Integrated School-Based Teacher Education: From Apprenticeship to a Complex Learning System

This article differentiates approaches to school-based teacher education. It contrasts the pervasive apprenticeship model, to a "naturally integrated" school-based teacher education program that we describe as a complex learning system. Rather than view teacher education as fragmented by separating educational theory (physically based on a university campus) and teaching practice (based in a school and resembling an apprenticeship), we favor an approach where all coursework is integrated with practice in a host school while maintaining close connections to the university. The latter model highlights learning as contextualized in school, focussed on the whole school, yet also informed by progressive educational thought. All participants in the school environment (not just university students) are at once both learners and teachers. Just as university-based aspects of teacher education suffer from a lack of practical relevance, we anticipate that any model of school-based teacher education will have to address the effects of context overwhelming theoretical learning, philosophical understandings, and generalization to other contexts. We claim that a complex learning system model is better able to mitigate these contextual effects. We propose an approach to address this issue through both "reduction" and "complexity".