Some of This Is Not Your Fault: Imperfect Placements, Student Teachers, and University Supervision

This article is about imperfect classrooms where student teachers struggle or fail. The authors highlight the current landscape of educational reform, suggest that such reforms have heightened the importance of classroom-based teacher preparation, and explore the (thin) related literature on imperfect classrooms to date. The authors consider why universities send (and perhaps should continue to send) student teachers out to imperfect classrooms, and they suggest a research agenda to better inform the preparation of teachers in the years ahead.