PREPARING FOR THE COMPLEXITIES OF TEACHING: MODELING CONCEPTUAL THINKING IN POST-OBSERVATION CONFERENCES

In order for teacher educators to prepare teachers for complexities of language teaching, their nature needs to be understood. Vygotskian sociocultural theory offers a useful framework for construing such complexities. Vygotsky distinguished between everyday and scientific concepts, and saw the interaction of the two as conceptual thinking, the basis for higher order cognitive skills. Johnson (2009) frames learning to teach as the development of conceptual thinking and considers the nature of the dialogue in teacher education activities as crucial to this development. Drawing on longitudinal data from a semester-long case study of the dialogic interactions between a teacher and teacher educator, this study illustrates how the teacher educator modeled conceptual thinking in her language. We propose a taxonomy of conceptualizations about language teaching that may help teacher educators be more purposeful in designing activities for and interacting with novice teachers.

sociocultural theory; conceptual thinking; post-observation conferences