Devotion to Duty: The Preservice Teaching Experiences of a Former Coast Guardsman

Troops to Teachers

In a report to the United States Congress, Shaul (2001) provided an overview of the goals and history of the Troops to Teachers program. TTT was originally established by Congress in 1992 to support military personnel who were separating from the Armed Forces to become certified as teachers. It also aimed to help them gain employment in school districts that were experiencing teacher shortages and served large numbers of high-need students. Through the program, the Department of Defense (DoD) worked with state Departments of Education (DoE) to create pathways into teaching through alternative certification programs. Initially, the TTT program offered stipends to participants and grants to school districts, with some preparation partners and school districts providing additional funds to incentivize recruitment. While the DoD has phased out most of this financial support, the program has continued and still serves its original purposes.

Shaul (2001) continued by providing details about the outcomes related to teacher demographics, noting that most program completers are men, which stands in contrast to female-dominated traditional teacher preparation programs. Also, approximately one in four program completers teach STEM classes and another one in five work in special education, both of which are high-need areas. Finally, Shaul (2001) noted that TTT completers are more likely to describe themselves as very satisfied with their teaching career and are retained in their schools for one or more years. Thus, TTT has a history of diversifying the workforce, filling hard-to-staff schools and content areas, and fostering longer-term employment than traditionally prepared teachers.

The effectiveness of TTT participants has been studied through reflective surveys of school principals that employ them, asking the principals to rate TTT participants instructional effectiveness, fit within the school culture, and responsiveness to critique. Also, through comparisons of student standardized testing outcomes of TTT participants to those of other teachers. In their survey of school leaders, Owings et al. (2006) found that school leaders believed that TTT participants had a more positive effect on student achievement than other preservice teachers, were better at working with colleagues, and were more skilled at independently handling student discipline problems. Owings et al. (2006) also claimed that the school leaders believed that TTT completers’ instruction was more closely aligned with research-based practices than other preservice teachers. As a result, the surveys suggested that TTT completers provided significant benefits to their schools and districts. Additionally, in a study of 6,500 Florida students, Nunnery et al. (2009) found that the reading and math scores of students taught by TTT completers were substantially and statistically significantly higher than those of other teachers matched by subject and teaching experience.

Advocates for TTT (e.g., Parham & Gordon, 2016) focus on the personal qualities of the participants, arguing that the maturity and leadership qualities gained in active service account for their relative effectiveness in the classroom. In this study, we take a different approach and suggest that the cultural values of the service, in this case the Coast Guard, act as mediational means for our participant’s willingness and ability to develop critical reflection skills and, consequently, adjust their practice. These two tendencies distinguished them from their teacher residency colleagues and aligned their instruction with calls for reflective practice, suggesting the likelihood of their future effectiveness.

The Coast Guard

The United States (US) Coast Guard was created in 1790 to promote national and border security, as well as engage in search and rescue operations in US waters. The Coast Guard has law enforcement, regulatory, intelligence, and first responder missions (US Coast Guard, n.d.). The Coast Guard’s value of Devotion to Duty is particularly salient and aligns with the findings of Owings et al. (2006). The Devotion to Duty states that, “Members of the Coast Guard pledge to seek responsibility, accept accountability, and commit to the successful achievement of organizational goals” (US Department of Homeland Security: United States Coast Guard Auxiliary, n.d.). Each of these are directly applicable to teaching, as teachers must be responsible for running their classrooms, accept accountability for their students’ learning outcomes, and commit to their students’ success. These responsibilities align with the emphasis on reflection that is characteristic of teacher education programs as defined by the Pennsylvania Department of Education Frameworks for Educator Effectiveness (Pennsylvania Department of Education, n.d.).

Teacher Reflection vs. Teacher Reflective Cycle

Teacher reflection and disposition to reflect is a distinct category of action and proficiency from teacher knowledge, yet is considered to be a critical aspect of professional growth (Alger, 2006). There are numerous reports on the positive effects of teacher reflection that range from theoretical to practical (Alger, 2006; Loughran, 2002; Loughran, 2007; Milner, 2006). Moreover, reports on potential interventions designed to foster deeper and better reflection for teachers and student teachers are common in the literature (Alger, 2006; Cavanagh & McMaster, 2015; Cavanagh & Prescott, 2010; Muir & Beswick, 2007; Zhu, 2011).

Teacher reflection has long been viewed as an important aspect of teacher professional practice. Dewey (1941) first identified evidence-based reflection as a way for teachers to explain and question their own classroom practices. More recently, teacher reflection has been seen as a tool to improve school and student performance (Goddard et al., 2007). For Dewey, reflection was an “[a]ctive, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge” (1933, p. 9) meant to change attitudes and beliefs. Yet, in the field of teacher education, there is evidence that changes in practice can drive changes in beliefs, and, as a result, reflection that changes practice might be equally valuable (Franke, et al., 1997). Richards and Lockhart (1994) take a broader interpretation, defining a reflective approach to teaching “[i]n which teachers collect data about teaching; examine their attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, and teaching practices; and use the information obtained as a basis for critical reflection about teaching” (p. 1).

At the same time, most of the reports, and the literature more generally, do not paint an optimistic picture of teacher reflection. For example, Otienoh (2011) goes so far as to claim that “[i]t has been realized that most teachers are unable to critically reflect” (p. 733). While not all the literature is so negative, most of it reports that it is common for both preservice and in-service teachers to primarily provide descriptions without an analysis of events, and to reflect on actions, rather than focus on the reasons for those actions (Zhu, 2011). These conclusions are drawn from interviews and evaluations of several written texts that preservice and in-service teachers have produced. As a result, we focus on Wallace’s (1991) notion of the reflective cycle, in which professional learning is the outcome of concrete experience and reflective thinking about that experience. In addition, the development of new ways of thinking, including refinements and further articulations of prior conceptions, as well as re-understanding of prior experience, support the development of professional competence. That is, it is only by critical reflection on practice, experience, and received knowledge (e.g., from classes) that teachers gain professional competence localized to their practice.

Wallace (1991) distinguishes between knowing-in-action and knowledge-in-action, claiming that knowing-in-action can be understood as the day-to-day work and actions of a teacher. While we assume that all of these are attempts to satisfy the myriad and interrelated sets of teachers’ goals and constraints, some of that knowing is implicit and unexamined, and possibly inefficient. As the teacher reflects, that knowing-in-action is examined, transformed, or even discarded. The resulting knowledge-in-action can be made explicit and reflects more mature ways of acting in the classroom, drawing the teacher upward on a trajectory of professional competence. That is, in this conceptualization (Figure 1), reflection requires specific thought about the efficacy of particular actions within the context of the classroom and school. Wallace (1991) also notes that some types of knowledge of teaching can be derived from observation, which is distinct both from knowledge derived from text/training and from knowledge derived from one’s own teaching practice. In our interviews, we sought to elicit descriptions of knowledge from each of these three sources.

Figure 1

Choice within Constraints

A second perspective that guided the theoretical framing of this study is that teachers are “[c]omplex, sensible people who have reasons for the many decisions they make” (Leatham, 2006, p. 92). This perspective holds that although teachers may not be consciously aware of their beliefs and may not always be able to articulate them, those beliefs are part of a coherent and complex system organized by strength, quasi-logical relationships, and clustering; and, that belief systems are coherent for the individual believer (Leatham, 2006).

Participant

This study focused on the experience of a Coast Guard veteran in the Troops to Teachers program, who transitioned to middle school science teaching after serving in the military. We have assigned him the pseudonym, Neil. The data for this paper were collected as part of a larger study (Burke et al., 2025) conducted at a large, public, urban, research university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The participants of that study were recruited from a cohort of graduate students enrolled in the university’s 12-month master’s Teacher Residency (TR) program, which pairs coursework with an intensive teaching residency designed to prepare participants to teach in urban, high-needs schools. We have chosen our case study because his experience was strikingly different from others in the cohort, and we wanted to understand the factors that contributed to these differences. We examined his experience to explore how his military background uniquely and meaningfully shaped his thinking and practice as a teacher.

Data Collection

Recruitment for the larger study occurred at the beginning of the fall 2020 semester. We sent an invitation email to all TR program participants and any that replied were part of the larger study. We note that the academic year was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, so the participants engaged in both remote instruction and limited in-person teaching. Data were collected in four phases during the 2020–2021 academic year. During all phases, participants completed semi-structured interviews that occurred via Zoom and lasted between 45–60 minutes. Interviews were conducted by four researchers on our team. Given the cumulative, reflective nature of this work, each participant was interviewed by the same researcher.

Each interview consisted of a foundational interview task, followed by an explicit discussion of the participants’ most fundamental commitments to their teaching practice (Table 1). The tasks of the first three interviews probed sources (I) and representations (II & III) of the participants’ commitments to their teaching. For example, in Interview I, participants were asked to talk about a teacher upon whose practice they wanted to model their own. This discussion provided insight on the participants’ implicit beliefs and primed them to discuss their explicit beliefs. The fourth interview’s task then prompted the participants to consider their views on educational theory. This task directly prepared them to reflect on their commitments to practice and how these commitments had evolved over their TR year. The participants were also asked to provide a theory-driven conceptualization of education, school, subject matter in school curricula, teaching method, and school and social practices. Through this interview task, we considered how the participants’ discussions of educational theory aligned with their commitments.

Between periods of data collection, the researchers conducting interviews reviewed the prior interview transcripts and compiled a list of each participant’s “pillars of practice” (the fundamental beliefs about teaching that they held for their practice) that were either explicitly stated or implied. This review enabled the interviewers to continuously engage the participants in a reflection on their pillars. During interviews II, III, and IV, the researchers reminded the participants of the pillars they had identified in previous interviews and asked if these pillars had shifted. This repeated, direct discussion and reflection on the participants’ pillars of practice functioned as a type of member checking. The data for the study were collected with the approval of Temple University’s Human Subjects Institutional Research Board (#27500). Data collection followed approved protocols for ethical treatment of participants.

Data Analysis

At the conclusion of data collection, our research team began a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the interview transcripts using the qualitative coding tool Dedoose. Our unit of analysis was the content unit, a segment of discourse designed to make a single point. A single researcher open-coded the first-round interviews, providing our team with an initial codebook. This coding was later reviewed and streamlined by a more senior member of our research team. Initial codes were also developed based on our reading of the literature, as well as articulated foci of the teacher education program, such as “real-world connections” and “active learning.” Once the codebook was developed, Interview I was recoded and Interviews II, III, and IV were coded via a collaborative coding process between varying pairs of researchers. The coding pairs met synchronously via Zoom to read, discuss, and code each content unit (Miles et al., 2013). We then developed axial codes to organize similar emergent themes. The code co-occurrence function of Dedoose allowed us to track the frequency of different axial codes.

As noted above, Neil’s codes diverged in critical ways from the other TR participants in the larger study. As we describe below, he was focused on engaging students in productive struggle––in discussions that solicited both correct and incorrect ways of thinking––and in assessment and evaluation practices that included both his students and instruction. These codes were not applied to the interview data of other participants.

Training as a Foundation for Teaching

During Interview IV, Neil discussed his transition from service in the Coast Guard to a career in teaching and how his perceptions of teaching significantly changed during his residency year, stating:

Here, Neil explained that prior to beginning his residency year, his experiential knowledge of K12 schools was based entirely on being a student. He then noted that drawing on his experience with two great teachers was useful, but not “[t]he best method.” Instead, he realized that he needed to shift away from thinking about whether students are giving “[r]ight and wrong answers.” During the year, Neil began to focus on engaging students in critical thinking and problem solving, and how “[t]hat was a little bit of a shock,” because he had not thought “[o]n the other side of the classroom” or as a science teacher before. By drawing on the Coast Guard values, in particular, the value of accepting responsibility, we theorize that what allowed him to do that thinking was data-based reflection and taking responsibility, as learned by his experiences in the Coast Guard.

Neil then highlighted the importance of the culture and practice of the “[t]rain your replacement” model within the Coast Guard (we note that this is common across the Armed Forces [Mastin, 2011]) and explained this practice in Interview I as helping him to realize that he enjoyed teaching:

Neil then described the importance of “train-your-replacement” in his career development as motivating his career transition to teaching. It also provided him with transferable skills such as public speaking and presentation proficiency. Moreover, he realized that he was already teaching, nearly daily, and enjoyed it during his four years in the Coast Guard, stating:

Neil then specifically named feeling enjoyment and comfort in teaching, sufficient comfort that he could imagine “[d]oing [it] for a lifetime” and that teaching was “[s]taring me in the face.” That “[d]ay in and day out” when he was “[t]eaching [people] how to do stuff” and the notion of training your replacement meant that he was well-situated to begin a teacher education program.

Shaping Pedagogy and Assessment with Military Values

Neil was reflective about how his ways of thinking about pedagogy and assessment evolved during his residency year. He explained that he began the year focused on the notion of “[d]o the job” regarding whether students were giving the right answers to questions. Over time, he shifted this concern for correctness to whether the students were engaging in productive struggle. During Interview IV, Neil explained:

In this excerpt, Neil explained his initial mindset about his goals for his students during the residency year. He said that he initially evaluated himself as a teacher (i.e., “[a]m I a good teacher?”) by whether “[e]nough people [are] raising their hand and giving the right answer.” He specifically cited engagement as his marker for success in Interview I while reflecting on his experience as a student and aspirational instructional practices, stating:

Here, Neil reflected on his experience as a student, noting “I have vivid memories of those experiments” as formative. He explained that in his experience, hands on, active, and engaging work would be formative for students. As a result, he aspired to create those kinds of activities, contrasting his time teaching a rocket project [they want to engage] with the “normal” instruction where “kids [were] very rarely coming off mute…it was not a great environment for learning.” In Interview I, Neil was clearly using engagement and excitement as a marker for successful instruction.

In addition, Neil claimed that early in the year, he used engagement to determine whether “I’m doing the job and we’re on track” (Interview IV) in terms of the curriculum. Describing his evolution as a teacher, he continued:

Here Neil claims to have moved away from a focus on simply using correct answers to judge his performance and students’ success to a focus on “[e]ngaging in productive struggle” and using assessment as a tool for continued and focused instruction. He noted that he and his students “[t]alked about one answer [that] isn’t correct or the best answer” as a characterization of productive struggle. Moreover, he recognized a fundamental change in his role, explaining “If students are getting things wrong…it’s more so, like ‘Alright, let’s take this information for what it is. You guys are all messing up this topic and let’s dive deeper.’” That is, Neil reconceptualized his job as a teacher from “[e]nsuring students know and can state the right answer” to one that supports students meaningfully engaging with a range of ideas and thinking deeply about even those that might not be the correct or “the best” answer.

In thinking about lesson planning, Neil repeatedly emphasized the importance of focusing on “[w]hat the students are doing” and ensuring a close relationship between the intended learning goals (i.e., standards) and classroom activities. For example, during Interview III, he said:

In this excerpt, Neil begins by emphasizing the importance of relating his objectives to meaningful subsequent work. His repetition of “[w]hat are the students doing?” is aligned with the focus of the train-your-replacement model in that the instructor needs to focus on what the learner is doing and whether they have developed the proficiency to “do the job.”

Neil provided multiple lines of reasoning for this change in proficiency that involved both thinking about students and thinking about the discipline of science. He explained:

In this excerpt, Neil first explains that when he changed his pedagogy to prioritize student-centered methods, students “[t]hink they’re wrong and so they don’t want to share out” because “[they] are used to getting every answer right and they aren’t sure about this.” That is, both Neil and the students were getting used to a new milieu, in which students were expected to share their thinking as part of the class. Neal’s claim that students would not want to share if they did not know that they were right aligns with his prior focus on prioritizing students getting correct answers. As Neil continued, he shifted his explanation to include a rationale grounded in the discipline, explaining that “[t]his is science, you make mistakes in science and make errors…for hundreds of years people believed things that were completely wrong.” Here, we interpret Neil as suggesting that scientific understanding is not linear as it does not always begin with correct explanations of natural phenomena. He implied that, within the classroom, these incorrect ways of thinking should be understood as part of the journey to more correct understandings as aligned with scientific progress.

Neil further described a pedagogical approach that includes ceding authority to the students to do “[h]eavy thinking,” while engaging them in exploration and conversation. He stated:

In this excerpt, Neil made it clear that “[his] goal [was to have] students do most of the heavy lifting” and it was only “[a]t the end of the class” that he would “[c]lear up any miscommunications or misunderstandings that [they] developed in that investigation.” He wanted to promote creative thinking and meaningful engagement and recognized that “[s]ometimes they’re wrong.” Moreover, he valued both hearing and then directly confronting his students’ misconceptions because he recognized that allowing them to go unaddressed meant “[t]hat’s going to be…a problem later on down the road,” especially when similar ideas resurfaced.

Finally, we note that Neil expected students to have different needs and respond differently to varying types of pedagogical approaches. During Interview IV, he said:

Neil again returned to the idea that both he and his students had previously focused on a “[r]ight answer, wrong answer type mentality.” He explained that he took a sense of personal responsibility for his learning outcomes, even if it meant leaving his comfort zone, saying, “[j]ust because I’m comfortable with it doesn’t mean that students are benefitting from it.” We interpreted this to mean that Neil felt a responsibility to ensure that his instruction included multiple types of teaching methods, especially “[h]ands-on [and] student-led” and one that “[w]ould vary for subject matter.” As such, Neil recognized that it was important to match his pedagogy to his teaching goals, and that if he wanted to ensure that students could do the job of a scientist, he had to engage in student-centered instruction and engage students in productive struggle.

Overall, we present a case of a novice teacher and Coast Guard veteran who arrived with beliefs about what it meant to achieve success in teaching, like ensuring that his students get correct answers to questions, but recognized the inadequacies of that approach in terms of long-term learning. Neil switched his instructional practices to focus on engaging students in productive struggle around questions, engaging them in conversations that solicited their critical thinking––especially valuing incorrect thinking, and supporting them via many pedagogical approaches. Fundamentally, this approach is grounded in assessment, evaluation of himself and his students, and critical reflection on his own practice. We argue that Neal’s acceptance of responsibility carried over from his Coast Guard service to his teaching practice.

Change Moments as a Result of Reflective Teaching

Neil’s pedagogy was unique in terms of his focus on supporting students’ agency and ensuring that they engaged in productive struggle. In particular, he arrived at those positions early in his residency. His desire to support students’ agency, especially, was contrasted with the more typical lecture/practice of many classes. During Interview II, the interviewer asked:

Here, the interviewer is restating some of Neil’s claims related to instruction and asking how he came to hold those beliefs, most fundamentally, that he did not want to be seen as the exclusive source of knowledge during the class discussion. Rather, Neil wanted students to leave his class having seen the issue “resolved” via notes. He was adamant that his students should have the space to be experts on their own and to seek out information while not relying on the teacher or text. Because this was during Interview II in early December, this seemed a rather unusual position for a beginning preservice teacher to have adopted. Thus, the interviewer’s question, which provided this response:

In this excerpt, Neil claims that there was not a single moment, but rather an accumulation of moments due to reflective discussions between him and his co-teacher regarding their teaching that prompted his pedagogical shifts. He described how he and his co-teacher were having conversations about the students’ performance, noting that they were assigning quizzes, daily exit tickets, and exams to evaluate their students’ learning. While the students’ responses to the exit tickets were promising, their quiz and exam results were not. Neil’s explanation for this mismatch suggested that students were “[d]umping it 40 minutes later,” running counter to his goal of meaningful learning. As a result of their analyses based on their dissatisfaction with the assessment results, Neil and his mentor teacher “[s]tarted piecing together” the need for alternative pedagogical practices.

This change in pedagogical practice continued to be coupled with responsibility and accountability on his part, stating:

Here, Neil explained that when “[e]veryone’s off the mark, that’s feedback for the teachers.” When all the students struggle, he interpreted this as feedback indicating that the lesson or activity was not properly designed and that the students were not able to engage in the desired productive struggle. Thus, Neil viewed assessment as able to be both in-the-moment and long-term, recognizing a responsibility to systematically attend to students struggle and an accountability for creating situations where students can engage in the types of work and argumentation that result in learning. This reflecting on and analysis of the results of his teaching contributed to these “change moments” that resulted in pedagogical change.

Limitation

This study examined a single case and as a result, our conclusions, while evocative, are not generalizable. Additional research is needed to explore the phenomenon further, including a more focused probe of the impact of the Coast Guard’s core values on the beliefs and practice of other Coast Guard TTT participants, as well as an examination of the impact of the core values of other branches of service. Future research in traditional settings not impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic would also shed light on the possible influence of that unusual circumstance.