Understanding teacher candidate dispositions: Reflecting to build awareness.

Schussler, D.L. & Stooksberry, L.M. & Bercaw, L.A. (2010). Understanding teacher candidate dispositions: Reflecting to build awareness. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(4), 350-363.

These teacher educators used journal writing from 35 preservice teachers to test a model of teacher dispositions. They found the model, a three-part framework, encompassing The Intellectual Domain, The Cultural Domain, and The Moral Domain, to be useful in describing these preservice teachers' developmental processes, through the categories were not so important as how the preservice teachers reflected within them. As usual, a framework can help us structure our reflection about a difficult topic (like dispositions), but it is a tool only, and we must look carefully at the qualitative content of that reflection and try to draw inferences from that. The framework, or any assessment strategies that are drawn from it, cannot become so reified that they become ends in themselves. This is the danger when something like disposition assessment is mandated by accreditation entities like NCATE. The authors of this article put the issue in perspective: "although assessment is important, it is the development of dispositions that should be of the most concern in teacher education (p. 351)."