GATEways to Teacher Education

A journal of the Georgia Association of Teacher Educators research for my Culture and Diversity project in college, I remembered that young children of Asian descent often have birthmarks, which appear blue, then fade as they get older, called “Mongolian spots.” The story generated several shocked faces and the connection seemed to make sense to them. Students began to ask questions, and several wanted to share their own experiences in similar situations. I had to end the discussion, simply because we were running out of time in class, but I expressed how exciting it would be to resume the conversation once everyone had time to complete the Culture and Diversity assignment. The simple, personal vignette from my experience helped my students to see the authentic value in completing the work.

As a graduate assistant teacher standing in front of my first undergraduate class, the student in the back of our classroom literally shouted out, “You want us to do what?” I had heard about Total Quality Management (TQM) at a teacher workshop and wanted to implement strategies from it for this course. Deming’s (1986) proposition of TQM was new. In his TQM work, Bonstingl (1992) focused on four principles to incorporate when applying TQM in the academic setting These include working together for the good of the group, constant development through reflection, acknowledging learning as a process, and combined leadership. These four strategies promote active participation for everyone involved, which in turn, enables communication between students and teachers to have results that are more prosperous. Additionally, TQM acknowledges the improvements, not necessarily the perfections.

My idea was to ask college students for their input on our syllabus. Instead of me, in my role as a teacher, assigning all points for assignments, I left all points blank. I wanted my college students to feel empowered by coming together to assign points for their assignments.

Because they had never been asked to be a part of this process, this student, and the others in my class, expressed their concern as to “what to do.”After an explanation on my part, students quickly embraced the TQM strategy and ultimately came up with the same points I had wanted to be generated, too, for each assignment.

As a former kindergarten teacher and now college professor, I have found that TQM can be implemented at any age/grade. Empowerment through TQM is truly relevant for students and teachers.

In an effort to help teacher candidates transfer knowledge from an academic context to an authentic context beyond my college classroom, I include overt background and purpose statements on my assignments, which are, largely, performance assessments couched in a context representative of scenarios they will encounter in their own classrooms. The background statement is reflective of skills or concepts that students have been studying or learning about in the course. Purpose statements define why candidates are tasked with an assignment and provide an overt connection to why they need to know, understand, and apply the content knowledge to their profession. For example, in my Principles of Teaching course, I facilitate a unit on classroom and behavior management. For the culminating project of this unit, candidates construct a management