Education Commons^™

Assessing Conceptual Orientations In Teacher Education Programs, Louis Volante, Lorna Earl

Essays in Education

A well-defined conceptual framework helps identify a program’s central tasks, such as helping teachers become intellectual leaders, promoting the primacy of experience and/or developing a progressive social vision in teachers. This type of conceptual clarity provides guidance to teacher educators in program development and evaluation by identifying issues or tasks that specific programs should address (Feiman-Nemser, 1990).

Conceptual orientations research has typically relied on the analyses of course syllabi to infer a program’s emphases. The degree to which a program fosters knowledge acquisition in a particular area may or may not conform to these course/program descriptions. Direct data gathered from …