A View of Teacher Education’s Frontier: An Exploratory Phenomenographic Study of Pre-Collegiate Conceptions of Teaching

Abstract

Ongoing teacher shortages have led to new teacher recruitment initiatives, including the introduction of teacher education into high schools through teacher career exploration courses. However, teacher educators taking up this work engage with pre-collegiate learners during a period of their lives that researchers have frequently characterized as harmful to conceptions of teaching. The purpose of this exploratory phenomenographic study is to inform teacher education work with high school students by surfacing their conceptions of teaching. Five high school students considering teaching careers participated in this study, which included three interviews per participant and participants’ creation of audio, textual, and/or visual artifacts. The author’s analysis revealed six categories describing participants’ conceptions of teaching: teaching as interpreting situations; discerning approaches, routines, and patterns; relating to teachers and learners; coping with dependencies; prioritizing beliefs and motivations; and merging various factors together. The implications of the findings for teacher learning and high school-based teacher education are discussed.

1. Introduction

Teacher education’s frontier may be found in secondary schools. Worrisome declines in teacher education program enrollment between 2009 and 2018 (see Partelow, 2019; Sutcher et al., 2016) have spurred policymakers, teacher educators, and other stakeholders to attract and recruit high school students to the teaching profession (Audrain & Googins, 2020). For example, Gist et al. (2019) described Pathways2Teaching, a Grow Your Own (GYO) initiative designed to recruit teachers of color to the teaching profession. Another secondary-level initiative is teacher academies. Though Audrain and Googins (2020) traced teacher academies’ origins to the 1950s, they reported that teacher academies’ enrollment nearly doubled between 2010 and 2018. Grow Your Own programs and teacher academies represent a new layer of teacher education, which has been increasingly accessible to secondary students as schools and districts respond to concerns about the supply of teachers (Audrain & Googins, 2020).

Secondary-level recruitment initiatives, while growing in number and enrollment, target a population whose learning as teachers is poorly understood. Following Lortie’s (1975/2002) apprenticeship of observation construct, teachers’ K-12 school experiences are typically homogenized and characterized as detrimental to their understandings of teaching and teaching practice (e.g., Boyd et al., 2013; Davis, 2021; Gray, 2020; Grossman, 1991). Despite such characterizations, high school students’ experiences with and conceptions of teaching are seldom researched, an absence that grows in significance as teacher education increasingly appears in high schools. The purpose of this exploratory phenomenographic study is to inform the work of high school and university-based teacher educators by investigating variations in high school students’ experiences with teachers and teaching. In targeting these students’ conceptions of teaching, this study seeks to provide a fuller account of these students’ views and understandings of teaching.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. Experience, Consummatory Experience, and Learning to Teach

This study’s theoretical framework centered on Dewey’s theory of experience is heavily influenced by the significance attributed to the thousands of hours young people spend observing and interacting with teachers during their K-12 student experiences. Experience is a product of humans’ “events, doings, and sufferings” (Dewey, 1934/2005, p. 1). Most experiences may be “fractured, fragmented, unfulfilling and meaningless” (Oral, 2013, p. 136). However, Dewey (1938/1997) contended experience is undergirded by two principles. First, experience is continuous; it includes various beginnings and endings, seldom consisting of a singular and uninterrupted narrative (Dewey, 1938/1997). Second, experience is interactive, both internally through an individual’s understandings of experiences as well as through interactions with the surrounding social world (Dewey, 1938/1997). To grow from experience is to make a “cumulative movement toward a later result” (Dewey, 1916/2004, p. 40). When such cumulative movement occurs, particular experiences are unified into a cohesive whole distinct from the stream of all experiences. Dewey (1934/2005) called this unified whole “an experience” (p. 38).

Dewey’s (1934/2005) notion of “an experience” possesses a temporal quality (p. 38), characterized by intersections between past experiences and future desires, hopes, or imaginings. When such intersections lead to a richer understanding of experiences, Dewey (1934/2005) asserted humans achieve a form of consummatory experience. Drawing from Dewey’s principle of continuity, Oral (2013) described consummatory experience as an extension “backwards and forwards in time”, in which one is engaged “with the meaning of the events of the recent and remote past as well as the imminent and far-off future” (p. 133). Consummatory experience yields what Gadamer (1975/2004) has described as a certain openness to new experience, making those who achieve such consummation “particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them” (p. 350). Oral (2012) has described consummatory experience in terms of being and becoming a teacher; the seeds of learning to teach are past experiences as well as future hopes for teaching, which intersect in the lived present and potentially blossom into a whole “pregnant with novel meanings” (p. 169). Thus, learning to teach is fueled and powered by the integration of prospective teachers’ past experiences with their desires to become or to enact some form of teacher and/or teaching Both of these influences are essential in understanding and shaping each subsequent experience with teachers and teaching.

2.2. Asset and Deficit Views of Experiences with Teaching

Prior experiences have long been considered to be significant influences on teacher learning, characterized by stakeholders as both assets and deficits to teacher development. Walter Johnson (1825), an early advocate of state-supported normal schools, posited “[m]en [sic] have been apparently presumed to be qualified to teach, from the moment that they passed the period of ordinary pupilage” (p. 14, emphasis original). Experience, to Dewey (1904/1974), possibly constituted students’ “greatest asset” in understanding learning and teaching (p. 323). Some scholars have described such experiences as a student as a reservoir from which teachers can later draw (Davis, 2021; Jackson, 1986; Lacey, 1977/2012), one possibly leading to the cultivation of pedagogical expertise (Wilson & Corbett, 2001). Other researchers and teacher educators have focused on the deficits created by prior experiences with teachers and teaching, such as exaggerated feelings of competence while teaching and a lack of understanding of lesson planning, selecting teaching approaches, and other aspects of teaching (Collet & Greiner, 2020; Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985; Westrick & Morris, 2016). Although it provides divergent views of experience’s benefits and limitations on teacher learning, the literature highlights the tremendous significance experience has in influencing how teachers think about and enact their teaching.

However, few empirical studies before 1970 examined the influence of teachers’ prior experiences on their teaching. Research instead emphasized teachers’ behaviors (Clark & Yinger, 1977). According to Clark and Yinger (1977), the “logical outgrowth” of research on teacher behavior was a movement towards studying teachers’ “thinking processes” (p. 279). As researchers began to explore various forms of teacher thinking, they increasingly studied implicit theories (e.g., Clark & Yinger, 1977), belief systems (e.g., Brophy & Good, 1974), classroom perspectives (e.g., Janesick, 1979), and conceptions (e.g., Fischl & Hoz, 1993). Conceptions of teaching continue to hold significance for teacher educators.

2.3. Conceptions of Teaching

Conceptions, sometimes described as amorphous due to the varied uses of the construct (Gorodetsky et al., 1993), are generally defined as knowledge of “an object, idea, or phenomenon” that is “comprehensive, organized, and united” (Fischl & Hoz, 1993, p. 58, emphasis original). Following Lortie’s (1975/2002) coining of the apprenticeship of observation, or the approximately 13,000 h of experience teachers spend as K-12 students that resulted in highly personal and simplistic conceptions of teaching, teacher educators have continued to study the influence of the pre-collegiate period on teacher learning. Teacher educators and researchers framing conceptions as deficits have sought to disrupt (Boyd et al., 2013), confront (Westrick & Morris, 2016), mitigate (Gray, 2020), or overcome (Grossman, 1991) prospective teachers’ harmful conceptions of teaching. Less frequently, teacher educators have instead positioned conceptions as learning assets for teacher candidates (Knapp, 2012; Mewborn & Tyminski, 2006). Scholarship on conceptions of teaching, which exclusively examines teacher candidates and professional teachers, tends to emphasize the deficits created by pre-collegiate, school-based experiences with teachers and teaching (Smagorinsky & Barnes, 2014). Conceptions of teaching, viewed from Lortie’s (1975/2005) apprenticeship of observation, are weighed down, if not determined, by past experiences.

However, Dewey’s (1934/2005) and Oral’s (2012, 2013) notions of consummatory experience help to highlight the importance of the present and future in shaping conceptions of teaching. Oral (2013) described consummatory experience in learning to teach as a transaction between past and future; to understand and learn to teach requires a teacher to move between these two periods or phases. Past experiences with teachers and teaching might yield negative influences on a teacher’s conception of teaching, but, as Dewey (1904/1974) asserted, “direct and personal experience”—including experiences with teaching and what might be learned from them—can also be “the greatest asset” to leverage in one’s learning (p. 323). Thus, when examined through the prism of Deweyan notions of experience, studies of conceptions of teaching must investigate the teaching that has been seen and heard, as well as how the teacher grapples with these experiences, what is required in the moment as a teacher, and what is hoped for or imagined in future episodes of teaching.

This study adopts the phenomenographic view of conceptions to explore the conceptions of teaching of high school students interested in teaching careers, and the experiential assets and deficits that may contribute to their learning in high school-based teacher education. In particular, this study draws from the work of Marton (1981) and Marton and Pong (2005), who described conceptions as the “different ways of understanding” people develop concerning particular phenomena (p. 335), or aspects of reality they experience. Conceptions are simultaneously influenced by a structure of awareness consisting of the features of the phenomenon individuals perceive (i.e., the structural aspect) as well as the meaning the phenomenon has for those experiencing it (i.e., the referential aspect) (Marton & Pong, 2005; Pang, 2003; Yates et al., 2012). Marton and Booth (1997) further divided the structural aspect into the external and internal horizons. The external horizon might be the background conditions or setting in which a phenomenon is experienced, such as the type of school in which a participant might encounter the phenomenon (e.g., a Montessori school). The internal horizon consists of the specific features of the phenomenon as the individual experiences them (Marton & Booth, 1997), including the wording a teacher might use in a teaching situation. Dewey’s (1938/1997) principle of interaction suggests that experiences with a phenomenon, and thus conceptions, are seldom individual in nature. Phenomenographers have also disputed individualistic notions of conceptions; Svensson (1994) claimed that conceptions represent a type of learning that “fundamentally is a question of meaning in a social and cultural context” (p. 12; see also Prosser et al., 1994).

A phenomenographic framework for examining conceptions of teaching, including the use of elements like internal and external horizons to analyze the phenomenon within participants’ respective social and cultural milieu, thus aids this study in exploring what high school students interested in teaching careers have learned about teaching. The study is guided by the following research questions:

• What are the conceptions of teaching of five high school students interested in teaching careers?
• What structures and/or relationships, if any, exist within and between these students’ conceptions of teaching?

3. Method

To inform these research questions, this study employed a phenomenographic methodology. Phenomenography is a qualitative research approach used to explore “the qualitatively different ways in which people experience, conceptualize, perceive, and understand various aspects of, and phenomena in, the world around them” (Marton, 1986, p. 31). In phenomenographic studies, the individual experiences of a cohort are studied to surface conceptions that “are faithful to the individual’s experience of a selected learning phenomenon” through the development of categories of descriptions of experiences (Francis, 1996, p. 36). These conceptions are then analyzed to ascertain whether there are structures or associations within/between each category (Larsson & Holmström, 2007; Marton, 1981). In this study, the aspect of reality defined as the phenomenon is teaching, as experienced prior to university study and formal teacher preparation. Although often experienced in school settings, teaching may also be encountered in other contexts. As a result, this study can be considered a pure or discursive phenomenography since it explores “how people perceive various aspects of their reality” rather than a learning phenomenon only encountered in a formal course of study (Marton, 1986, p. 38; see also Hasselgren & Beach, 1997). By centering participants’ descriptions of their own experiences with teachers and teaching, a phenomenographic methodology can challenge the homogenization of K-12 school experiences as problematic deficits in teacher learning (see Brunker, 2024). Phenomenography’s elements also help to bring order and understanding to thick and varied descriptions of experiences through its structure of awareness framework (see Cope, 2004).

3.1. Participants and Recruitment

A purposive sample of high school students with a range of P-12 school experiences and who expressed an interest in teaching careers was recruited for this study. The study paralleled existing scholarship on conceptions of teaching, which has examined preservice teachers’ (e.g., Gray, 2020; Knapp, 2012) and professional teachers’ (e.g., Lortie, 1975/2002) conceptions of teaching, by recruiting participants who were taking steps to become teachers. Consequently, high school students who were not considering teaching careers were excluded. Variations in experiences with teachers and teaching were sought; as Berglund (2006) explained, maximizing variation in the data requires a cohort of participants with a broad range of experiences with the phenomenon under study. All names and locations below are pseudonyms, except for states in which participants lived and attended school.

Recruitment commenced in July 2017 following Institutional Review Board approval at Teachers College, Columbia University and utilized three major approaches. Initially, high school students were recruited from teacher recruitment pipeline programs and statewide associations that developed secondary-level curricula for teacher career exploration courses. In addition, coworkers and educators met through graduate school and professional work recommended potential participants. Participants also were solicited through the Teachers College, Columbia University intranet. Together, these approaches led to the recruitment of six high school students interested in teaching careers who assented—and whose parents consented—to the study. Five of these students completed all elements of the study.

Table 1. Participant Demographics.

	Alice	Aiden	Beth	Mateo	Sandra	* Paula
Age	14	15	16	16	17	17
Gender	F	M	F	M	F	F
Race/Ethnicity	White Euro American	White Euro American	White Euro American	Hispanic	White Euro American	Hispanic
Schools	Waldorf K-4 Homeschool 4–9 (Urban)	Public K-12 (Suburban)	Public K-12 (Rural)	Public K-12 (Urban)	Montessori K-6 Public 7–12 (Rural)	Public K-12 (Urban)
Grade	9th	10th	11th	11th	12th	12th
Teaching Interests	Elem & MS English	MS/HS Science	Elem Math & Science	MS/HS Math & Science	HS Science & Social Studies	HS English
Origin of Interest	3 Years Old	Teaching Assignment	Career Course	Teachers To Be Program	MS School Art Class	Lifelong Interest

* Paula withdrew from the study.

includes biographical data for all recruited participants.

3.2. Data Sources

As Åkerlind (2005) and Bruce (1994) observed, interviews are frequently the primary data source of phenomenographic studies, which was also the case in this study. Each of the study’s five participants completed three semi-structured and audio recorded interviews, each 60–75 min in duration. This study utilized Seidman’s (2006) phenomenological interview structure across the three interviews, which was adapted as a response to Francis’s (1996) claim that phenomenographic interviews tend to focus on long-term memories at the expense of short-term ones. The first interview focused on participants’ life histories, including their earliest memories of their families and schooling. The second interview shifted focus to what Seidman (2006) called “the details of present lived experience in the topic area of the study” (p. 18). Finally, the third interview prompted participants to reflect on the meaning of their past and ongoing experiences with teaching, as well as their anticipated futures as teachers. Within the broad focus of each interview, participants were asked a series of questions intended to help investigate participants’ structure of awareness—the structural and referential aspects, as well as the external and internal horizon from their descriptions. Interview questions were also designed to provide participants with the freedom to bring attention to what they regarded as important as they described their pre-collegiate experiences with teachers and teaching (Ashworth & Lucas, 2000, p. 302; Cope, 2004).

Table 2. Sample interview questions.

Interview	Focus	Sample Questions
Interview 1	Early life experiences, including those with teachers and teaching	Since you were younger, what kind of activities, sports, groups, or clubs have you been involved in outside of school? How were you taught this knowledge and/or skill [in an activity, sport, group, or club outside of school]?
Interview 2	Ongoing experiences focused on those with teachers and teaching	Tell me about a particular story or event related to [an] unsuccessful example of teaching. If you think about some of these leaders, coaches, teachers that we’ve been talking about—what parts of their work do you think come down to their choice? Which parts do you think are mandated or required?
Interview 3	Reflections on experiences, including anticipated experiences as a teacher and/or teaching	If you were talking to your friends about teaching, how would you describe what good teaching is? How do you see yourself teaching others in the future?

includes sample questions from each interview.

In addition to interviews, participants were asked to contribute a series of artifacts for analysis. First, participants were asked during the initial interview to complete a timeline of people who helped them to learn, recording the names of individuals and the approximate periods in which they were encountered. Second, participants were asked after the first and second interviews to complete two snapshot sketches using a provided template; the first sketch asked for a depiction of someone helping the participant to learn, and the second prompted them to depict how they anticipated themselves teaching in the future. In addition to these fixed artifacts, participants were invited at the end of the first and second interviews to contribute 1–2 artifacts per week in between interviews. Participants were provided with directions similar to the snapshot prompt, but they were permitted to contribute any kind of artifact. Participants contributed textual descriptions, additional snapshot sketches, voice memos, school assignments, and published writing. Bruce (1994) has noted phenomenographers’ use of drawings, work products, and written texts to supplement interview data. In this study, sketches and other artifacts were integrated to offer different forms of media through which participants could share their experiences with different teachers and forms of teaching.

3.3. Data Analysis

Data analysis commenced in September 2017, conducted initially at the participant level;

Table 3. Data Analysis Steps.

Step	Step Description	Concurrent Steps
1	Transcribed interview audio and edited transcripts	Categorized each line as structural or referential and internal or external horizon Drafted and grouped mini-memos by topic Drafted analytic memos exploring participants’ descriptions of their experiences with teaching
2	Drafted narrative profile for each participant	Wrote 20–25-page profile Revised second version of profile to 10 pages in length
3	Conducted member check with participants	Shared 10-page version of profile with each participant Revised original and revised profiles based on participant feedback
4	Analyzed data corpus for categories of description	Sorted data into folders representing draft categories Re-sorted data into alternate folders or categories as understanding shifted Generated audit trail to track movement between folders or categories Drafted memos using audit trail and emerging category descriptions to examine relationships within/across categories
5	Peer review for communicative validity	Findings reviewed by teacher education scholars and students Findings separately reviewed by academic journal and conference review panels Suggestions incorporated into findings and final write up

is an overview of the study’s analytical procedures. Once interviews were completed, each recording was listened to, transcribed, and checked for accuracy at least twice to capture all words and tone suggestive of how participants described and understood their experiences with teachers and teaching (Franz, 1994; Svensson & Theman, 1983). Following Cope’s (2004) recommendation for validity and reliability in phenomenographic research, a structure of awareness framework was utilized throughout data analysis. Each transcript line was categorized as indicative of the structural or referential aspect of experience; lines categorized as the structural aspect were also labeled as reflecting the internal or external horizon. As interviews and collected artifacts were transcribed and categorized, mini-memos consisting of 3–5 word “questions, musings, and speculations” were also generated (Creswell, 2007, p. 290). The mini-memos were physically grouped together in a notebook and later served as the basis for more substantive analytic memos exploring participants’ descriptions of experiences with teaching (Marshall & Rossman, 2011). In addition, positionality memos were drafted to surface and attempt to mitigate possible researcher bias in interpreting and analyzing participants’ descriptions of their experiences.

Once transcriptions, artifact collection, and memoing were completed for each of a participant’s three interviews, these data were synthesized into a 20–25-page narrative profile of each participant. The purpose of the profile was two-fold. First, the profiles allowed the author to evaluate what Ashworth and Lucas (2000) referred to as “internal validity” in phenomenographic research, or “the consistency in the account given by the participant” (p. 305). Second, and crucial for the study’s validity and reliability, the profiles allowed the author to repeatedly consider participants’ structure of awareness and how their descriptions reflected the dimensions of variation across their experiences (Cope, 2004). Once the full profile was drafted, it was revised to approximately 10 pages in length and then shared with participants to validate their profiles and to check the researcher’s own presuppositions as a researcher and teacher educator (Åkerlind, 2005; Ashworth, 1993; Francis, 1996). Participant feedback was then incorporated into the full length and revised profiles.

Once the final member check was completed in August 2018, the analysis shifted to the goal of phenomenographic research: to identify categories of description across the cohort of participants (Berglund, 2006; Marton & Pong, 2005). As transcripts were reread, data were manually segmented, sorted, and resorted into labeled folders (Berglund, 2006) to create what Bowden (2000) called “tentative allocations…of the draft categories” (p. 52). This sorting included manual creation of piles until all data were categorized. To promote validity and reliability in the midst of sorting transcripts and artifact data and developing different tentative allocations or piles, an audit trail was created in a spreadsheet (see Rands & Gansemer-Topf, 2016). The audit trail included a record of each transcript segment and its movement between folders, as well as a general description of the evolving categories. Analytic memos, the audit trail, and the emerging category descriptions were all utilized to explore relationships and associations between participant descriptions within/across each category (Berglund, 2006). This process of re-reading, sorting, maintaining records and descriptions, and memoing was conducted a total of four times, at which point categories achieved stability.

Finally, communicative validity of the study’s findings was pursued. Åkerlind (2005) described communicative validity as a common practice within phenomenographic research, one in which researchers “[ensure] that the research methods and final interpretation are regarded as appropriate by the relevant research community” (p. 330). The study’s findings were peer reviewed by teacher education scholars and students, including chosen individuals as well as anonymous peer reviewers from an academic journal and conference review panels. This array of feedback was particularly useful in enhancing communicative validity for the first category identified below in the study’s results (Åkerlind, 2005). In this case, the focus of the category shifted from an emphasis on the array of situations participants described to their understandings and interpretations of various situations in which they encountered teachers and teaching. The result of these various forms of peer review was the development of more “defensible” interpretations of the study’s findings (Åkerlind, 2005).

4. Results

Six categories of description were identified from participants’ descriptions of their experiences with teachers and teaching. The categories reflected four levels of awareness. At the most fundamental level of awareness, teaching was interpreted from a number of situations both within and beyond schools. Participants interpreted these situations in part by discerning approaches, routines, and patterns, as well as relational characteristics. Yet these approaches, routines, patterns, and relational characteristics were invariably shaped, and sometimes constrained, by a complex array of teacher priorities and contextual dependencies teachers faced. Ultimately, participants described teaching as the merging of interpretations, approaches, routines, patterns, relational characteristics, priorities, and dependencies, resulting in unique forms of teaching. Each category of description is detailed in the subsections below.

Table 4. Participant data segmenting across categories of description.

Category of Description	Level	Alice	Aiden	Beth	Mateo	Sandra	Total
Teaching as Interpreting Situations	1	5	2	7	2	16	32
Teaching as Discerning Approaches, Routines, and Patterns	2	26	16	14	15	16	87
Teaching as Relating to Teachers and Learners	2	12	12	3	17	22	66
Teaching as Coping with Dependencies	3	1	11	2	9	3	26
Teaching as Prioritizing	3	16	13	44	18	23	114
Teaching as Merging	4	24	26	24	17	19	110

summarizes the number of data segments across the data corpus and the categories of description to which they were ultimately assigned.

4.1. Teaching as Interpreting Situations

Teaching seemed ubiquitous to participants due to its close relationship with learning. Indeed, participants often identified teaching within learning situations they described. “[E]veryone is a teacher”, Beth wrote in one of her submitted artifacts—a belief she came to hold since she “learn[ed] something every day” from friends, family, peers, and herself. Echoing a similar belief, Sandra claimed it was “easier to say learn when you mean teach”, reflecting a codependence she saw between the two since “it’s almost impossible to have one without the other”. Although participants all named and described intentional teaching acts—including several they engaged in through internships, peer tutoring, class assignments, mentoring groups, and volunteer work—the close relationship they saw between teaching and learning led them to view teaching as something that could also be unintentional. For example, Sandra explained how a car accident while speeding in the parking lot might lead to a situation where an experience teaches the driver, whereas studying might lead to a situation in which students teach themselves. Crucial to these examples was participants’ role in these episodes of teaching: often, they found themselves and/or others learning something, which led them to conclude that teaching must be happening.

Interpreting situations as teaching involved the assessment or reading of the intentions of those enacting teaching. Intent was more easily and accurately read in some teaching situations than others. When Aiden’s parents emphasized “get[ting] these good scores so we can set up for a good life”, their teaching intent to Aiden seemed clear: school success and future success were closely related. In other situations, participants’ reading of intentions may have been different from teachers’ own intentions, in part because participants read these intentions through the prism of learning. For example, Beth viewed her mathematics teacher’s emotional reaction to the death of a student as, in part, an attempt to convey the interconnectedness between people—a slightly different view than the teacher’s stated goal of helping students grow as people. The prism of learning is limited in that it does not provide young people like Beth with a two-way mirror, either. This limitation was evident when Beth recalled how she struggled to ascertain her chemistry tutee’s understanding of Beth’s teaching during a tutoring session. Beth’s recollections of her tutoring suggest that, while young people observe teaching and often attempt to read the intentions of their teachers, they focus on learning while enacting their own teaching without considering other intentions they or their learners may hold. This splintering of expectations for teaching, which may only exist if high schoolers have accrued their own experiences teaching in various contexts, bears important implications for their understandings of teaching.

4.2. Teaching as Discerning Approaches, Routines, and Patterns

In addition to developing capacities to read the intentions of their own teachers, participants appeared to discern teaching approaches, routines, and patterns from their experiences with teachers and teaching. Teaching approaches, routines, and patterns were described by participants as ways to shape or structure interactions between teachers and students. For example, Aiden and Mateo identified different forms of modeling. Aiden’s swim coaches “segmented” swimming strokes by breaking them into smaller components that could be demonstrated and practiced (see Figure 1). Mateo recalled how the director of his extracurricular music group not only prompted students to rehearse musical pieces, but also how he played with, and modeled successful performance for, them. Participants described common teaching approaches like lecturing, yet their descriptions at times reflected disparate understandings of the approach. Sandra characterized lecturing as an ineffective approach that was used for students, one that she immediately thought of when she considered “a stereotypical teacher”. Yet Alice, who had seen her father lecturing law students and who watched recorded lectures as part of her studies, seemed to situate lecturing as an important supplement to her studies rather than a dominant but ineffective teaching approach. Participants’ descriptions and critiques of teaching approaches, routines, and patterns helped them to form an evaluative lens for teaching—one that was in part based on the context in which they experienced teaching, as Alice’s descriptions helped to illustrate.

Much like reading teachers’ intentions, participants’ capacities to discern teaching approaches, routines, and patterns appeared different when they were describing others’ teaching instead of their own. In Alice’s online English class, she recalled how each lesson consisted of the same approaches, including reading and discussing an assigned Shakespeare play, discussing a related assignment, and reciting a memorized passage. Recognizing such patterns allowed participants to understand teaching and to anticipate elements of upcoming lessons. When lessons lacked a degree of predictability, they were more difficult to follow. Mateo characterized such difficulty as “jumping from like point A to like point C, and then point C to like point F”, making him feel as though lessons lacked coherence. Participants were able to identify specific approaches within lessons, as well as the arc of different approaches, routines, and patterns across episodes of teaching.

Observations of teaching approaches, routines, and patterns influenced participants’ teaching, yet participants rarely described anticipating subsequent activities when recounting their own teaching. In most descriptions of their own teaching, participants often found themselves reacting to their perceptions of their learners’ understanding, seldom pivoting like Beth did while working with her chemistry tutee. Beth made the conscious decision to shift her teaching away from her teachers’ heavy reliance on slideshows and instead improvised a “mini-lesson” to answer the student’s questions. Reacting to learners did not always yield pedagogical changes, though. In a school assignment, Aiden recognized that he was “lecturing too much”, yet was unable to shift his approach during its implementation. The connection between the teaching observed and enacted by high school students interested in teaching careers may reflect students’ own roles in teaching. While their perspectives as students may allow them to see teaching as a series of episodes, they may view their own teaching as immersive yet singular interactions with learners.

4.3. Teaching as Relating to Teachers and Learners

Though structured by teaching approaches, routines, and patterns, participants’ descriptions of teaching also seemed to reflect fundamental relational characteristics in teaching. Relational characteristics often started from personal feelings about teachers and teaching. During the study, participants repeatedly identified teachers and episodes of teaching that they “really liked”, as Aiden said of his mathematics teacher. Conversely, participants were at times disgusted by teaching, like when Sandra recalled her band teacher’s comparison of a section’s performance to the sound of “a bunch of foreign women”. Liking and disliking teachers and teaching were feelings sparked by different aspects of teaching. For example, Aiden “really liked” his math teacher because of her willingness “to help a lot” by “going over tests and quizzes” after school. However, when participants described themselves or others disliking teachers, they tended to focus on teachers’ personalities or personal preferences. Alice may have offered the most visceral example of this tendency. She took an English class with Tanya, a friend who openly exhibited a “more personal” dislike of the teacher, whose appearance Tanya found objectionable and a reason not to like her. Alice attributed Tanya’s dislike of their English teacher to Tanya’s “strong ideas about how people should be, or how they should look”. Participants’ evaluative capacities for teaching also drew from their individual feelings about teachers and teaching, yet they appeared to emphasize learning and pedagogical aspects when they liked teaching, and personalities or personal preferences when they disliked teaching.

A second relational characteristic was observed when participants’ descriptions suggested the presence of a collective feeling amongst students when it came to teachers and their teaching. Sandra’s caption to her Snapshot of Anticipated Teaching recounted a distinctly negative experience with a teacher, leading Sandra, “along with many students in the room”, to lose respect for the teacher following her loud, angry reaction to student disruption. Sandra may have become aware of this collective feeling the same way Aiden did when he and his friends discussed their classes, particularly discussions “where our anger’s directed towards that teacher” following a particular incident in class. The tributaries of individual feelings seemed to coalesce into collective emotional currents, which participants used to understand and explain what was happening in teaching and classrooms.

Third, participants exhibited a tendency to characterize the relational aspect of teaching as a positioning, balance, or manner of holding themselves with regard to their duties and responsibilities as a teacher and their personal relationships with students. Alice and Sandra both encountered this positioning or balancing in their own teaching roles: Alice found that she had to be “firm but kind” when teaching young people in a homeless shelter, whereas Sandra struggled in her teaching internship “to get [students] to understand that…I am more their teacher than their friend”. The middle ground that participants repeatedly described themselves as inhabiting in their teaching roles placed them between their desire to cultivate a relationship with learners and their duties and responsibilities as teachers.

4.4. Teaching as Coping with Dependencies

Participants expressed some awareness of the various dependencies that shaped, and even constrained, teachers’ professional duties and responsibilities, some of which appeared to be framed as cultural or community factors. Beth and Aiden both described their experiences in affluent communities, where a certain community or even societal pressure to excel in school and pursue collegiate studies was felt by students. Finding herself consistently judged by teachers and peers, Beth saw “success in the classroom…very focused on standardized test scores, and grades”, creating extreme stress for her as a high schooler. For Aiden, teaching in high school classes was intended to help students to “[get] into a good college and [set] up myself” for work and life. In Aiden’s view, this societal pressure was more acutely felt by members of certain racial groups, particularly Asians, who he characterized as a homogenous group with universally strict expectations about school performance and how teachers should teach students. The homogeneity of the community and student body of her own high school led Sandra to lament the rarity of “really deep conversations about race, and about whatever was going on in the government and the world”, which she only recalled experiencing with foreign language teachers. Cultural and racial dependencies created certain expectations for, and even constraints on, teaching and learning, shaping participants’ experiences with teaching.

Another set of dependencies identified by participants were structural in nature. Race, at times, could be categorized as such a dependency. Midway Village was “one of the whitest areas in history” and Wakefield Township was “mostly white”, but neither Sandra nor Beth were able to explain how such overwhelming whiteness had come to exist in their respective hometowns. These communities were white for the same reason public schools were public: they always had been. Public schools represented a structural dependency that impacted the way teachers taught; Sandra believed public school teachers taught primarily through worksheets “[c]ause that’s how they do it” because “that public school teacher grew up in a public school”. The tacit, generational transmission of approaches Sandra seemed to suggest lacked an explicit origin point. Other structural dependencies, like Mateo’s descriptions of the Keystone Exams in Pennsylvania or Aiden’s accounts of Google Classroom, came from identifiable sources: the state government and the school district, respectively. Mateo saw the exams as something that helped teachers to “know what they wanna teach”, which was reflected in “their lesson plan set up for [the Keystone Exams]”. To Aiden, Google Classroom provided structure, yet one that was not as controlling and deterministic in its nature since it helped to “open new doors for teaching” and the way it was conducted. Dependencies were not always constraints but instead factors impacting teaching in ways teachers often could not avoid through their own decision-making.

4.5. Teaching as Prioritizing

Within their reading of teachers’ intentions as they interpreted teaching situations, participants found that teachers prioritized and enacted specific beliefs, preferences, and/or values in their teaching, which sometimes differed from the dependencies that participants attributed to schools and communities. The most prominent priority participants described involved meeting learners’ needs. Meeting learners’ needs often entailed the movement of knowledge, which included Sandra’s calls for “knowledge about what [teachers] are teaching you”. Beth’s belief that teaching should convey “what [students] need to know and what [they] don’t [need to know]” in a given topic or subject matter also emphasized the movement of knowledge. In addition, participants described the movement of key ideas or values. For example, Mateo identified his sister as someone who taught him by “really passing down” the idea of being yourself and not compromising values for others. Beth also identified an example of a teacher with a focus on a bigger picture than subject matter. She recalled a Physical Education teacher who helped students develop “certain skills of, like, not just running away from problems, but…confront[ing] them head on” (see Figure 2). Other priorities involved judgments concerning what should be taught or how teachers should engage with students. Mateo valued “doing the taxes” and other real-world school topics students would not simply “learn…and then just throw away”. Fun and engagement were also mentioned by participants. Aiden recalled how his Environmental Science teacher sought to get “the entire class involved” by being “energetic” and making the class “fun”, something Beth also found in her classes. Participants characterized priorities in teaching as intentional efforts reflected in instruction, and sometimes explicitly stated by teachers, empowering teachers and participants with an agency through which they could enact teaching elements they valued.

The classroom was not just the stage for the enactment of teachers’ priorities, but a site viewed by participants as an intersection point between teachers’ priorities for teaching and students’ priorities for learning. On a particularly memorable occasion for Aiden, his eighth-grade algebra teacher responded to students’ request for group work by “looking at her computer, and…writing [the assignment] down and…actually check[ing] by herself if [the assignment] was doable in groups”. She appeared in this episode, and at other points during Aiden’s time with her, to weigh her priorities for students in the lesson—which appeared to be learning about graphing algebraic equations—as well as students’ learning preferences, ultimately making an on-the-spot change to accommodate both priorities. Teachers sometimes struggled to accommodate multiple priorities, or were altogether unaware of priorities other than their own. One of Beth’s volleyball coaches appeared to hold no “greater purpose” than “racking up more wins”, which conflicted with Beth’s view that teaching interactions should help prepare learners for life rather than adopt a singular and myopic priority like winning at all costs. In her AP Biology class, Beth also found that her teacher asked students to interpret data and apply certain skills related to biology, yet taught exclusively through textbook readings, guided notes, and PowerPoints. Beth believed that these teaching approaches were incongruent with developing interpretation and application skills. The classroom could be a site of intersection between priorities, such as meeting learners’ needs, developing new forms of practice, and/or enhancing student buy-in. However, the potential of such intersections heavily depended upon teachers’ recognition of, and willingness to negotiate with, priorities other than their own.

4.6. Teaching as Merging

Teachers’ engagement with student priorities hints at participants’ view of teaching as a central point of enactment that reflected a constellation of significant factors. Participants each used various expressions to characterize teaching as a merging of factors. Mateo recalled how Ms. Roya, whom he had encountered as a student and professional teacher, worked to develop “her own way of doing things”, which she achieved by “merg[ing]” advice from teachers into a new form. He also saw his ninth-grade math teacher “pull[ing] in everything” from multiple years of math courses to help mathematics “[click] together…to form just, like, this easy thing”. Though Alice claimed she was unable to articulate a teaching philosophy, she indicated that teaching invariably depended “on the students, the teacher, and the subject being taught”, also suggesting that teaching itself was frequently changing depending on these three essential components. For Beth, tutoring and teaching both relied upon “what each person is struggling with, and, like, how they learn the best”. Sandra referred to a “middle ground” that required teachers to “keep your cool as a teacher” while balancing relationships with students and the goals of the lesson and class. Although participants used different expressions, they all seemed to position teaching as the merging of everyday interactions with teaching; teaching’s various approaches, routines, and patterns; its relational characteristics; the dependencies that shaped teaching in its various contexts; and teachers’ priorities in/for their teaching. Teaching, rather than being prescriptive or hierarchically dominated, held an agentive potential, which participants highly valued.

5. Discussion

Rather than the simplistic and homogeneous conceptions of teaching Lortie (1975/2002) described, the six categories of description described above reflect participants’ comprehensive and unified—yet also complex and varied—understandings of teaching (c.f., Fischl & Hoz, 1993). Participants portrayed themselves in their descriptions of their experiences with teaching as learners; in Sandra’s case, she even described the “material” of her teaching internship as “learning to teach”. This learning, consistent with Dewey’s (1938/1997) theory of experience and Feiman-Nemser’s (2001) characterization of teachers’ experiences and knowledge, was continuous and dynamic. Participants may have believed that teaching took many forms, and as such was something they frequently interpreted from myriad situations. As they interpreted these situations, the approaches, routines, and patterns they discerned—as well as the relational characteristics they found influential—represented a constellation of factors unique to each participant. Similarly, and consistent with Svensson’s (1994) highlighting of the social and contextual nature of conceptions, participants highlighted an array of teacher priorities as well as the dependencies they coped with in their respective contexts, which varied across forms and settings of teaching. High school students—specifically those interested in teaching careers—may not possess the pedagogical expertise Wilson and Corbett (2001) described, but their conceptions of teaching do not appear to reflect the universally narrow and limited conceptions of teaching previously found by Lortie (1975/2002) and others.

Despite echoes of certain deficit characterizations present in the data, this study’s findings further challenge the socialization model describing pre-collegiate experiences’ influence on prospective teachers’ conceptions of teaching. For example, Sandra’s belief that her band teacher “[made] his favorites really good”—which necessitated “be[ing] very present” with him—sounds quite similar to Lortie’s (1975/2002) assertion that students “learn…the value of teacher favor” (p. 62). Another similarity to deficit characterizations was Beth’s initial reliance on her teacher’s PowerPoint slides while conducting a tutoring session, which could be characterized as Beth surrendering to the familiarity pitfall of experience (see Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985). Despite these similarities, participants seldom expressed a desire to imitate their own teachers. When participants did find themselves replicating what they saw their teachers doing, they often implemented different approaches, as Beth did with her tutee. Though this study’s findings suggest that high school students may hold conceptions of teaching that are far more nuanced and complex than existing scholarship credits them with having, teacher educators have continued to base aspects of their practice around deficit views of pre-collegiate conceptions of teaching (Mewborn & Tyminski, 2006; Smagorinsky & Barnes, 2014). Arguing that teacher educators have overemphasized Lortie’s (1975/2002) socialization model, Smagorinsky and Barnes (2014) called for continued research on pre-collegiate experiences and their impact on “newer generations of teachers in new eras of expectations” (p. 50).

Yet unlike Smagorinsky and Barnes’s (2014) calls for continued research, which offer little indication as to what this scholarship might look like, the present study begins to identify specific experiences to investigate. Previous studies of prior experiences and conceptions of teaching typically focused on what is gleaned from teaching through observations and interactions with teachers (e.g., Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985; Smagorinsky & Barnes, 2014). However, these observation-centric views of learning to teach may offer an incomplete picture of high school students’ understanding of teaching, as students may also engage in teaching of their own. Participants in this study all described their own teaching through teaching internships, school assignments, peer tutoring, mentoring programs, and volunteer work. Observations and enactments of teaching yielded differing, and sometimes complementary, views of teaching. Contemporary societal movements like the push for accountability may impact teacher learning from K-12 student experiences (Smagorinsky & Barnes, 2014), but researchers must also seek to understand how the observation and enactment of teaching shape—and potentially shape disparately—how teachers understand the work of teaching.

Teacher educators, both in their research and their practice, must come to see that their students are learning to teach long before they enter teacher education programs, and that such learning can be an asset to formal teacher learning. Scholarship on pedagogies designed to explore, and possibly change, prospective teachers’ beliefs or conceptions of teaching has been repeatedly conducted (e.g., Collet & Greiner, 2020; Grossman, 1991; Westrick & Morris, 2016; Wood, 2000). These studies differ from the current study in that they emphasize teacher education pedagogies (e.g., teaching approaches; reflective blogs or journals) and/or deficit views of pre-collegiate experiences rather than the assets those considering teaching careers develop through their experiences with teaching. This study’s findings identified potential assets like the capacity to read teachers’ intentions, to discern approaches, routines, and patterns, and to evaluate teaching through the prism of learning or contextual demands like testing. These capacities might be dismissed by some teacher educators since they may yield incorrect or problematic perspectives on teaching. However, these capacities—along with the categories of description surfaced in this study that help to explain the capacities’ development and use—constitute the crucially important, yet poorly understood, foundation of teacher learning. Learning to teach, instead of a process conducted solely through socialization in K-12 schools that produces teaching beliefs grounded in emotion and personal preference, occurs across a wide array of experiences with teaching, many of which are the product of deliberate choices made by young people.

Perhaps the most powerful asset high school students interested in teaching careers may hold is their awareness of their learning as teachers. Sandra seemed to demonstrate an awareness of her own learning as a teacher, as well as its malleability over time. In addition to describing her teaching internship as centered on “learning to teach”, she also situated teacher learning as something that could be lost. Sandra found one damaging consequence of her public school’s testing emphasis, including her exposure to teaching approaches supporting this emphasis, was that she “literally had trouble thinking of a different way to teach” other than constantly preparing for tests. By returning to a Montessori school like the one she attended as a K-6 student, Sandra believed she could “get that back”, a reference to the capacity to develop different and even novel teaching approaches and ideas. Sandra’s awareness of her learning and its malleability illustrates Lortie’s (1998/2005) subsequent postulation that the influences of prior experiences may be more malleable than he originally found.

Each participant seemed to hint at an awareness, and even the malleability, of teacher learning. Aiden saw his teachers “figuring it out as they go” when using classroom technologies like Google Classroom. Similarly, Mateo recalled how Ms. Roya took “advice from all teachers and, like, made it into one”, in effect learning to teach by “merg[ing]…together” different perspectives into her “own way of doing things”. Not only did Alice see the teacher, student, and content as constantly changing factors in teaching, but she also suggested that her understanding of the three was in flux. High school students interested in teaching careers may be more than just aware of their own learning as teachers. If they are like this study’s participants, they may also articulate agency through their awareness and their desires to shape or control their own learning as teachers, or young people regularly engaging in the act of teaching.

6. Implications

The potential influence of past experiences to shape teacher agency demands a reorientation of teacher education. Teacher educators have consistently used blogs, journals, and other activities to spur cognitive dissonance (e.g., Galman, 2009) and/or reflective thinking (Conway, 1998, 2001), yet these activities and modes of thinking seem focused on instigating changes in prospective teacher beliefs, conceptions of teaching, and instructional practices that teacher educators find problematic. Similarly, teacher educators have conducted research documenting their efforts to change beliefs and conceptions of teaching (e.g., Gray, 2020; Westrick & Morris, 2016).

Teacher educators should reorient at least part of their practice towards the assets that prospective teachers hold, which will necessarily involve new approaches to illuminate and to (re)interpret past experiences. Focusing prospective teachers on the remembering and analysis of critical incidents (see Badia & Becerril, 2016) offers one path towards a deeper examination of experience rather than an emphasis on prospective teachers’ personal deficits and flaws held. Teacher educators also can use classroom-based activities like blogs and journals to examine additional influences on preservice teachers’ conceptions of teaching. Recent research has identified non-school influences on conceptions of teaching, including parents (Brunker, 2024), social media (Carpenter et al., 2025), and nonformal education experiences like Scouting (Davis & Julian, 2023). For such a reorientation to occur in their practice, teacher educators must experiment—and become aware of alternative influences and approaches—through dialogue and research, along with self-studies of teacher education practice. However, teacher education is undoubtedly more than reflecting upon one’s own experiences.

This study also suggests that teaching practice should play a central role in high school-based teacher career exploration courses. Observing teaching in traditional high school classes, and even in a teaching career exploration class, informs high school students’ understandings of teaching. In this study, students’ experiences engaging in the act of teaching contributed to potentially powerful experiences that may have drawn from observations, yet in some respects contributed differentially to early understandings of teaching. These participants were, through their respective teaching experiences, engaging in the two jobs that Feiman-Nemser (2001) attributed to new teachers: “they have to teach and they have to learn to teach” (p. 1026). Thus, the act of teaching should be central even in this early stage of teacher preparation. As Audrain and Googins (2020) noted, the centering of clinical teaching practice in programs like high school-based teacher academies has tremendous potential in reshaping how teachers are prepared.

If learning to teach is an ongoing and continuous experience (see Dewey, 1938/1997; Lortie, 1975/2002; Smagorinsky & Barnes, 2014), the professional learning continuum (see Feiman-Nemser, 2001) for teachers must be reconceptualized to include high school-based experiences. The growth of teacher academies (see Audrain & Googins, 2020) and other high school-based teacher career exploration classes (e.g., Teaching as a Profession, n.d.) means that teacher education has, at least in certain pockets across the country, extended into US secondary schools. States like Ohio appeared to engage in backwards design to develop their teacher academy programming by drawing extensively from frameworks for professional teaching like the Association for Colleges of Teacher Education’s A pivot toward clinical practice, its lexicon, and the renewal of educator preparation (2018) report and the Educators Rising Standards (2016). Although teaching practice appears to be a significant complement to observations of teaching, the current study demonstrates the pre-collegiate period’s uniqueness for teacher learning. The pre-collegiate period is the only time where a high school student interested in teaching careers can simultaneously be a K-12 student, take coursework related to teaching, and possibly teach in a subject and/or grade level they may desire to teach professionally in the future. Such pre-collegiate experiences and programming may be significant for teacher recruitment (Carothers et al., 2019), yet as a field we know so little about the nature of teacher learning and decision-making in these contexts.

This limited knowledge base leaves important gaps to be filled by future research. Teacher academies and other high school teacher career exploration courses represent unique structures where high school students interested in teaching careers can negotiate and co-author with high school teacher educators new roles, pedagogies, and learning experiences for those considering teaching careers. However, few scholars have examined such programs, either individually or across the country (but see Gist et al., 2019; Googins, 2019). Although these studies describe the structure of programs, they offer little indication as to who the students are, what the challenges of learning to teach are in these settings, and how high school-based teacher educators engage these challenges. Such scholarship might challenge the apparent assumption that a current or effective teacher will invariably make an effective teacher educator. As Zeichner (2005) argued, “one’s expertise as a teacher does not necessarily translate into expertise as a mentor of teachers” (p. 118). The same could be said of educators teaching high school students to teach: the expertise that teachers hold does not necessarily translate into expertise as teacher educators.

The effectiveness of secondary-level recruitment initiatives in drawing young people to teacher preparation and the teaching profession warrants examination, particularly insofar as secondary students’ backgrounds might impact their decisions to pursue teaching as a career. While participation in teacher academies between 2010 and 2018 nearly doubled from 80,000 to just shy of 160,000 students (Audrain & Googins, 2020), teacher education program enrollments dropped significantly during the same period (Partelow, 2019; Sutcher et al., 2016). This paper does not provide a detailed analysis of enrollment trends in secondary-level recruitment initiatives, which might help to isolate the salient factors that illustrate how upward enrollment trends have not yet translated into teacher preparation program enrollment increases. Additional research is necessary to examine students’ decision-making processes, as well as the experiences or other influences in secondary-level recruitment initiatives that might impact their desire to advance into teacher preparation programs.

Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly, subsequent research can address longitudinal questions related to teacher learning and recruitment. Preservice teacher education has been characterized as a weak intervention, in part because of the persistence of preservice teachers’ beliefs or conceptions related to teaching (Borg, 2006; Reichl, 2012). By studying the experiences of students interested in teaching careers across their pre-collegiate experiences and college/university-based teacher preparation and beyond, researchers can potentially map out shifts in beliefs or conceptions over time. A longitudinal approach might also allow researchers to identify programmatic activities or experiences that might contribute to changes in teacher learning and conceptions of teaching. With its small number of participants and limited time frame, the current study offers a single snapshot of a select number of high school students’ descriptions of their experiences with teachers and teaching, the analysis of which may be influenced by the researcher’s own experiences in learning to teach. For teacher educators to better understand “the carry-over of student experience into the work lives of classroom teachers” (Lortie, 1998/2005, p. 139), their scholarship must examine teacher learning across multiple points in time.