We designed a video-based course to develop preservice teachers’ vision of ambitious instruction by decomposing instruction to learn to attend to student thinking and to examine how particular ...teaching moves influence student learning. In this study, we examine the influence that learning to systematically analyze ambitious pedagogy in the course has on preservice teachers’ classroom practice. Analysis of preservice teachers’ videos from the Performance Assessment for California Teachers Teaching Event reveals that they engaged in more student-centered practices compared with a cohort of candidates who did not participate in the course—creating opportunities to see student thinking, noticing student thinking during instruction, and pursuing student ideas to learn more about their thinking. We also found that their probing of student thinking focused primarily on correct answers and procedural fluency. These findings have implications for defining a pedagogy of teacher preparation to develop beginning teacher competency.
The requirement for all Initial Teacher Education programs in Australia to include a capstone teacher performance assessment (TPA) is relatively new. However, TPAs are common in other countries, ...particularly the United States. In this article, we report on a review of the literature instigated by the authors' involvement in the development of an Australian TPA. Through a systematic review of the international research literature, supplemented by a separate set of preliminary sources, we identify and explore a range of key considerations for the development of TPAs within the Australian context. We focus on common aspects of TPAs worldwide: planning and preparation, observations on and evidence of teaching practice, and student work samples. We then interrogate further issues related to TPAs including the role of schools, principals and teachers; relation to Initial Teacher Education coursework; fairness; validity and reliability; and rubric development. To conclude we present a series of guiding principles to support the development and implementation of such complex, high stakes, and increasingly mandated kinds of assessments.
This paper seeks to explore the lived experiences of teacher educators working in the midst of the current tumultuous and highly regulatory policy landscape. The paper will briefly outline the ...politics and policies that have profoundly shaped teacher educators' work in Australia over the past 10 years. We write from our own experiences, as three actively-teaching teacher educators, working with a diverse and nontraditional student population in regional Queensland. We seek to illuminate these experiences through a series of narrative (re)presentations, drawing attention to what we see as important questions regarding the enactment of policy reforms, paying particular attention the impacts on teacher educators and preservice teachers.
This paper focuses on the national, institutional and pedagogical responses as a result of the closure of schools and universities in March 2020 in Portugal. It includes a brief description and ...analysis of the initiatives and responses to the crisis as well as the difficulties, the challenges and the opportunities. The paper concludes with the discussion of the implications for teaching and teacher education in such uncertain times, particularly in regard to the role of practice as well as issues of mentoring within the context of a practicum as a 'real practice' versus 'an ideal(ised) practice'.
Spelling instruction has been researched over the last several decades, but unfortunately, researchers have determined that best practices have not generally transferred to classroom practice. The ...authors explored how quality word study professional development rooted in nonnegotiable tenets provided a framework for teacher and student construction of knowledge and practice. This work resulted in reframed conceptual knowledge on the part of the teachers and achievement growth on the part of the students.
Reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. In this article, we argue ...that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. Situating our argument within the broad economic trends affecting labor and higher education in the 21st century, we begin by examining the linkages between the core practices movement and organizations that advocate market-based solutions to education. We then explore how constructs of practice and improvisation and commitments to equity and justice are taken up, and with what implications and consequences, in core practices scholarship and its applications. In conclusion, we consider how work being done around core practices might contribute to a collective struggle for greater equity and justice in schools and in society.
Although teacher education is the formal means by which novices are prepared for teaching, they come having already had significant experience in schools. Preservice teachers have formed habits of ...“teaching” which influence their learning to teach. This article reports a study of the specific knowledge of and skills with teaching practice that novices bring to teacher education with respect to one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking in elementary mathematics, and describes the use of a standardized teaching simulation to learn about novices’ skills. The findings reveal details about preservice teachers’ skills and habits of practice at the point that they enter formal teacher preparation. Preservice teachers’ ways of carrying out this particular practice are categorized into three distinct categories: (a) skills that need to be learned, (b) skills that can be built on, and (c) approaches that need to be unlearned.
Arguments for social justice teacher education and arguments for practice-based teacher education are often seen as incongruous. Drawing on sociocultural theory and theories of justice, our study ...interrogates this underresearched assumption. We conducted video analyses of teacher education coursework and novice teachers' K-6 classroom instruction, together with novices' written reflections on videos. Data were collected during a university-based, accelerated teacher credentialing program. Analyses of videos of teacher education coursework revealed that while teacher educators frequently represented, decomposed, and approximated teaching practice, they rarely did so when discussing social justice issues. In a mirrorimage finding, analyses of videos of (and reflections on) novices' subsequent K-6 teaching revealed that novices rarely identified instructional decisions during which they attended to social justice issues.
As teacher education programs shift to more practice‐based methods in the preparation of literacy teachers, the ways in which teacher educators support the learning of their preservice teachers ...(PSTs) becomes paramount. In an effort to support PSTs in developing competency in instructional literacy routines, coaching has been found to support PSTs’ understandings of how to teach for student learning. In this article, three approaches to coaching are explored: rehearsals, a modified behind‐the‐glass approach, and structured video reflection. Drawing from rich examples of practice, attention is paid to the ways each method of coaching supports novice teachers in developing competency and the contexts in which each is used.
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