Using Computer Conferencing to Foster and Assess Prospective Teachers’ Moral Sensitivity

Finding ways to better understand prospective teachers' development is central to teacher preparation. To effectively foster development, teacher educators must determine how their students conceptualize and understand teachers' work: How do they understand learning and learners? What are their general and specific understandings of subject matter? How do they understand the lines of action open to teachers and the consequences of the various choice made? How does their understanding of each of these aspects of teaching help them build a coherent and integrated understanding of teaching? The "new science of learning" tells us that to foster student understanding one thing teachers must do is to work with the understandings students bring with them and provide opportunities for students to take more control of their own learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). To do this, teachers must first determine what those understandings are. ********** Technology is a powerful tool that can aid teacher educators in these endeavors. By designing applications as intellectual mirrors (Schwartz, 1989) they can be used to enhance as well as prompt attention to prospective teachers' evolving understandings. Applications designed and used in this way reflect the user's thinking and the consequences of their thinking. They reflect barriers to deep understanding including false assumptions, misconceptions, and naive understandings. The constructed, evolving, and transformative nature of learning is illuminated. Using applications as intellectual mirrors allows us to capture and reflect prospective teachers' cognitive and professional development. That information can then be used to further foster their development. Technology designed to enhance what and how our students know and used to support and challenge our students' current ways of making meaning requires an understanding of development across the life-span and a focus on how applications can be structured to support and challenge students to more complex ways of thinking and understanding. This also requires careful attention to how the applications are implemented. Schwartz and Perkins talked about a "'pedagogy of understanding' wherein students develop a genuine comprehension of key concepts, an improved ability to formulate and solve problems, and an overall grasp of the nature" of what is being taught (Schwartz & Perkins, 1995, p. 257). To implement a pedagogy of understanding we need to identify what we want prospective teachers to learn and design learning opportunities that help them develop the ability to formulate and solve the problems of teaching while illuminating, for them, the nature of teaching and learning. New technologies also seem especially s uited to helping us develop a pedagogy of understanding, particularly when those applications are designed to serve as intellectual mirrors of students' talk developing understanding of teaching and learning. The challenge for education is to design technologies for learning that draw both from knowledge about human cognition and from practical applications of how technology can facilitate complex tasks in the workplace. These designs use technology to scaffold thinking and activity, much as training wheels allow young bike riders to practice cycling when they would fall without support. Like training wheels, computer scaffolding enables learners to do more advanced activities and to engage in more advanced thinking and problem solving than they could without such help (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999, p. 202). It is time for students of teaching to receive that help. Using applications as intellectual mirrors and embedding them in a pedagogy of understanding will place us closer to that goal. A goal of the study discussed here is to examine one way in which that might be accomplished. CONFERENCING ACTIVITIES Conferencing activities can be a particularly powerful way to both foster and gain insight into prospective teachers' development. …