“A Brave Group of People”: Teacher Candidates’ Perceptions of Teaching in Middle School

Authors

Bettie Perry, Old Dominion UniversityFollow
Jori S. Beck, Old Dominion UniversityFollow
KaaVonia Hinton, Old Dominion UniversityFollow

Abstract

We set out to create a middle grades program and to inform the field about the perceptions of our teacher candidates on teaching middle school. To accomplish these twin goals, we sought to better understand our teacher candidates’ perceptions of teaching middle school and how these perceptions might be changed if necessary. Our review of research included three themes to frame this work: (a) middle school philosophy, (b) motivations to teach, and (c) middle school teacher preparation. We chose an emergent, qualitative research design to cull rich data from diverse stakeholders including open-ended survey data. We found an overarching deficit narrative about middle school students even though teacher candidates expressed admiration for middle school teachers. Our teacher candidates professed a need for coursework on classroom management and adolescent psychology as well as more field experiences to better prepare them for careers in the middle grades. Implications for middle grades programs are discussed including the structure of field experiences and teacher preparation curriculum. We explain specific revisions to our own program in the attempt to generate analytic generalizability.

Author Bio

Jori S. Beck (Ph.D., George Mason University) joined the faculty at Old Dominion University after three years as an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In her career so far as a teacher educator, Dr. Beck has been awarded over $650,000 in external funding and has published in journals such as Teacher Education Quarterly, The Teacher Educator, and the Journal of Teacher Education. Her work focuses on clinically rich teacher education broadly including foci in Third Space theory, use of data and evidence, and school-university partnerships with an underlying theme of equity. Dr. Beck primarily specializes in qualitative methods, including case study.

DOI

10.20429/cimle.2021.260102

Creative Commons License

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

Recommended Citation

Perry, Bettie; Beck, Jori S.; and Hinton, KaaVonia (2021) "“A Brave Group of People”: Teacher Candidates’ Perceptions of Teaching in Middle School," Current Issues in Middle Level Education: Vol. 26: Iss. 1, Article 2.
DOI: 10.20429/cimle.2021.260102
Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cimle/vol26/iss1/2