Becoming a teacher: Coordinating past, present, and future selves
with perspectival understandings about teaching
SoonAh Lee a, *
, Diane L. Schallert b
a
Department of Education, 77 Younbong-ro, Buk-gu, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, 61186, Republic of Korea
b
Department of Educational Psychology, SZB 506F, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA
h i g h l i g h t s
 Teacher identity and teaching conceptions interacted as twin developmental processes.
 Conﬂicts between theory and practice or between one's ideals and reality were useful.
 Views of becoming new teachers and what teaching would entail grew more realistic.
 Learning to teach ﬂowed from situated perspectives on teaching.
 Continual shifts in inward and outward foci accompanied preservice teachers' growth.
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 2 July 2015
Received in revised form
30 January 2016
Accepted 7 February 2016
Available online 1 March 2016
Keywords:
Teacher identity
Conception of teaching
Preservice education
a b s t r a c t
A longitudinal study is presented of how students preparing to become teachers conceptualized teaching
and developed their identities as teachers. Findings were that contextualized momentary switchings
between student and teacher perspectives accompanied participants' understandings about teaching and
their negotiation of the process of becoming a teacher. Dynamic processes involved in constructing
conceptions of teaching and self-as-a-teacher unfolded across three semesters, culminating in a more
professional identity at program's end. The study contributes to teacher preparation research by making
connections among aspects of professional development and suggesting a model of learning to teach,
grounded in participants' situated perspectives on teaching.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The status of being a preservice teacher brings with it a
dilemma: Is the individual a student or a teacher, or both or neither,
at different times? Calderhead (1991) claimed that learning to teach
may include multiple and complex forms of learning because
various areas of knowledge growth occur at the same time. FeimanNemser
(2008) also implied such complexity by conceptualizing
what is involved in learning to teach with four broad themes:
learning to think, know, feel, and act like a teacher. Although several
models or theories describing teacher development have been
presented over the past three decades (e.g., Berliner, 1988; Fuller,
1969; Huberman, 1989; Nias, 1989; Ryan, 1986; Sprinthall,
Reiman, & Thies-Sprinthall, 1996), models focusing on preservice
teachers' learning to teach seem few. Levin (2003) pointed out the
lack of coherent theories of teacher development despite the
heuristic value of different models from different theoretical perspectives.
However, two representative models of preservice
teachers' learning to teach, suggested by Hollingsworth (1989) and
Kagan (1992), have enjoyed wide acceptance and share common
themes. Both suggested that preservice teachers' prior beliefs play a
critical role in determining how much knowledge they acquire in
teacher education programs and how this knowledge is interpreted.
Both discussed that preservice teachers shift their attention
from class control to student learning as their teaching experience
increases. Also, both models were theoretically grounded in
cognitive and information processing perspectives (Levin, 2003).
Increasingly, educational researchers have recognized the
importance of considering sociocultural inﬂuences that impinge on
the individual. Wanting to contribute to the work on preservice
teachers' learning to teach, we looked to Greeno and Van de Sande's
(2007) conception of perspectival understanding. In this view,
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: purebaby@jnu.ac.kr (S. Lee), dschallert@austin.utexas.edu
(D.L. Schallert).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Teaching and Teacher Education
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.02.004
0742-051X/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e83
human cognition is inherently based in perspectives, and one's
knowing and understanding is always situated in activity. Taking a
perspectival view, we explored preservice teachers' teacher identity
development as an ongoing process of changing understandings
about teaching. We were interested in how such
changes were enacted in their interactions with their teaching
context moment to moment.
There seems no argument that teacher education should
contribute to the development of the professional identity of
teachers, but it is not clear which aspects are relevant and to what
extent these aspects are integrated in such identity development.
Whereas some studies have connected teacher identity to teachers'
conceptions or images of the self (Knowles, 1992; Nias, 1989), other
studies have emphasized teachers' roles (Volkmann & Anderson,
1998) or reﬂection in teacher identity development (Maclean &
White, 2007; Walkington, 2005). With respect to the relationship
between beliefs about teaching and teacher identity, Mayer (1999)
claimed that teacher identity is based on core beliefs about teaching
and what it means to be a teacher, and that these beliefs are
continuously reshaped in the process of becoming a professional
teacher. Additionally, Korthagen (2004) stated that teachers' professional
identities inﬂuence their beliefs about teaching as well as
their teaching actions.
Acknowledging the inﬂuence of these perspectives and that the
development of one's conceptions about teaching is vital to
becoming a teacher (Kelchtermans & Hamilton, 2004), we were
curious about how preservice teachers come to think, know, and
feel like teachers during teacher preparation. Two research questions
guided us: (1) how do preservice teachers develop a teacher
identity during teacher preparation?; and (2) how is the evolution
of a teacher identity related to preservice teachers' conceptions of
teaching? We saw connecting these two developmental processes
experienced throughout teacher preparation as affording a way to
achieve a more integrated understanding about preservice teachers'
learning to teach.
1.1. Self and identity
Research on identity issues has been carried out from multiple
disciplinary perspectives, beginning with work in philosophy and
psychology. The construct has become increasingly central to the
work of researchers in the ﬁeld of teaching and teacher education.
We begin with a brief introduction to the construct of identity
broadly construed.
Based on Mead (1934), Nias (1989) distinguished between a
substantial self (formed in one's early years, inﬂuenced by family
and immediate culture, and generally resistant to change) and
situational selves (multiple selves that respond to social encounters
by incorporating beliefs and values). As Rodgers and Scott (2008)
claimed, identity seems closer to situational selves, and distinguishing
between the two makes the self the meaning maker
and identity the meaning made, with both evolving over time.
Although the relationship between self and identity is still unclear,
identity itself is generally deﬁned as referring to who or what an
individual is perceived by him/herself and by others (Beijaard,
1995). According to Rodgers and Scott (2008), contemporary conceptions
of identity share four basic assumptions: (a) identity is
formed within multiple contexts; (b) identity is formed in relationships
with others and involves emotions; (c) identity is
shifting, unstable, and multiple; and (d) identity involves the construction
and reconstruction of meaning over time. Of these aspects,
contexts and relationships constitute external inﬂuences on
identity formation, and stories and emotions act as internal
meaning-making aspects. As for the time dimension, a useful
approach comes from Markus and Nurius (1986) who described
how changes in identity occur over time as well as in the present, as
an individual makes use of memories of past selves and imagines a
future self to construct a particular present self.
Gee (2001) clariﬁed how identity can be contextual, relational,
multiple, and shifting by categorizing four ways of viewing identity:
Nature-identity (N-Identity), Institution-identity (I-Identity),
Discourse-identity (D-Identity), and Afﬁnity-identity (A-Identity).
N-Identity is a way of looking at “who I am” based on nature, and it
indicates a state (e.g., I am an identical twin), whereas I-Identity
represents a position within an institution (e.g., I am a student at
the University of Texas). The third perspective, D-Identity, is a
matter of one's individuality coming through in how one talks or is
talked about by other individuals, and is constructed in the ﬂow of
interactions with others, not by nature or institutions (e.g., “She
tells the funniest stories when describing her student teaching”).
Last, the source of A-Identity originates in an afﬁnity group made
up of individuals who share similar interests across contexts and is
acquired through participating in or sharing speciﬁc practices as a
group member (e.g., an online bookclub reading Johnston's Choice
Words fan). According to Gee, these four identities are interrelated
rather than forming discrete categories, and should be seen as
different aspects of how identities are formed and sustained.
Woven together to represent an individual as he/she acts within
each context, one of these four identities can nevertheless predominate
in a given time and place. Thus, identity is not a ﬁxed
attribute and but an “ongoing process” of changing from context to
context and even moment to moment in interaction with others
(Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004; Gee, 2001).
More recently, these postmodern perspectives on identity have
been extended in Akkerman and Meijer (2011) dialogical approach
by considering three dimensions to identity: unitary and multiple,
continuous and discontinuous, and individual and social. Building on
Hermans' (1996) Dialogical Self theory, the authors claimed that
identity should be characterized along all six seemingly opposite,
but simultaneously true, dimensions.
1.2. Teacher identity
Aligning with recent conceptions of identity, professional
identity is also open to continuous redeﬁnition through negotiating
one's self as a social being. One's professional identity is especially
related to dealing with professional functions and includes roles,
abilities, and values that lead one to commit to a profession
(Korthagen, 2004; Maclean & White, 2007). Tickle (2000) pointed
out that two aspects, others' expectations and socially accepted
images and what teachers themselves value as important, seem
intermingled in their professional identity. Similarly, Borich (1999)
claimed that teachers' sense of self-identity includes their sense of
self in relation to others in professional environments, and it is
acquired by accepting professional roles, responsibilities, or obligations
as a teacher.
Acknowledging that function and identity are intertwined aspects
of what it means to develop into a professional (Walkington,
2005), Mayer (1999) claimed that teacher identity should be
distinguished from teachers' functional roles: a teaching role refers
to performance required as a teacher, whereas a teaching identity is
a personal characteristic encompassing how one identiﬁes with
being a teacher or how one feels as a teacher. He also asserted that a
fully professional teacher engages an intellectual dimension in
addition to “doing the job” of teaching. Core beliefs about teaching,
representing the intellectual dimension, encourage teachers to
engage in ongoing change in their professional identity as lifelong
learners.
Extending Mayer's (1999) claims about the interrelationship
between teachers' beliefs and their teachers' professional identity
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e83 73
formation, Korthagen (2004) suggested an umbrella model of levels
of change, an onion model in his words, as a framework for teachers'
reﬂection and development in becoming a good teacher. The model
has six levels of change including the environment as the outermost
layer, followed by behavior, competencies, beliefs, identity,
and mission as the innermost level. According to Korthagen, professional
identity is created as a Gestalt that includes an unconscious
set of needs, images, feelings, values, role models, previous
experiences, and behavioral tendencies. Teachers become aware of
this Gestalt by describing their life path in acts of storytelling about
themselves, and the Gestalt inﬂuences the outer levels of beliefs,
competencies, and behavior. Relatedly, Akkerman and Meijer
(2011) conceptualized teacher identity from a dialogical
approach, as “an ongoing process of negotiating and interrelating
multiple I-positions in such a way that a more or less coherent and
consistent sense of self is maintained throughout various participations
and self-investments in one's (working) life” (p. 315).
Thus, conceptions of teaching and teacher identity seem reciprocally
involved in professional development. Through reviewing
25 studies on professional identity conducted during the period
1988e2000, Beijaared et al. (2004) found that preservice teachers'
beliefs were determined by their biographies and were important
constituents of their professional identity formation. Similarly,
Sugrue (1997) asserted that preservice teachers' lay theories and
teaching identities may originate from very early years and are
shaped signiﬁcantly by “immediate family, signiﬁcant others or
extended family, the apprenticeship of observation, atypical
teaching episodes, policy context, teaching traditions and cultural
archetypes, and tacitly acquired understandings” (p. 222). Thus, the
development of one's conceptions of teaching and one's teacher
identity are closely related (Cabaroglu & Roberts, 2000). Considering
Walkington's (2005) perspective on the relationship between
teacher identity and teaching practice, that “the uniqueness of
every teacher's approach to teaching, shaped by personal teacher
identity is what makes every classroom ‘look’ different” (p. 54),
studying the link between conceptions of teaching and teacher
identity promises to provide a more integrated understanding
about why preservice teachers teach in the particular ways they do
and how teacher educators can help them become better teachers.
1.3. Situative perspectives on learning to teach
Perspectives on learning to teach have progressed over the last
40 years, with earlier paradigms reﬂecting process-product, student
mediation, and classroom ecology approaches to describing
the different processes of learning to teach (Floden, 2001). Having
reviewed 93 empirical studies about how beginning teachers learn
to teach, Wideen, Mayer-Smith, and Moon (1998) grouped them as
representing three traditions in teacher education, positivist, progressive,
and social critique traditions, claiming that each tradition
brings a different view of the learning-to-teach process. From a
positivist tradition, teacher education is a process of providing
preservice teachers with pre-determined knowledge about teaching
and learning whereas a progressive tradition emphasizes the
knowledge with which student teachers begin and how they
change their knowledge through teacher education. In a social
critique perspective, broader issues including preparing teachers
for the diversity of cultural backgrounds their students will bring
are the concern of teacher education. Ismat (1998) distinguished
between two versions of constructivist teacher education: the
developmental (Piagetian psychological) and social reconstructionist
(Vygotskian sociocultural) traditions, each based in turn on
views of how students learn and on the role of the teacher in
helping students learn. Similarly, Borko and Putnam (1996) psychological
approach to learning to teach is aligned with
constructivist or socio-constructivist learning theories. Borko and
Putnam addressed how the knowledge and beliefs of novice
teachers change as they experience teaching practices, even as
beliefs and prior knowledge serve as ﬁlters in shaping what and
how preservice teachers learn from teacher education experiences
situated in particular contexts and cultures.
Against this backdrop of views of what is involved as preservice
teachers learn to teach, a newer perspective on learning has grown,
the situative perspective, rooted in such constructs as ecological
psychology, sociocultural views of learning, and distributed
cognition (e.g., Belland, 2011; Engle, 2006; Greeno, 1997; van de
Sande & Greeno, 2012). Unlike earlier cognitive and constructivist
perspectives, this newer perspective emphasizes the importance of
physical and social contexts in learning and the role of social interactions
among learners as participants in learning communities
(Greeno, 2011). Putnam and Borko (2000) pointed out that the
situative perspective has been primarily discussed in terms of
students' learning and has rarely been applied to the task of
learning to teach. The authors connected three conceptual themes
as central to a situative perspective on learning to teach, that
cognition is (a) situated in particular physical and social contexts,
(b) social in nature, and (c) distributed across the individual, other
persons, and tools. Peressini, Borko, Romagnano, Knuth, and Willis
(2004) applied a situative perspective on learning to the study of
how secondary math teachers reﬁned their conceptions of mathspeciﬁc
pedagogy and sense of self as a math teacher by participating
in various teacher education contexts.
Recognizing that there have been different perspectives on
teacher education research, we agree with Putnam and Borko
(2000) assertion that a situative perspective would provide a
powerful new lens for examining teaching, teacher learning, and
the practice of teacher education for both preservice and inservice
teachers. Perspectival understanding encompasses not only building
understanding of concepts, but also recognizing that such understandings
are colored by the perspectives one takes and are
developed through interactive negotiations (Greeno & van de
Sande, 2007). A framing assumption of perspectival understanding
is that human cognition always reﬂects a perspective, and
constructing a viewpoint is necessary in learning. Developing a
perspectival understanding involves resolving constraints or making
sense of a learner's practice that one faces in a particular context
(Greeno & van de Sande, 2007; van de Sande & Greeno, 2012). In
addition, what we mean by perspectival understandings about
teaching is similar to Kelchtermans' (2009) concept of “a personal
interpretative framework” (p. 38). As a set of cognitions and representations
that teachers use to make sense of their teaching practice,
a personal interpretative framework guides interpretations
and actions in a particular teaching context, even as it is modiﬁed
by meaningful interactions with the context. In our work, we were
interested in whether a situative perspective on preservice teachers'
changing conceptions would be useful in understanding their
growing professional identity.
2. Method
The purpose of this study was to explore how preservice
teachers develop their teacher identities as they develop their
conceptions of teaching. To capture this process, we designed a
longitudinal qualitative study, initiating the study at the beginning
of the students' teacher preparation program and gathering data
through naturalistic observations and interviews over the three
semesters making up the program.
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e8374
2.1. Context and participants
Participants were nine women students (age 21 to 23 at graduation
from the program) and diverse in ethnic background (see
Table 1). They were enrolled in the three-semester preparation
program, called the Professional Development Sequence (PDS), that
prepared students for Pre-K to 4th grade teaching certiﬁcation.
Before entering the PDS program, students had taken some
preliminary education courses such as “Play in Early Childhood,”
“Individual Differences,” “Sociocultural Inﬂuences on Learning.”
Once they began the program, students were grouped in cohorts,
depending on personal choice and interest, and supervised by a
program coordinator. The PDS program had approximately ten
cohorts at the same point in the program, and each cohort had one
program coordinator and two or three graduate student facilitators.
Our participants were all in the same cohort, called the “cultural
diversity” cohort, in which they were required to do three successive
internships in nearby elementary schools in the same lowincome
district so that they could experience teaching students
from culturally diverse backgrounds. Participants had to choose
kindergarten or pre-kindergarten classrooms for the ﬁrst internship,
but for the other two internships, schools and grade levels
usually depended on their preference, informed by their coordinator.
Our participants' choices of grade levels for the three internships
appear in Table 1. Both coordinators and facilitators
helped students ﬁnish the program successfully and cared about
their progress. The coordinators supervised students' coursework
and internship placement schedules, and the facilitators observed
students practicing their teaching in placement classrooms and
gave them advice about their lessons. Our participants had a
particularly close relationship with their coordinator, with some of
them describing her as their “school mother.” Besides face-to-face
communication, students used an online forum (called Teachnet)
where they could share information contact fellow cohort members,
their coordinator, and their university professors.
So that students would be gradually exposed to more school
contexts and became familiar with school curricula, routines, and
events, the number of hours for working in the ﬁeld increased with
each semester. Along with various more general courses (e.g.,
Applied Human Learning, Classroom Management) and more focused
subject methods courses (e.g., Elementary Language Arts, Elementary
Social Studies), they spent 12e14 h per week in pre-kindergarten or
kindergarten classrooms (ﬁrst semester) and 16 h per week in
1ste4th grade classrooms (second semester). In the third semester,
students were at their placement school every day for the full
school day, except for Mondays when they took their last required
course at the university in the morning and worked at their
placement school in the afternoon. During apprentice teaching,
individual students had to prepare teaching lessons in cooperation
with their cooperating teachers under their program coordinator's
supervision. Student teaching began in the second week of the 14
weeks of the last semester. At ﬁrst, preservice teachers taught only
one or two subjects using their cooperating teachers' lesson plans.
Gradually they took over more subjects and used more of their own
lesson plans, until they came to teach all subjects in a day using only
their own lesson plans, hence the name total teaching. In addition to
the cooperating teacher, each student was observed by the coordinator
and facilitator three times respectively during the total
teaching period.
2.2. Data collection procedures
We used several data collection procedures: interviews and
observations supplemented by audiotaping, collection of artifacts,
and administration of online questionnaires. In addition to triangulation
established by the use of multiple and different data
sources and methods, the trustworthiness of this study came from
what Lincoln and Guba (1985) called prolonged engagement and
persistent observation, achieved by our relatively long and continuous
relationship with the preservice teachers. Our classroom observations
were conducted in two different settings: the university
classrooms and participants' placement school classrooms. Because
the focus of our study was on exploring preservice teachers'
development of their teacher identities, it was vital that we observe
how they positioned themselves or were positioned by others in
these different contexts.
The primary data source was the face-to-face individual interviews,
audiotaped and later transcribed. Interviews, which were
semi-structured with open-ended questions, were of two types:
end-of-semester and reﬂective interviews (see Appendix for actual
interview protocols). The ﬁrst set occurred at the end of each semester
with questions structured in ﬁve areas: (1) learning experiences
in coursework, (2) internship experiences, (3) current
conceptions of teaching and any noted changes in these conceptions,
(4) self-identiﬁcation in both contexts, and (5) conﬁdence
about being a teacher. Beyond these common areas, each semester's
interview had distinctive foci. In the ﬁrst semester, students
were asked about past K-12 learning experiences and how they had
come to choose teaching as their profession, whereas in the third
semester, students were asked about their student teaching and to
describe their overall PDS learning experiences. These interviews
took place in an ofﬁce, and ranged in length from 30 to 80 min, with
the majority between 45 and 60 min long. Thus, interview data
came from 27 interview transcripts (three for each of the nine
students).
Conducted in the third semester, reﬂective interviews were
designed to offer the preservice teachers a chance to reﬂect
immediately on a lesson just delivered. These occurred mostly right
after a teaching session (or during the lunch break of the same day)
because timing was important for the quality of data. We designed
Table 1
Participants' background information.
Pseudonym Ethnicity Original major Prior teaching experience Internship grade level
2009 Spring 2009 Fall 2010 Spring
Amanda Caucasian Education 1½ years Pre-K 1st 1st
Madison Caucasian Math 1½ years Kinder 5th 3rd
Michelle Caucasian Education 2 years Kinder 1st 3rd
Paula African-Amer. Education 3 years Kinder 1st 1st
Jackie African-Amer. Education 2 years Kinder 4th 4th &1st
Sally Latina Psychology 1½ years Kinder 4th Kinder
Maxine Caucasian Business ½ year Kinder 3rd Kinder
Jane Caucasian Education 1½ years Pre-K 4th 3rd
Heather Caucasian Speech Path 1½ years Kinder 4th Pre-K
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e83 75
these interviews to allow the preservice teacher to explore what
had been of greatest concern while teaching, and we asked about
thoughts and feelings, and teaching strategies and actions. These
interviews usually occurred in a private corner near the placement
classroom, and lasted between 8 and 30 min, with the majority
between 10 and 20 min long.
Supplemental data came from students' responses to questionnaires
about their perceptions and reﬂections and their ﬁnal
papers detailing their teaching philosophy and personal discipline
system, collected as the ﬁrst and second semesters ended. Additional
data came from observational ﬁeld notes and analytical
memos. These helped us to keep a record of our thoughts about our
data and provided useful insights in later analytic sessions.
2.3. Data analysis
In line with Corbin and Strauss (2014) qualitative methods and a
grounded theory approach, data analysis began immediately during
the ﬁrst semester of data collection with extensive memos and
ﬁeld notes reﬂecting on puzzlements and emerging insights. Later
data analysis was conducted in two phases reﬂecting our two
research questions: Phase 1 involved open, selective, and axial
coding with a focus on how students were developing their teacher
identities. Phase 2 was focused on exploring the relationship between
conceptual change and teacher identity construction and
building a grounded theory of the central phenomenon.
In Phase 1, we started the process by reading the transcripts of
the end-of-semester interviews repeatedly for relevance to the
research questions. We identiﬁed any meaningful chunk by labeling
them with such phrases as “Own early schooling experiences,”
“Prior conceptions of teaching,” “Conﬁdence in own teaching,”
“Internship experience.” We used both down reading and across
reading, the ﬁrst (reading all of one semester's interview transcripts
across participants) to identify characteristics of that semester's
experiences that seemed associated with the students' development
of their teacher identities, and the second (reading each
participant's interview transcripts across the three semesters) to
note patterns of individual differences in learning and identity
formation.
Having engaged in open coding, that is, the process of identifying
and closely examining units of meaning for similarities and differences,
we grouped together similar units to identify properties
and dimensions speciﬁc to a particular concept or theme. We next
engaged in axial coding to elaborate on the initial open codes
through a process of constant comparison, looking for similarities
and differences to other dimensions and for relations among them.
Relationships among categories provided a fuller explanation of the
central phenomenon, and a basis for addressing the research
questions. Coding for self-identiﬁcation issues resulted in two
single identity categories, student only identity and teacher only
identity, and three dual identity codes, equal student and teacher
identities, student-dominated identity, and teacher-dominated identity.
Observation ﬁeld notes were used to triangulate these identity
codes.
In the second phase, we hoped to gain insight into what characteristics
appeared as students' teacher identities evolved, and
how these characteristics were related each other. Attempting to
ﬁnd discernible patterns in the development of conceptions of
teaching and teacher identity, we thoroughly examined each case,
leading us to postulate how each student recognized herself as a
teacher and experienced evolution in her self-image (within-case
analysis). In the next step of integration, we compared and contrasted
across cases to integrate categories and ﬁnd relationships
between the two developmental aspects, rereading all memos and
ﬁeld notes, constructing a large chart of all case analyses, and
creating a storyline of the central phenomenon. This phase required
a continuous comparison across data sources and analysis techniques
until the analytic story seemed to ﬁt the data well, and all
categories seemed logically linked, with an emerging explanation
and interpretation about the relationship between students'
conception of teaching and their teacher identity.
As with any qualitative study, issues of reliability and validity
were addressed by careful consideration of the canons of trustworthiness.
In addition to prolonged engagement, persistent
observation, triangulation, and thick description, peer debrieﬁng
was useful throughout this analysis phase, with informed colleagues
helping us justify our categories and interpretation by
reading transcript inserts and observation memos in several
sessions.
3. Findings
Our ﬁndings are presenting in ﬁve sections. We begin by discussing
three emerging themes about the process of developing a
teacher identity. We then illustrate how preservice teachers'
perspectival understandings about teaching and self-as-a-teacher
were intertwined with growing professional identities, and, in
the last section, present a model of the process.
3.1. Reﬂecting past selves: preservice teachers' initial images of
themselves as teachers
Like the preservice interns in Hollingsworth's work (1988,
1989), nearly all participants reported having prior images of
themselves as teachers before entering the program, strongly
inﬂuenced by their self-images as learners. These images were
revealed in their description of their favorite classes or teachers or
their decision to become a teacher, as Madison reﬂected in her
interview: “A lot of the ways I think about teaching have come from
my experiences as a child and the teacher I liked and what/how I
learned the best.” Five of the participants mentioned that they had
always wanted to be a teacher, recollecting playing teacher with
friends or siblings in childhood. Using their memories about their
favorite teachers and classes, they imagined how they would be
around children as a teacher, as illustrated in the following comments:
“ … . Because those two teachers were genuine and concerned
about my education … that's how I want to be with my students. I
want them to have joy in their learning” (Michelle); “I admire that in
that teacher. I wanna teach like her, just trying to ﬁnd good in all my
students” (Jackie). Interestingly, teachers' qualities were very often
explicated, and ﬁve of nine preservice teachers generated such
characteristics of a good teacher as caring, supporting, welcoming,
genuine, patient, warm or passionate.
Not all memories reported were positive. Some participants
included negative learning experiences (e.g., hated taking tests,
bored with sitting all day long and doing assignments, had to show
excellence to be the teacher's favorite, etc.) in their recollections,
but these negative images also inﬂuenced their initial conceptions
of self-as-a teacher.
By contrast to other participants, Maxine had only thought
about becoming a teacher recently, stating she could not name a
teacher who had ﬁgured in her decision to switch her major from
Business to Education. She decided to become a teacher after
realizing that she was good at giving friends advice and enjoyed
helping fellow students. Thus, at the program's start, her image of
herself as a teacher seemed vague, compared to her peers.
Preservice teachers' initial images of self-as-a teacher seemed to
inﬂuence how they responded to interview questions about how
they currently conceived of teaching. Two contrary perspectives
appeared in their views about the difﬁculty of teaching itself:
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e8376
whereas Sally reported having thought that teaching would be hard
because teachers need to know everything about every subject,
others described early views of teaching as just being around kids
and having fun with them. Thus, preservice teachers' initial images
of self-as-a-teacher overlapped with their perspectives about what
teaching is.
3.2. Identifying present selves: dynamic shifts in self-identiﬁcation
in different contexts
The participants' present selves were recognized differently
depending on context, contrasting the university classroom and the
elementary classroom where they worked as intern teachers. Five
types of self-identiﬁcations were signiﬁcant: (1) student-only
identity, (2) teacher-only identity, (3) equal-student-and-teacher
identity, (4) student-dominated identity, and (5) teacherdominated
identity. Whereas Categories (1) and (2) indicated single
identities, the other categories represented dual identities, each
with a different balance between thinking of themselves as a
teacher and as a student. Most preservice teachers had dual identities
in both contexts rather than single identities, but generally,
Category (4), the student-dominated identity, appeared more in the
college classroom, whereas Category (5), the teacher-dominated
identity, was more evident in the elementary classroom. These
different emphases in identity were not simply based on the kinds
of acts in which the participants were immediately engaged
(learning acts vs. teaching acts), but also on how others such as
their professors, cooperating teachers, or children positioned them.
The preservice teachers' self-identiﬁcations were not ﬁxed but
continuously changed moment by moment within a context. They
saw themselves as teachers in the elementary classroom because
their cooperating teacher (CT) and the children treated them as a
teacher as they engaged in teaching tasks. Nevertheless, even in the
elementary classroom, there were times when they saw themselves
more as a student than a teacher, such as when their CT helped
them out for a college course project or when they took notes about
classroom set-ups. Madison mentioned that even while teaching a
lesson in front of the whole class, she felt equally like a student and
a teacher (equal-student-and-teacher identity) because she was
learning from her students whether her teaching approach was
working or not:
I am learning just as much from them. I think you need to always
assess yourself as a teacher and you always need to know there is
room for change … That's my job and that's what I am. I am giving
them knowledge and scaffolding them, facilitating their learning
and guiding them. That's my role. But also, when I teach, I want to
do this strategy and I know it's not working, I have to learn that
from them and to change it.
Likewise, in their college courses, preservice teachers identiﬁed
themselves as a teacher when asked how to apply what they were
learning to their teaching practice. The design of courses inﬂuenced
preservice teachers' self-identiﬁcation in the classes. For example,
in the science method class taken concurrently with the last semester
of the PDS program, they were required to explore how to
do an experiment using given materials and to work as a group at
every class. Because of these class activities, they generally felt like
a student during this class. Depending on the topic, even if using
the same format of a discussion activity, they identiﬁed themselves
differently. Michelle expressed how she identiﬁed herself differently
every week in one class in her ﬁrst semester of the program:
When we had our discussion on stereotypes, I feel like I had to put
on my teacher hat, and say, “ok, here's how I want my classroom to
be run.” When we talked about lining the kids up, I thought I don't
want to do a boy and girl line. Whereas with self-regulated
learning, I thought more as a learner because self-regulating
learning applies to me as a learner, like, I am still learning new
things, but as a teacher, too because I wanted to talk about selfregulated
learning with my CT, seeing if my CT offers that, and
thinking how I would do that in my own classroom.
Aligning with a contemporary view of identity, preservice
teachers' identities were responsive to context and shifted moment
by moment. Amanda explained the process of identity switching in
the college context:
I identify myself more like a student when I am reading [course
materials] and from ﬁrst hearing about it and taking notes. That's
when I feel like a learner. But when I get to [college] class, I am
more, like, in teacher mode because I am deﬁning and giving my
view on it. I feel like I understand it, I can envision it in my mind.
How it can relate to my future as a teacher. Once I can make that
connection between what I read and learn and what I plan in my
future, that's when I feel like I switch into a teacher.
Amanda's comments clearly reﬂected how preservice teachers
made the switch from student to teacher role, and vice versa, with
reﬂection vital in the process. While actively engaging in a process
of self-recognition and self-revelation, they focused on their deeper
self-as-teacher. This self-development is similar to what Conway
and Clark (2003) referred to as an inward focus of attention,
moving from self-survival concerns toward developing the self-as-
teacher.
3.3. Projecting future possible selves: becoming a teacher
A third theme related how, in addition to inﬂuences emanating
from their past, preservice teachers were inﬂuenced by their
envisioned future. As Amanda indicated, switching modes from
learner to teacher and taking a teacher's perspective in her university
classroom was one way of projecting herself as a future
teacher that helped her feel “real” about being a teacher. With a
strong awareness about the purpose of their learning in the college
classroom, they seemed involved more actively in their learning
and sought ways to apply their knowledge through projecting their
future identities as teachers, as shown below:
Michelle: We are all teachers, like, in our classes, because I feel like
whatever I learn in the classes, I can apply it to my classroom
eventually one day. Even if I don't do it now, I will someday.
Jackie: I think both [identify myself as a student and also as a
teacher] because I am learning what to do and then thinking as a
teacher how I can use it in the classroom. So, I think I am trying to
do both at the same time. That's why I liked to see the examples of
how teachers use it in the classroom, instead of just what to do.
Another way of projecting themselves as teachers was for preservice
teachers to work in the ﬁeld through their internship experiences.
The internship experiences during the ﬁrst two
semesters encompassed observing their cooperating teachers'
teaching, working with students in small groups, leading calendar
time or reading aloud time, teaching four to ﬁve lessons, and
attending teacher-parent conferences. Interestingly, many reported
some conﬂict between what they were learning in the college
classroom and what they observed in the elementary classroom,
noticing a gap between theory and practice. This dissonance, rather
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e83 77
than confusing them, seemed to play a positive role in validating
the effectiveness of what they had learned and elaborating their
conceptions of teaching. Even though they sometimes experienced
negative feelings such as anger or discomfort, they learned what to
do and what not to do from these conﬂicts, projecting themselves
as future teachers:
Sally: … every teacher has their highs and lows, and things that I
just didn't agree with. I don't even think that they did something
wrong. It just wasn't what I would want to do with my kids. So, I
took good and bad from each of them.
Jane: I had a lot of times of observing teachers sitting up there and
leading activities in the class. I started to feel I wouldn't wanna do
that in my classroom because, like, speciﬁcally in math class, the
math teacher just sits up there and just talks, tries to teach, but half
of the students were not paying attention and doing something
else.
As Jane commented, keeping students on task and engaged in
what they are doing was an important goal for her for her future
teaching, a point addressed by many of our participants.
Student teaching was very different from the other internships
they had experienced in the previous two semesters in terms of the
amount of time and responsibility required. During the period of
total teaching, the preservice teachers had to attend their placement
schools every day, and they taught all subjects to all students using
their own lesson plans. This experience made preservice teachers
understand individual students' academic needs, background
knowledge, and abilities and to see their students' growth. As
Michelle stated, “I loved to be in the classroom every day because it
gave me an opportunity to see the kids and see their needs and to build
lessons around these needs. [Before, I didn't] really get opportunities
to see them grow as much as this semester.” Through opportunities to
interact closely with their students and to use their own lesson
plans, they seemed more reﬂective and realistic about what to
expect from students and what would or would not work: “The
ways my kids behave toward me have made me change my ideas
about teaching. So, deﬁnitely, every time I was teaching them, I reﬂected
on what worked and didn't and tried something different the
next day” (Heather). Along with more sophisticated understandings
of students, these preservice teachers were developing clearer
conceptions of themselves as teachers.
3.4. Perspectival understandings about teaching and the self-as-a-
teacher
From the three themes focused on teacher identity development
addressed in the previous sections, we saw the relationship between
two developmental aspects, conceptions of teaching and
teacher identities, coming together as follows: as they learn to
teach, preservice teachers take their past learning experiences into
the present and use these as a reﬂective mirror for evaluating their
current learning and shaping images of themselves as future
teachers. During these processes, preservice teachers take a
teacherly perspective and draw an integrated understanding about
teaching that is directly connected to what/how they want to teach
in the future. In this way, preservice teachers' perspectives about
self and teaching grow together and reciprocally inﬂuence each
other (see Fig. 1 for two examples).
However, preservice teachers' current aspirations for their
future did not always reﬂect their actual teaching in the present as a
teacher-in-training. Some constraints as an apprentice teacher
made them fail to teach what and how they wanted to teach, as
illustrated in the following comments:
Sally: That was hard to try to ﬁnd the balance between trying to
implement teaching strategies I've learned here [names her university]
and also trying to scaffold my teacher's desires, like, what
she want me to do in the classroom.
Madison: I didn't get to the method I have been taught at [names
her university], they kinda ﬁgure it out themselves, and you're to
guide them, not to tell them, you know what I mean? I told them
and then guided them. So, that was because of the situation with
the state standards tests, and they were third graders.
Some constraints existing in their placement school, such as
time limitations, the expectations of their cooperating teachers, or
the emphasis on district standards seemed to create some struggles
and dissatisfaction with the role preservice teachers found themselves
enacting in their school placement. In the process of interacting
with certain constraints on and affordances for their
learning, preservice teachers negotiated their images of the teacher
they were striving to be, modifying their beliefs about what good
teaching entails. As shown in Fig. 1, Heather had imagined herself a
strict teacher early in the ﬁrst semester, but later gained the idea
that children naturally need freedom to learn. After her student
teaching, she modiﬁed her perspectives on teaching again, recognizing
the importance of some structure in young students'
learning in a negotiated synthesis of her early, later, and latest
ideas.
Interestingly, each participant's self-image as a teacher seemed
directly related to her self-conﬁdence about being a teacher. For
most, their self-conﬁdence increased as the semesters passed, and
by the end of the third semester, most stated they now felt like a
teacher and expressed excitement about having their own classroom.
However, a few participants admitted strong trepidations
about being a teacher. This was particularly true of Madison and
Maxine who expressed concerns about their readiness to be a new
teacher, as shown by their responses to the question, “Do you feel
like a teacher now?” Both answered that they would not feel like a
teacher “until I really have my own classroom” or “until ten years.” By
the end of the program, both came to hold strong constructivist
views of teaching that were compatible with their program's perspectives,
and they shared common characteristics in their conceptions
of teaching, such as being critical of what they observed in
their internship and struggling during student-teaching, either
with class management issues or with explaining concepts to
children.
Aligned with Weinstein's (1988) unrealistic optimism, a term she
used to refer to preservice teachers' tendency to believe that they
would experience less difﬁculty on several teaching tasks than is
reported by the average ﬁrst-year teacher, the majority of our
preservice teachers expressed that they had not realized that
teaching would require so much effort and time before starting the
program. As Jane stated in the second semester interview:
I thought this job was taking care of kids and having fun and
helping them to learn something, but now I realize that there is so
much more than that. I mean, you ultimately have to prepare
students for either how their education will go or getting a job. And
now, my mindset is toward the content that I am teaching and how
I can teach versus hanging out with kids and having fun. It's getting
a lot more serious.
Jane's comments showed how her perspectival understandings
about teaching were changing from simplistic and affective views
to a more nuanced understanding, which led her to realize the
responsibilities entailed in being a teacher. Madison and Jackie
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e8378
even expressed that they felt “scared” and “pressured” about being
responsible for students' knowledge and lives for one year, feelings
that were still present at program's end. Even as our participants
reported gaining conﬁdence and feeling more ready than in the
previous semester at every interview, their expectations about
their ﬁrst year of teaching became more realistic, expectations that
were nevertheless still waiting to be tested by their ﬁrst full-time
teaching position.
Preservice teachers' realizations about the demands of teaching
came not only from their awareness about the high workload that
they observed in the ﬁeld but also their deeper understanding
about the nature of teaching itself. For example, Madison was very
conﬁdent about teaching math because math had been a long-time
favorite subject, one in which she had excelled as a student.
However, through teaching math lessons to her students during the
second semester, she realized that knowing math and teaching
math were very different matters (see Fig. 1). Paula also mentioned
that she now realized the work needed behind lesson planning
because she had to consider many aspects in order to make even
one lesson plan, and she found it more difﬁcult and timeconsuming
than she had expected: “We have to think so broadly
and ﬁnd out how to teach, what works best. It was deﬁnitely different
and I learned a lot, especially with lesson planning, behind the scene
work.” Similarly, Michelle addressed the need to put in special
effort when teaching diverse students, to consider the students'
different cultural backgrounds, knowledge, ability levels, and academic
and social needs. These preservice teachers' growing
awareness of the complexity of teaching reﬂected conceptual
growth that served as a basis for envisioning themselves as future
teachers.
Fig. 1. Examples of perspectival understandings about teaching and self-as-a teacher.
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e83 79
3.5. An integrative model of developing teacher identity and
conceptions of teaching
The main question we addressed in this study was how preservice
teachers' development of their identities-as-a-teacher
would be related to their conceptual growth about what teaching
comprises. Our response takes the form of an integrated model
presented in Fig. 2. In this model, the two developmental aspects,
conceptions of teaching and teacher identities, share basic resources
for professional growth throughout teacher preparation.
From our data, we saw that prior beliefs about teaching and prior
images of self-as-a-teacher were mostly shaped by our participants'
apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975) and reciprocally inﬂuencing
each other. Newly acquired knowledge and perspectives
about students seemed a crucial component for both aspects of
development. Preservice teachers used their expanded knowledge
about students to acknowledge, modify, and reconstruct their beliefs
about teaching and their prior self-images as teachers,
resulting in more sophisticated understandings about what it
means to be a teacher. These changes are represented in Fig. 2 by
ovals that are increasing over time, with a bright area to refer to a
growing perspectival understanding about teaching and a dark area
to refer to a growing sense-of-self-as-teacher, eventually leading to
a teacher identity grounded in more sophisticated perspectival
understandings about teaching.
The two developmental aspects are also related in that both
journeys require a similar mechanism of development, but are
maintained on different tracks. The realization of a gap between
theory and practice, between their ideal and reality, or between
their pre-existing beliefs and newly acquired beliefs about teaching
acted as a starting point of development. Some degree of cognitive
dissonance triggered preservice teachers' continuous evaluation of
what they were learning and experiencing throughout the teaching
preparation program, leading them to develop perspectival understandings
about teaching, on the one hand, and self-as-ateacher,
on the other. In this way, our participants' teacher identities
evolved together with their conceptions of teaching, and both
inﬂuenced one another. Our model illustrates this dynamic mechanism
by representing the two different trajectories as intertwined
and as developing through spiraling phases.
The intertwined twin spirals encompassing growing ovals were
meant to capture the developing sense of self-as-a-teacher and
conceptions of teaching, the trajectories of change these preservice
teachers experienced. New perspectival understandings about
teaching were constructed when their knowledge about students
expanded and they considered other teaching environment conditions,
paying attention to factors beyond themselves;
simultaneously, they maintained their focus on themselves as
teacher-to-be, developing their teacher identities. Preservice
teachers' identities in the course of learning to teach were inﬂuenced
by their past images of teachers and conceptions of teaching,
and by their projection of themselves as a teacher in the future,
intertwined with how they positioned themselves in a teaching
moment. Aspects of these participants' teacher identities and
conceptions of teaching will not be completely established even in
their beginning years of teaching and will continue to change as
Heather explicitly envisioned (see Fig. 1).
4. Discussion
Before discussing our ﬁndings and situating them in the context
of the existing literature on learning to teach, we need to address
characteristics of our participants and context that should be
considered when considering the transferability of our ﬁndings.
Our participants were elite students who had been admitted to a
selective university. Furthermore, the kind of teacher preparation
they were experiencing held twin goals of fostering a deep theoretical
grasp of what teaching involves as well as introducing students
from the beginning to strong ﬁeld-based experiences to
actual hands-on teaching experiences. Other teacher preparation
programs, in fact most in the state where this study took place,
were not as selective in their admission requirements nor as
intensive in their ﬁeld-based philosophy of teacher preparation.
Keeping these limitations in mind, we saw our ﬁndings as
providing promising results for a better understanding of how
preservice teachers become teachers.
4.1. Ongoing journey of becoming a good teacher
Rather than adopting a student-only or a teacher-only identity,
most preservice teachers expressed dual identities, experienced in
situated ways in their university and placement classrooms. How
they identiﬁed themselves in these two contexts was itself subject
to moment by moment changes, inﬂuenced by factors such as what
they were doing, how others positioned them, and what activities
or topics engaged them. In the process of learning to teach, our
participants actively engaged in self-reﬂection and selfactualization,
suggesting three general processes of teacher identity
development, reﬂection, identiﬁcation, and projection. These
processes worked together as preservice teachers' reﬂections on
their past selves inﬂuenced their present selves in immediate
learning/teaching situations, and their present selves showed the
inﬂuence of their projected future possible selves. Thus, shifts in
self-identiﬁcation in the present brought about modiﬁcations of
Fig. 2. A model of the interrelation between teacher identity development and conceptions of teaching.
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e8380
how past and future selves were envisioned. These processes cooccurred
in parallel development in their conceptions about
teaching, resulting in teacher identities that were grounded in
conceptual growth. As Markus and Nurius (1986) conceptualized,
possible selves act as one critical domain of self-knowledge,
bringing in how individuals think about their past and potential
future to provide an evaluative and interpretive context for their
current self-views.
This process can be explained in terms of Akkerman and Meijer
(2011) dialogical approach to teacher identity: in particular, one's
multiple, and possibly conﬂicting, identities are dialogically and
intersubjectively exchanged, with one taking temporary dominance
in a negotiated space that requires the managing of multiple
pedagogical beliefs and wrestling with a sense of fulﬁllment as a
teacher. In this way, teacher identity entails unity and continuity,
resulting in a narrative about one's self that includes one's routinized
personal teaching behaviors. Therefore, we do not think that it
necessarily helps in developing a professional identity as a teacher
to think only like a teacher and to have only a teacherly perspective
in learning-to-teach contexts. Instead, shifting between the two
identities of a teacher and learner and negotiating multiple and
discontinuous identities in various contexts contributes to developing
a uniﬁed and coherent teacher identity.
The relationship between preservice teachers' conceptions of
teaching and their identity development can be explained in terms
of their attention focus. Whereas their conceptual development
about teaching required their outward attention (e.g., focus on
students, other teachers, or school environments), the processes of
teacher identity development depended on an inward focus on
themselves at a deep inner level. Aligning with recent studies that
emphasized the importance of a journey inward in beginning
teachers' professional development (Conway & Clark, 2003;
Poulou, 2007; Watzke, 2007), our ﬁndings suggested that this inward
journey of self-growth as a professional teacher is intertwined
with a concomitant outward journey of developing
conceptions of teaching. These journeys seemed inseparable,
existing as external and internal aspects of the same developmental
trajectory. Thus, as preservice teachers progressed in their understanding
about the nature of teaching, their self-actualization as
teachers became solidiﬁed. Reciprocally, projecting themselves as
teachers provoked conceptual change and allowed change to
become more permanent. Connecting to what Akkerman and
Meijer (2011) referred to as the social nature of identity, our ﬁndings
help elucidate how internal and external positions within the
self can emerge together with one deﬁning the other. In other
words, preservice teachers develop internal positions within
themselves (e.g., “I as a teacher” or “I as a lifelong learner” or “I as an
enjoyer of teaching”) concurrently with growth in external positions
that are part of their envisionment such as “my students,” “my
colleagues,” “my teaching” or “my classroom.” Critical to the process
of constructing and negotiating their identities and conceptions
of teaching are both signiﬁcant others, including parents,
peers, pupils, professors, or supervising teachers, and the social
rules and conventions of the social environment in which preservice
teachers ﬁnd themselves.
More importantly, our ﬁndings suggest that two aspects of
teacher development, conceptual development and teacher identity,
interact to enable what Kelchtermans (2009) called for, narratives
of becoming a teacher in the journey of growing one's
professionalism. As Kelchtermans stated, “narratives are considered
to be a powerful way to unravel and understand the complex
processes of sense-making that constitute teaching” (p. 31). For
preservice teachers, learning what teaching is and how to teach
requires them to go beyond simply following personal tendencies
and beliefs; rather, it inevitably involves a process of understanding
contextual dynamics, negotiating multiple positions, and designing
a relationship between teaching and learning. Therefore, as we
have done in this study, teacher preparation needs to be
approached from an integrative and situative view of teaching and
learning if deeper insights into the teacher development process
are sought.
4.2. Implications and future research
We saw a theoretical contribution of our ﬁndings in that we
grounded the process of preservice teachers' learning to teach in a
situative framework on perspectival learning, bringing with it an
emphasis on contextual inﬂuences and on how learners' growing
understandings reﬂect a perspectival trajectory from past conceptions
to projected future use of new ideas. Aligned with Kagan's
(1992) model of professional development, knowledge of self and
knowledge of students are essential components in the journey of
becoming a teacher. For her, acquiring knowledge of students and
of self is a primary task for novice teachers, as their schemata for
pupils and self-as-a-teacher evolve together. However, Kagan
considered novice teachers' attentional shifts as unidirectional,
claiming that, once the image of self-as-a-teacher is resolved,
novice teachers move their attention to instructional design and
ﬁnally to pupils' learning. Although she emphasized the importance
of self-focused attention at the initial stage of teacher
development, the inward focus in her view does not seem needed
once clarity about the self-as-teacher is achieved. As such, our
study both supports and challenges Kagan's (1992) professional
growth model.
The bi-directional aspect of our model is also distinct from
Hollingsworth's (1989) model of learning to teach. Hollingsworth
implied a one-directional successive shift in teachers' attention
focus, suggesting that acquiring general managerial routines has to
occur before subject content and pedagogy become a teacher's focus,
and then, interrelated managerial and academic routines need to be
established for teachers to be able to attend to students' learning
from academic classroom tasks. Also, whereas Hollingworth's model
emphasized these three areas of teacher attention as well as personal,
program, and contextual factors, our model focused on how
teacher identity grew along with changes in conceptions of
teaching, and on the dynamic relationship between these two aspects
of growth.
Thus, this study helps elucidate how complex are preservice
teachers' developmental trajectories as these work together to
result in different engagement of learning-to-teach processes. Understanding
preservice teachers' professional development would
be enhanced by research conducted with beginning teachers in
their ﬁrst year of teaching because a teacher's ﬁrst year will likely
include change of context and responsibilities. In addition to
research using ongoing self-report measures of our study's key
constructs of conceptions of teaching and identity-as-a-teacher, our
study suggests the need to explore the processes of learning to
teach by taking seriously the perspectival change implied by
Kelchtermans and Hamilton's (2004) shift from “knowing how to”
to “being some-one who.”
Several years ago, Bullough and Baughman (1997) suggested
that a primary goal of teacher education programs is to help students
build a professional teacher identity. Our study supports the
need to attend to how preservice teachers regulate dual identities
in context, self-as-a teacher and self-as-a student, and how they
develop a teacher identity during teacher preparation. Aligned with
recent work (e.g., Czerniawski, 2011; Furlong, 2013; Pillen, Beijaard,
& den Brok, 2013), this study underscores the importance of
teacher educators as “signiﬁcant others” in fostering a robust
teacher identity. Acknowledging the value of preservice teachers'
S. Lee, D.L. Schallert / Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016) 72e83 81
early schooling experiences and prior images about teaching and
teachers, teacher educators should also be sensitive to students'
projected future selves, supporting a dialog in-the-present between
students' lay theories and their possible selves in learningto-teach
processes. Preservice teachers would beneﬁt from opportunities
to evaluate their current conceptions of teaching and
teachers and to engage consciously in shaping their identities even
though such self-reﬂection may cause some uncomfortable tension.
Finally, this study encourages teacher educators to engage preservice
teachers in seeing themselves as lifelong learners on a
continual journey to becoming a good teacher.
Appendix. Interview protocol
<End-of-semester interview questions>
1. Tell me about your experience in elementary school.
Prompt: How did you feel about going to school? Who was
your favorite teacher? What kind of student were you?
2. Tell me about your experience in middle/junior high school
3. Tell me about your experience in high school
4. Do you think your learning experiences during K-12 inﬂuence
your learning now in the class or your internship in
some way? How?
5. Tell me about any experience you had related to teaching like
tutoring, after-school teacher, volunteer in school, or anything
else.
6. Tell me the story about how you decided to be a teacher
7. Think about what you pictured a teacher to be (or teaching to
be) before starting this semester. Did you have to modify or
adjust your original picture as a result of what you have
learned? How hard or easy was this to do?
8. What was your ﬁrst impression of the elementary school,
classroom, kids or teachers you are working with as an
intern? Did you see any gap or difference from what you
pictured before going to the elementary school?
9. How do you feel about your learning experience of XXX class
so far?
10. How do you feel about your internship experience so far?
11. Have you been seen any gap between what you have learned
in the class and what you observed of students or what you
applied to the students in the elementary school? How did
you adjust the differences?
12. Has your conception of teaching changed in any way this
semester? What caused the changes? If not, why don't you
think so?
13. Did you identify yourself as a student or a teacher or both in
that class? What do you think made you identify yourself
that way?
14. How do you identify yourself in the elementary school?
Why?
15. What is your current view about students and how they
learn? What is your current view about good teaching?
Prompt: What do you think is the most important role of a
teacher? What kind of classroom do you want to create when
you have your own classroom?
16. Tell me how conﬁdent you are about being a teacher.
Prompt: what strength/weakness do you think you have as a
teacher?
17. How many times did you do full teaching this semester?
Reﬂecting on your lessons, what methods do you think you
used the most in your teaching? What was your basic
concern during your teaching? Can you deﬁne what your role
was in your teaching?
18. Did you feel any challenges in preparing or conducting your
lessons?
19. Reﬂecting in the all classes you took in the PDS program,
which class do you think was most helpful to you? Why?
20. Reﬂecting on all CTs you worked in your placement, who do
you think was most helpful to you? Why?
21. How was your relationship with your coordinator/facilitator?
Can you share their evaluation or advice about your
teaching?
22. Imagine you are in your ﬁrst teaching job. Can you describe
what will be going on in your classroom?
23. How do you feel about being a new teacher? What is your
biggest concern about being a new teacher? Do you feel like a
teacher now?
) 1e8 items were used only in the ﬁrst semester; 17e23 items
in the third semester only.
<Reﬂective interview questions>
1. How do you feel about your teaching today? Tell me whatever
this question makes you think about.
2. How did you expect your students to learn in your class? How
well do you think your students learned?
3. Why did you plan the activity or the teaching strategy (indicating
a speciﬁc one she used in class)? Where did you get the idea for
the activity or strategy?
4. How well do you think the activity or the strategy worked? If
you could do something differently next time, what would it be?
5. Was there anything that you changed, that did not follow your
lesson plan? Why did you make that change? What did you
consider in making the change?
6. How do you feel about yourself at the moment you were
teaching? Did you feel like a teacher while teaching? What
made you feel like that? Are there times you feel more like a
teacher and times you feel less like a teacher?
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