The UCSB Teacher Education Partnership prepares you to become teachers through

helping you construct the necessary knowledge, skills and dispositions that are interrelated

as program themes. Ideally, the six themes run through every class, every experience,

every professional interaction that you have during the year.

Autobiography/Philosophy of Education

If teachers are to respect and understand how students make sense of the world,

YOU have to understand and respect how you make sense of YOUR world, and why.

Study of Children/Study of Schools

To understand children and how they learn, teachers must be able to observe them

and to learn from those observations. Since most of a teacher's interactions with a

student are in a school and since the nature of that environment shapes the nature of

those interactions, teachers must understand both the student and the school.

Methodological Competence

Watching and respecting children is not sufficient; teachers must know how to help

students learn. Successful teaching requires a repertoire of knowledge, skills,

strategies, approaches and learning activities.

Diversity

People have always been different from each other, but for many reasons there is a

greater sense of the presence and value of differences today. The essence of the

diversity theme is to respect and utilize differences. The pedagogical component is

captured by the paradox that to treat each child the same requires treating each child

differently.

Collaboration

There are limits to how much one can learn from teaching without intellectual and

emotional support. Teachers must be capable of working with others if they are

going to meet the needs of students and if they are going to continue to grow as

professionals. We encourage communication and sharing and require student

teachers to observe and coach their teaching colleagues, both in actual classrooms

and through videotape. Informal meetings, seminars and social events are held, all

of which contribute to an atmosphere of mutually supportive relationships.

Reflection

While collaboration is a requirement of growth, so too are hard, personal looks at

oneself. Reflection is believing in the importance of looking critically at yourself,

the possession of skills that enable reflection to happen, and the wisdom to change

what one can. The use of your portfolios and the Performance Assessment for

California Teachers, along with journals, tape recordings, selfevaluation forms,

collegial coaching and case studies, will help you to become a more deliberative

and reflective teacher.