discussion and other activities in which the case materials are used (Sykes & Bird, 1992). For preservice programs, cases avoid the problem of placing prospective teachers in settings that do not embody the kinds of teaching advocated by university teacher educators. Although all cases limit the information provided, they vary in the richness or complexity of classroom life portrayed. Some media, such as videotape, can convey more of the complexity of classroom events than written cases. Interactive multimedia cases and hypermedia environments have the potential to provide even richer sets of materials documenting classroom teaching and learning. Lampert and Ball (1998), for example, developed a hypermedia learning environment that combines videotapes of classroom mathematics lessons, instructional materials, teacher journals, student notebooks, students' work, and teacher and student interviews, as well as tools for browsing, annotating, and constructing arguments. The non-linearity of such hypermedia systems, the ability to visit and revisit various sources of information quickly and easily, and the ability to build and store flexible and multiple links among various pieces of information, allow users to consider multiple perspectives on an event simultaneously (Feltovich et al., 1997; Spiro et al., 1988). Further, the extensiveness of the databases and ease of searching them enable teachers to define and explore problems of their own choosing (Merseth & Lacey, 1993). Like traditional cases, these multimedia and hypermedia materials provide a shared context for the exploration of pedagogical problems. They can come much closer, however, to mirroring the complexity of the problem space in which teachers work.
Despite vocal advocates and an increased use of cases in recent years there is much to learn about their effectiveness as instructional tools. Commenting on this "imbalance between promise and empirical data," Merseth (1996) noted, "the myriad claims for the use of cases and case methods far exceed the volume and quality of research specific to cases and case methods in teacher education" (p. 738). Questions for research include differences in what is learned from the rich and open-ended experiences provided by hypermedia cases versus more structured and focused written and videotaped cases, as well as comparisons of cases and case methods with other instructional materials and approaches. In addressing these questions, it will be important to understand and take into account the variety of purposes and uses of case-based pedagogy. We may learn, for example, that considerable limiting of complexity is desirable for some purposes, such as illustrating particular teaching concepts or strategies. For other purposes, such as reflecting the confluence of the many constraints on a teachers' problem solving, complex open-ended case materials may be important.
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