Do As I Say and Do As I Do: Using the Professor-in-Residence Model in Teaching Social Studies Methods
Concerned with combining theory with practice, the author, a teacher educator, wrote a grant to combine teaching university social studies methods and teaching sixth-grade social studies in an urban professional development site (PDS). By combining both roles, she created a recursive process of theory, observation, analysis, coteaching, and reflection. Preservice teachers learned new methods, observed the professor-in-residence (PIR) using those methods with sixth-grade students, and discussed how the lessons were structured and taught at the PDS. The results of this qualitative study show that preservice teachers benefit from observing and practicing methods of the PIR. The author provides a description of this model. In addition, she discusses recommendations and limitations of a combined teaching load.