This study chronicles a Teacher Candidate’s (Sara) journey of learning to teach for understanding during her internship year, the fifth year of a five-year teacher preparation program at Great State University, a large University situated in the Midwestern United States.The traditional literature on learning to teach introduced stages of development that novice teachers need to follow and to “graduate from” before they are able to engage in intellectually demanding teaching. Critics of the learning to teach literature have disputed the above assumption of linearity in teacher development, and have drawn attention to the monolithic way in which novice teachers have been portrayed, underlining the importance of taking context into account in order to understand how learning to teach takes place. Similar to the traditional learning to teach literature, the teaching for understanding literature does not consider novice teachers as capable of engaging in constructivist-oriented teaching as early as their pre-service level exposure to the profession.To bring these two lines of literature together, I developed the conceptual framework of “paying attention to students’ thinking and reasoning,” in order to investigate how Sara learned to grow out of an orientation toward herself and her performance as a teacher into an orientation of active attention to students’ thinking and reasoning. I studied how she changed in that regard; how that change influenced her teaching; and how she herself perceived that change in her practice and developed tacit knowledge of it.I spent a year journeying with Sara in her teacher preparation program at Great State University (GSU) and in her internship placement at Ordinary Elementary School—an urban, K-5 public elementary school located in a mid-sized Midwestern city. Sara taught fifth grade in an ethnically, racially, and economically diverse classroom. To capture the evolving life of learning to teach in a school setting, I employed ethnographic methods for crafting a qualitative case study of Sara. I videotaped Sara’s teaching daily, using that as content for conversations with her. Her videotaped teaching became “data” and an object of systematic study, as well as text which we dissected daily. Triangulated data consisted of interviews with cooperating teachers, the school principal, and course and field instructors; field notes, which I recorded daily; reflective journal writing (mine and Sara’s); and various artifacts (GSU coursework assignments and other documents, Sara’s coursework papers and portfolio, and students’ journaling and other work).Grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1990) were the main methods of data analysis. To present the study’s findings, I used Erickson’s (1986) notion of the vignette. From one vignette to the next, Sara’s story unfolds: a story of rise and fall; of roller coaster rides; of demanding respect from and expecting to be listened to by students; and of arriving at new understandings of respect for and listening to students. Sara’s story, an “ordinary tale,” is about the intricate story of teacher education. It is essentially about the story of democracy, a story in the making, and a story far away from ordinary.
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