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Abstract

Promoting pre-service teachers' development of professional dispositions through purposefully designed learning experiences may be middle level teacher education's most important contribution to a novice's development from student to teacher. The 2022 Revised Middle Level Teacher Preparation Standards explicitly address this expectation in Standard 5, with Component 5.d noting that middle grades pre-service teachers should become "continuous, collaborative learners who demonstrate knowledgeable, reflective, critical perspectives on their teaching." This article offers detailed illustrations of the approaches one middle grades teacher education program used to intentionally select professional dispositions to target in early coursework and teach those dispositions to candidates. Approaches included: anticipating administrator expectations for inservice teacher behaviors; developing course norms based on those expectations; viewing interviews with local administrators about the importance of professional dispositions; analyzing job application reference forms for teaching positions in local districts; self-assessing on numerous behaviors that operationalized targeted dispositions; and setting goals for future dispositional growth. Recommendations for middle level teacher educators seeking to strengthen their program's work to support candidates in building professional dispositions are discussed.

Author Bio

Dr. Hilary Dack is an Associate Professor of Middle Grades Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her areas of specialization are differentiated instruction and effective instructional decision-making at the middle level.

Dr. Dack teaches courses on the science of learning, middle grades education, instructional design, and differentiating instruction for academically diverse learners. She recently received the Cato College of Education’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Before earning her Ph.D., Dr. Dack taught social studies, language arts, science, math, and English as a second language in 7th and 8th grade. She regularly leads professional development workshops for middle school faculties on differentiated instruction, the science of learning, and high-quality curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices.

Dr. Dack’s current research focuses on how teacher education programs prepare preservice and early career teachers for effective instructional decision-making. Her research has been published in leading journals, including Journal of Teacher Education, Research in Middle Level Education Online, Middle School Journal, and Teaching and Teacher Education. Her publications for practitioners have appeared in Phi Delta Kappan and Educational Leadership, and she serves on the International Editorial Advisory Board of Learning and Instruction.

Dr. Dack’s scholarship has earned the American Educational Research Association’s Social Studies Research SIG Outstanding Paper Award and the Cato College of Education’s Award for Excellence in Research. She was also the recipient of the University of Virginia’s Bruce Gansneder Outstanding Dissertation Award and the University of Virginia’s Edgar F. Shannon Award given annually to the School of Education’s outstanding graduate. Dr. Dack is the past president of the National Association of Professors of Middle Level Education and has served as a resource expert on middle grades education to North Carolina legislators and policymakers.

DOI

10.20429/cimle.2024.280103

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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