Background to Blending a Methods Course

​Anyone working in a teacher preparation program knows this to be true. University methods courses often fall short of their aims by the very nature of their organizational structure. In most cases, these courses are taken prior to hands-on classroom experience and the learning experiences are mostly bracketed from each other.

The ELA methods course I’ve taught in the past attempts to bridge this divide through a large-scale focal group project. This project involves a great deal of planning as it introduces students to the lesson design process through the case study lens of focusing on a small group of students. Taking place over months in the course, the tasks allow preservice teachers to make direct connections between the concepts and activities we discuss in our courses and the experiences they undergo at their practicum placements. Most importantly, it fosters authentic meaning-making for dimensions of practice that just cannot be replicated (as if anything truly can be) in the University space alone.

​For example, developing culturally relevant pedagogy outside of the presence of living, breathing students is a foolhardy endeavor I’ve undertaken more times than I would like to admit. Because let’s face it—these practices, mindsets, and beliefs are essential to teacher preparation. And still, we are all too often faced with structural arrangements that limit our ability to make true connections between theory and methods, only reinforcing the much lamented divide between postsecondary and K-12 settings.

So last year, I embarked on a plan to disrupt this divide by reimagining “space” within my course. To overcome these challenges, I decided to take a blended approach to redesign the course structure and activities. Similar to the “flipped” phenomenon, I played with the delivery and experience of course goals. In the following blog series, I will highlight the design choices, implementation of activities, and outcomes.  As this is my first true venture into blended course design, I’m excited to share how this model gave me greater insight into student thinking and better facilitated many of the goals my prior courses fell shorter of achieving.