Tensions in Learning to Teach

This article analyzes how Sharon, a student teacher, negotiated the different conceptions of teaching that provided the expectations for good instruction in her university and the site of her student teaching and how her effort to reconcile the different belief systems affected her identity as a teacher. The key settings of Sharon’s experience were the university program, her third-grade class at Harding Elementary, and her first teaching job. During student teaching, Sharon experienced frustrating tensions because her cooperating teacher provided little room for experimentation, mentoring instead with a mimetic approach. When in her first job, Sharon had the opportunity to resolve instructional problems with greater authority. We see tensions that require a socially contextualized intellectual resolution rather than simply one of relational accommodation as potentially productive in creating environments conductive to the formation of a satisfying teaching identity.