Implementation and impact of experiential learning in a graduate level teacher education program: An example from a Canadian university
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Teacher inquiry, in which teachers study their own professional practice, is currently a popular form of experiential learning that is considered a powerful tool to bring about effective change in teaching and learning.Little empirical evidence, however, exists to explain precisely if and how this pedagogical methodology moves teachers toward transformation of practice.Using a grounded theory design, we examined twelve end of term graduate level learning portfolios and administered a survey to 336 inservice teachers enrolled in a two-year graduate diploma program in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada.We found powerful evidence that our programs were highly impactful, with 94% of teachers reporting transformative learning within the second year of the program.Using portfolio data, we examined the process of the teacher transformations.Our findings revealed that teachers' abilities to interrogate their subjective-objective stance deepened their experiential learning.Using three case studies we exemplify how transformative pathways were formulated and conclude with a discussion of the implications of learning through experience, including the value of student-generated learning goals, continuous interfacing of theory and practice, seeing your "teaching" through the eyes of your students, colleagues or parents, and the power of living your research question in the context of your own classroom and school setting.We end the paper on a cautionary note pointing out the vulnerability of programs of this nature in an era of accountability, standardization, quality control, and risk management all of which eclipse approaches that focus on authentic practical problems and student generated solutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".