Emphasizing collaborative practices in learning to teach: Coteaching and cogenerative dialogue in a field-based methods course.

This manuscript details a field-based methods course for preservice teachers that has been designed to integrate shared teaching experiences in elementary classrooms with ongoing critical dialogues with a focus on highlighting the complexities of teaching. I describe the structure of the course and explore the use of coteaching and cogenerative dialogue as approaches to learning how to teach. Vignettes that typify experiences in this course are analyzed, and two main findings explored. First, coteaching provided critical support to preservice teachers as they taught their first lessons to children. Second, cogenerative dialogues mediated reflexive dialogue around the complexities of teaching, and provided for participants a foundation to examine their epistemological assumptions. It is argued that at a time of increasing segmentation of teacher education, teacher educators need to support dialogic, multi-perspectival approaches that emphasize the complex nature of teaching and learning in elementary classrooms.