Paired Placement

Clinical Experiences Research Action Cluster (CERAC, https://sites.google.com/view/clinicalexperiences/)

Our goal is to strengthen the clinical experiences within secondary mathematics teacher education by fostering deliberate partnerships among teacher candidates, mentor teachers, and university faculty via an integrated three-pronged approach, including embedded field work in the methods courses, paired placements, and co-planning and co-teaching.

The Paired Placement Sub Research Action Cluster (SubRAC) is part of the CERAC (http://mtep.info/cerac). The goal of the paired placement subRAC is to implement the paired placement model across different contexts in order to learn the most efficient ways to implement the model so that teacher candidates develop proficiency with implementing the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 2014) eight mathematics teaching practices and other equitable teaching strategies. In the paired-placement model, two secondary mathematics teacher candidates are paired with one mentor (or cooperating) teacher. This trio of teachers works collaboratively and develops skills and strategies for co-planning and co-teaching whereby all three work daily together to address student learning as a team (Leatham & Peterson, 2010).

For more than six years members of the paired placement subRAC have been implementing the paired placement model, creating protocols and syllabus to aid others in the implementing the model across different contexts, and constantly improving tools for implementing the model through plan-do-study-act cycles as defined by Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, and LeMahieu (2015). Our findings (Strutchens, Whitfield, Erickson, & Conway, 2020) are in alignment with other researchers (Gardener and Robinson, 2009 and Mau, 2013) who stated that the paired placement model promotes multiple perspectives, leads to increased dialogue about teaching and learning, facilitates the implementation of student-centered pedagogy; nurtures and develops teachers' skills of collaboration; increases teachers' willingness to take pedagogic risks; improves student teachers' level of reﬂection; promotes modifications of teaching to increase K-12 student learning; and increases better classroom management. Moreover, we have used findings from Mau (2013) and Goodnough et al., (2009) in orientation sessions and workshops related to the paired placement model to lesson the occurrence of pitfalls, such as worry that the paired-placement model do not reﬂect the reality of employment as a teacher, over dependency of one member of the teacher candidate pair on the other, and lack of communication among the trio members.

Here we present more information about the paired placement model in attempts to inform others, encourage the use of the paired placement model at other institutions, share resources that may be used in the model, recruit others to this research project and disseminate accomplishments of the paired placement sub-RAC.

Members of the sub-RAC include:

Central Alabama:

Marilyn Strutchens

Bradley Bearden

Huajun Huang

Brea Ratliff

W. Gary Martin

Angela Parsons

Montana:

Georgia Cobbs

David Erickson

Nick Grener

Jennie Luebeck

Columbus State University:

Basil Conway

Peter Anderson

Dacia Irvin-Sheffield

Jose Ruiz

University of Hawai’i at Monoa:

Charmaine Mangram

Kara Suzuka