“Now I know what I’m capable of, I just didn’t realize it before”: Pre-Service Teacher Readiness to Teach While Conducting Collaborative Action Research in a Community of Practice

Abstract

Although teacher preparation programs have critically important material to cover, there is much debate across teacher education scholarship regarding what to prioritize. Presently, limited time and resources are dedicated to developing the pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) own sense of readiness to teach. This is particularly important, since each PST will ultimately be responsible for their own classroom as the instructor of record upon graduation. All educational stakeholders in the PST’s future (students, parents, colleagues, administrators) will expect the novice teacher to be ready to teach, and to take on all the professional roles and responsibilities of a teacher from day one of their career. Self-efficacy is a strong indicator of teacher retention while a lack of a sense of readiness to teach can lead to teacher attrition. With the understanding that teacher retention is desirable, and thus self-efficacy and a sense of readiness are important qualities to develop during PST preparation programs, my motivation behind this dissertation was to identify a possible method of developing those qualities in PSTs without increasing their workload or extending their program completion timeline.This study builds off the work of Manasia et al. (2020), who established four dimensions of readiness to teach: Professional Knowledge, Professional Practice, Professional Engagement, and Self-Management. According to Manasia and colleagues, professional skills contributing to these dimensions include: conducting research and identifying reliable sources, collaborating with colleagues, engaging in self-reflection, managing time and resources on a long-term project, engaging with community members, seeking feedback, and dealing with the ever-changing nature of schooling. This dissertation leveraged a required action research project to provide PST participants with regular opportunities to practice skills directly related to their readiness to teach, exploring the following research questions:

How does PSTs’ membership in a community of practice with a focus on conducting collaborative action research contribute to their sense of readiness to teach? How does a teacher educator’s membership in a community of practice with a focus on conducting collaborative action research contribute to PSTs’ senses of readiness to teach? In this mixed methods study, I examined the ways a group of PSTs developed their own senses of readiness to teach throughout one school year. I framed their readiness both with Manasia et al.’s (2020) four dimensions of readiness to teach and also captured the ways the PSTs described their readiness in their own words. We formed a community of practice (CoP) with the specific goal of conducting a collaborative action research (CAR) study. This allowed me to create opportunities for the PSTs to explore and practice professional skills in the Professional Engagement and Self-Management dimensions of readiness to teach. Findings indicated that the PSTs’ readiness to teach increased in all four dimensions from the beginning of the school year to the end, with particular growth in several subdimensions of Professional Engagement and Self-Management. Furthermore, evidence of growth within some sub-dimensions of readiness could be directly attributed to participation in the CoP or conducting CAR. Although evidence of growth due to a participating teacher educator is minimal, the PSTs reported that having a non-evaluative teacher educator as a participating member of the CoP was particularly important to their involvement in the group overall. Teacher educator-guided CAR projects have strong potential to increase PST readiness to teach in dimensions that are often under-addressed in traditional teacher preparation programs without adding additional strain to the programs or to the PSTs themselves.