All faculty and graduate students who want to conduct research on the Teacher Preparation program at MSU must receive approval from the Director of Teacher Preparation, Dr. Gail Richmond.

How to apply for approval:

• Download the application form (link to download the form)
• Fill out the application
• Send the application to Dr. Gail Richmond, gailr@msu.edu
  • Application review process will take less than two months.
  • No application is accepted during summer (May 15 ~ August 15)
    

Current Research Studies on Teacher Preparation Program

<Example for a large project>

Video-based Response and Revision

Mary Juzwik (mmjuzwik@msu.edu) and Samantha Caughlan (caughlan@msu.edu),

Principal Investigators VBRR is a collaborative research and curriculum development project housed in the English teacher education program at Michigan State University (MSU) and affiliated with the Literacy Achievement Research Center at MSU. The project responds to a persistent problem we have encountered as teacher educators: Teacher candidates often see only a few models for designing classroom interactions, and many of them gain the most experience watching interactions that can best be characterized as “monologic”: the teacher is the single authoritative voice in the classroom and students are expected to passively take in information rather than become actively engaged in course content. Since this arrangement does not invite the diversity of student voices and experiences in the classroom to become resources for learning and engagement, we aspire to expand future teachers’ repertoire of experiences to include more “dialogically organized classroom interactions.” In such classrooms, the teacher’s voice is not the sole authority; rather, students’ voices are valued, encouraged, listened to, and built upon. To put it graphically, our project seeks to support teacher candidates in moving away from monologic to dialogue in their classroom interactions.
To accomplish this goal, we are turning to new media technologies, specifically video and Web 2.0 social networking resources, to invite teacher candidates into a recursive process that includes trying new (to them) ways of engaging students through dialogically organized classroom interaction, videotaping their efforts, sharing clips of those videos with small groups of colleagues, watching and responding (through writing, audio, or video) to their colleagues’ videos, reflecting on what they learn as they review and respond to their own videos and the videos of three or four others, and transforming their developing practices in response to what they learn through engaging in this process.

You can learn more about this project at http://vbrr.wiki.educ.msu.edu/.

<Example for an individual project>

Understanding how secondary science teacher candidates learn to teach via knowledge, practice, and professional identity

Hosun Kang (kanghosu@msu.edu)

The purpose of this study is to understand the mechanism of secondary science teacher candidates’ learning, how and why secondary science teacher candidates develop practices of science teaching while participating in multiple communities of practices. Specifically, this study aims to understand secondary science teacher candidates’ development of two reform-oriented science teaching practices–(a) planning and enacting classroom activities, and (b) assessing and responding to students–with the lens of professional identity. Fourteen secondary science teacher candidates at our program participate in this study over two academic years (2008-2009). Data consist of (a) candidates’ course assignments including plans, report of teaching, and self-made teaching video, and (b) interviews with candidates, mentor teachers, and course instructors. Data analysis has been undertaken based on the conceptual framework for beginning teacher learning that incorporates cognitive and a sociocultural perspective on learning (Kang & Anderson, under review) and the learning to notice framework (Sherin and van
Es, 2005). The findings illustrate candidates’ success and failure of learning these two reform oriented science teaching practices in relation to their positioning with respect to different communities of practices and prioritized values. This study aims to provide meaningful implications for both practice and research of teacher education.